The Wedding of James Bond

The tenth James Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) begins with Bond revisiting the scene of the first – the casino from Casino Royale. On a winning streak, he pays off the debt of a pretty girl, who then invites him up to her room. This is Tracy – soon to be Mrs James Bond.

Bond's first night with Tracy is not exactly romantic. She's cross and weird, telling him:

“Do anything you like. And tell me what you like and what you would like from me. Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.”

Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, p. 36. 

 Bond can see she's troubled and self-destructive, and she makes it explicit that she's shagging him because he paid her. So it's not exactly gallant that he doesn't walk away but instead gets his money's worth. Of course, it's been well established that Bond is an amazing lay. Later, Tracy tells him:

“'That was heaven, James. Will you please come back when you wake up? I must have it once more.' Then she had turned over on her side away from him and, without answering his last endearments, had gone to sleep – but not before he had heard that she was crying. 

What the hell? All cats are grey in the dark.”

Ibid., pp. 36-37.

It's hardly a great start to their relationship, but Bond then keeps his eye on Tracy and stops her when she tries to kill herself after a day on the beach. This rescue is interrupted by some hoodlums who take Tracy and Bond away to a Corsican gangster called Marc-Ange Draco – who turns out to be Tracy's dad.

So far, its a strange and exciting beginning. Draco and Bond quickly become friends – they might work on opposite sides of the law, but they're both rough diamonds with a liking for the finer things in life. The despairing dad explains Tracy's history, and again there's nothing very romantic about it.

“'I was married once only, to an English girl, an English governess. She was a romantic. She had come to Corsica to look for bandits' – he smiled – 'rather like some English women adventure into the desert to look for sheiks. She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well' – this time he didn't smile – 'she found me in the mountains and she was raped – by me. The police were after me at the time, they have been for most of my life, and the girl was a grave encumbrance. But for some reason she refused to leave me ... The result, my dear Commander, was Teresa, my only child.' 

So, thought Bond. That explained the curious mixture the girl was – the kind of wild 'lady' that was so puzzling in her.” 

Ibid., p. 46.

If this mix of glamour and abuse sits uncomfortably, Bond at leasts turns down Draco's offer of money to help straighten Tracy out, and instead recommends a clinic in Switzerland – which will be quite convenient later in the book. Bond returns to London, but he's smitten. Fleming doesn't exactly go overboard in schmaltz, using Bond's new secretary to show how much he's changed:

“Loelia Ponsoby had at last left to marry a dull, but worthy and rich member of the Baltic Exchange, and confined her contacts with her old job to rather yearning Christmas and birthday cards to the members of the Double-O Section. But the new one, Mary Goodnight, an ex-Wren with blue-black hair, blue eyes, and 37-22-35, was a honey and there was a private five-pound sweep in the Section as to who would get her first. Bond had been lying equal favourite with the ex-Royal Marine Commando who was 006 but, since Tracy, had dropped out of the field and now regarded himself as a rank outsider, though he still, rather bitchily, flirted with her.” 

Ibid., p. 57.

James Bond in love. What a dick.

And all this love stuff is just a side show anyway. Bond has also got an important lead from Draco on the whereabouts of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain whose SPECTRE organisation Bond has fought in the last two books. Bond hasn't met Blofeld, but a man who might be him, Monsieur le Comte de Bleuville, is living it up in a posh ski resort in Switzerland. And he seems rather pleased with his title, as he's been writing to the College of Arms to get it officially recognised.

The plot that follows is good fun, Bond posing as Sir Hilary Bray, an expert on heraldry who can help trace Blofeld's line. In doing so, he can also establish the man's history and link him to his crimes. But to do this, Bond has to go stay in Blofeld's luxury complex, high on the top of a Swiss mountain, without even packing a gun.

That's important. As always, the more the odds are stacked against Bond, and the more he must rely only on his wits rather than luck or clever gadgets, the better the adventure. Coincidences mount up against him – first a man who knows the real Sir Hilary is visiting, then one of Bond's own colleagues turns up. We hear the terrible scream of a man “accidentally” falling down the bob-sleigh run, and the threat of such a death hangs heavy over Bond. It all licks along quite nicely. Fleming nicely puts in brackets stuff Bond doesn't know, as Blofeld's henchpersons watch his every move, putting us in a privileged position that helps build suspense.

Also guests of the Count are a group of pretty girls from all round the UK – not from round the world as in the film. They're being treated for allergies to chickens and potatoes, and are all keen to get Bond into bed. He obliges one called Ruby – though we're told he's not forgotten Tracy, this is just him doing his job and getting information. Even so, it's odd to hear Bond call a girl “Baby” and there's something oddly prissy about what he gets up to:

“He gave her another long and, he admitted to himself, extremely splendid kiss, to which she responded with an animalism that slightly salved his conscience. 'Now then, baby.' His right hand ran down her back to the curve of her behind, to which he gave an encouraging and hastening pat.” 

Ibid., p. 122.

There's some fun stuff as he sneaks about, dodging the CCTV and opening locked doors to get into Ruby's room. Again, the details about smell make Bond seem weirdly OCD.

“Her hair smelt of new-mown summer grass, her mouth of Pepsodent, and her body of Mennen's Baby Powder. A small night wind rose up outside and moaned round the building, giving an extra sweetness, an extra warmth, even a certain friendship to what was no more than an act of physical passion. There was real pleasure in what they did to each other, and in the end, when it was over and they lay quietly in each other's arms, Bond knew, and knew that that the girl knew, that they had done nothing wrong, done no harm to each other.”

Ibid., p. 127.

This is all a little convenient. Bond – and Ruby - might feel entirely guiltless, but what would Tracy think? It's telling that he lies to her, says he never touched the girls – but tells the truth to her father, who accepts the fact without reproach. If the marriage had continued, how faithful might Bond have been?

As well as shagging the patients, Bond finally gets to meet Blofeld. Though this is the first time they meet, Bond has clearly gathered a lot of intelligence already:

“He knew what not to expect, the original Blofeld, last year's model – about twenty stone, tall, pale, bland face with black crew-cut, black eyes with the whites showing all round, like Mussolini's, ugly thin mouth, long pointed hands and feet – but he had no idea what alternations had been contrived on the envelope that contained the man.”

Ibid., pp.102-3.

Given the bald, Nehru-suited look of three Bond films (plus Charles Grey in Diamonds Are Forever and Max von Sydow in Never Say Never Again), it's striking how different the book Blofeld is:

“The man was tallish, yes, and, all right, his hands and naked feet were long and thin. But there the resemblance ended. The Count had longish, carefully tended, almost dandified hair that was a fine silvery white.” 

Ibid., p. 103.

Perhaps it's the “dandified”, but I imagined him played by Jon Pertwee. That Bond is able to catch this master criminal by playing to his vanity about a family title is really nicely done – a character flaw that makes a credible lure. Note also the book Blofeld is not accompanied by a white cat.

Speaking of the films, On Her Majesty's Secret Service also shows the influence of the film Doctor No. Fleming originally disliked the casting of Sean Connery but was soon won over – and here accommodates the accent into the canonical Bond:

“My father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss ... My father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe.”

Ibid., p. 59.

Ursula Andress is also one of the celebs dining at Blofeld's restaurant (on page 114). I'm tempted to suggest that the exciting escape from the Swiss mountain in the midst of an avalanche is also a nod to the action set pieces of the films. Bond's mum being Swiss means he's an okay skier, though Fleming is keen to make his style basic and old-fashioned, which ensures it's not to easy and that the odds remain against him.

Amid Emma Coat's 22 rules of good storytelling compiled while working at Pixar, there is:

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Bond – desperate, exhausted and with baddies almost on him – bumping into Tracy feels like a cheat. Yes, Fleming has set this up and it was Bond himself who recommended that she go to Switzerland, but it still feels too easy. Tracy is good in a crisis and helps Bond escape. He needs to get back to London to report, so she drops him at the airport. And Bond suddenly gets all romantic.

“Bond suddenly thought, Hell! I'll never find another girl like this one. She's got everything I've looked for in a woman. She's beautiful, in bed and out. She's adventurous, brave, resourceful. She's exciting always. She seems to love me. She'd let me go on with my life. She's a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings. Above all, she needs me. It'll be someone for me to look after. I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn't mind having children. I've got no social background into which she would or wouldn't fit. We're two of a pair, really. Why not make if for always?” 

Ibid., p. 172. 

This might seem a bit brutal and pragmatic, but it's perfectly in character. In context, it's even quite moving. Bond tells Tracy to meet him in Berlin, where they'll tie the knot.

Back in London on Christmas Day, Bond visits M's bizarre, nautically themed home to present all he's learned and work out what Blofeld is up to. There's something comic and late-60s The Avengers about M's house being based on his old ship, even down to his old staff now acting as a butler.

Experts arrive to confirm Bond's suspicions, and we get a full briefing on the new, deadly science of biological warfare. It all sounds credible, quoting a “United States Senate paper, Number 58991, dated August 29th 1960, prepared by 'The Sub-committee on Disarmament of the Committee on Foreign Relations'” (on page 191). Yet, as always, we need to take the things Fleming states as fact with a pinch of salt:

“Now there is plenty of medical evidence for the efficacy of hypnosis. There are well-authenticated cases of the successful treatment by these means of such stubborn disabilities as warts, certain types of asthma, bed-wetting, stammering, and even alcoholism,drug-taking and homosexual tendencies. Although the British Medical Association frowns officially on the practitioners of hypnosis, you would be surprised, sir, to know how many doctors themselves, as a last resort, particularly in cases of alcoholism, have private treatment from qualified hypnotists.”

Ibid., p. 187.

Having established what Blofeld's about, British intelligence is then rather hamstrung by tricky things like international law and the lack of help they can expect from the Swiss in extraditing Blofeld. Luckily, Bond is now owed a favour from Tracy's dad, and enlists the Corsican underground to lead an attack on Blofeld's base. Draco is only too pleased to help, seeing this as a sort of dowry. Tracy is less pleased:

“'All right. I won't ask questions. And I'm sorry I cried.' She added fiercely, 'But you are such an idiot! You don't seem to think it matters to anyone. The way you go on playing Red Indians. It's so – so selfish.'”

Ibid., p. 226.

The thing is that she's right. There's no reason for Bond to go, except his own macho nonsense. The attack is a bit of a disaster – despite an exciting chase down the bob sled run, Blofeld escapes and Bond is badly wounded. He heads to Berlin and to Tracy, where again it's not quite romantic:

“'What worries me is how we're going to make love. In the proper fashion, elbows are rather important for the man.' 

'Then we'll do it in an improper fashion. But not tonight., or tomorrow. Only when we're married. Till then I am going to pretend I'm a virgin.' She looked at him seriously. 'I wish I was, James. I am in a way, you know. People can make love without loving.' 

Ibid., p. 230.

Yes, the real tragedy is that they don't have a proper, loving shag before she snuffs it. A second bracketed section tells us that – in another coincidence - Bond has been spotted by his enemies. It's beautifully done – Bond's wedded bliss while we know something awful is coming, and then the simplicity with which he doesn't quite accept that Tracy is dead.

At the end of the fifth novel, Fleming killed Bond; at the end of the tenth* he kills his wife. I'd loved this book best of all when I originally read the novels in my teens. This time, I was struck by the fun and smart plot (especially after the awful The Spy Who Loved Me), how difficult things are made for Bond, and the striking “visuals” of the setting and action set pieces. The romance between Bond and Tracy is odd, unequal and often uncomfortable, and never quite convinces. She's yet another damaged girl “cured” by Bond having sex with her. Yet the ending is beautifully played and haunting, partly because of a tantalising glimpse of Bond being happy and putting someone else first.

(* For Your Eyes Only isn't a novel but a collection of short stories.)

The Man Who Made Love To Her

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) is a really unpleasant book. It's told in the first-person by Vivienne Michel, a young woman running away from her life in England who gets caught up in a nasty scam. The preface says:

“It's all true – absolutely. Otherwise Ian Fleming would not have risked his professional reputation in acting as my co-author and persuading his publishers to bring out our book. He has also kindly obtained clearance for certain minor breaches of the Official Secrets Act that were necessary to my story.”

Ian Fleming, preface to The Spy Who Loved Me. 

 Perhaps this attempt at realism explains the rather mundane plot. After the outlandish fantasies of the last few Bond books, this feels rather pedestrian. Vivienne is taking care of the Dreamy Pines Motor Court in the north of New York State while the owners are away – but the owners are really planning to burn the place down and claim the insurance, blaming the dead Vivienne for the “accident”.

Alone and without protection, Vivienne opens the door to two tough hoodlums sent to do the burning – and they thing they might enjoy this girl before murdering her. But then, by chance, a British secret agent just so happens to show up...

Modern, bratty and naïve, Vivienne is quite a departure from previous Bond girls in the books. The first third of the book recounts a rather tawdry love affair in Windsor, with a posh boy who dumps her as soon as he's had his wicked way. It's surprisingly explicit about her first sexual experience, with none of the usual romance and fantasy. She and her lover – Derek – are caught in the act and thrown out of the local cinema, and then get asked questions by a policeman. The sex itself is awkward and uncomfortable.

Vivienne then runs away from England – but nothing changes: she's still the prey of callous men who only want to use her. As a result, the book is all about her as hapless, helpless victim. There's always been a sadistic streak in Bond books, but with the violence focused on Bond himself. He's a tough, determined secret agent, able to defend himself and win despite what's done to him, so the sadism makes him more of a hero. Here, it only makes Vivienne more of a victim.

This means more than that she's just a weak character. I've said before that the best Bond girls are as tough and resourceful as any man. The tougher it is for Bond to impress them and get them into bed, the more that is an achievement (and, as in Moonraker, he's not always successful). So Vivienne's weakness makes Bond look less cool and the book less exciting.

It also doesn't help that Bond arrives to rescue her from the hoodlums quite by chance – on the way home from a far more exciting-sounding story, working with the Mounties to keep a Russian defector called Boris safe from a SPECTRE assassin. It would have been simple enough to connect the hoodlums to SPECTRE, and make Bond's arrival part of his case. The coincidence kills the “realism” that Fleming has otherwise aimed for.

As it is, there's some odd business as Bond has coffee and makes small-talk while the hoodlums try to look innocent. Why don't they just shoot him and get on with their job? Instead, Bond pretends to go to bed, sneaks round and shoots them before they can carry out their threat on Vivienne. She falls gratefully into Bond's arms, but the tone of what happens next is no less nasty:

“All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman's natural feeling for her hero. I had no regrets and no shame. There might be many consequences for me – not least that I might now be dissatisfied with other men. But whatever my troubles were, he would never hear of them. I would not pursue him and try to repeat what there had been between us. I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him – own any larger piece him that I now did. And for all my life I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him for ever as my image of a man.” 

Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me, p. 154. 

So the title is a lie. Bond doesn't love her but uses her – as all the other men in her life have, or have tried to – and drives off the next morning, leaving her a note rather than saying goodbye. A more accurate title might be “The Man Who Made Love To Me”. True, he squares things with the police so she won't be in trouble and can collect reward money, but that's surely the least he could do.

And Vivienne's point about no girl ever having more of Bond than she did isn't true, either. In the very next book, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, James Bond meets his wife. And it's one of my favourites...

Operation Thunderball

As I've read my way through Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, it's been fun comparing the films that were made out of them. Some books are faithfully transposed from page to screen, others bear almost no resemblance. Plots and characters from one book might be used in the film of another.

Thunderball is different. It was adapted into more than one movie – Thunderball (1965) and Never Say Never Again (1983), with plans for a third called Warhead 2000 AD. But the book is itself a novelisation of a screenplay: it was meant to be the first James Bond film, the script written by Fleming himself and a gang of pals. Does that make it different from the other novels?

First, is the plot any more cinematic than previous Bond books? A new super-team of villains nicking atomic bombs and holding the US and UK to ransom does seem a movie sort of plot. Compare it to some Bond books and it’s a lot bigger and more visual. Casino Royale is all about a card game, From Russia With Love is mostly taken up with the bureaucracy of the Russian secret service and Moonraker is set in rainy Dover. But Thunderball isn’t bigger or bolder than Doctor No (so no wonder that was chosen to be the first movie when rights over Thunderball got tricky).

What's more, the structure of Thunderball is really odd. It starts with Bond being sent to a health farm by an evangelical M, who's on a health kick himself. I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of Bond eating yoghurt. The films concur and both tack on a more exciting opening sequence before Bond goes to the farm.

The farm is still a big problem. While there, Bond just so happens to stumble into a chap with a crucial part to play in the bomb conspiracy. As I said a hundred years ago:

“It's a whopping great coincidence in Thunderball that Bond happens to be in the same health farm as the baddies. That is, unless either a) it being right next to a NATO base means the Secret Service can get a discount, or b) M has had a tip-off.

Though the latter seems not to play when Bond phones in his suspicions about Count Lippi's tattoo: Moneypenny reminds him how he's on leave.”

Me, Oddfelt, 23 August 2006.

It’s a pity that Bond is suspicious of Lippi based on little more than that he's of mixed race but drives a nice car. He’s not the greatest of villains either, his uncontrollable temper almost ruining SPECTRE’s plan. Fleming himself seems a bit unsure about,

“this rather childish trial of strength between two extremely tough and ruthless men, in the bizarre surroundings of a health clinic in Sussex”.

Ian Fleming, Thunderball, p. 43.

Later, when Felix Leiter helpfully guesses how the man Bond fought at the health farm might be connected to the conspiracy, Bond says it’s the sort of nonsense one might dream up on mescaline (p. 122). This is not the only time Fleming undermines his own plotting.

Perhaps, I thought, the health farm is there to inject new life into the old Bond – who must be a bit battered and scarred after so many wild adventures (he, er, died at the end of From Russia With Love). Or it’s a canny way of excusing any changes in the character on screen – his being younger, less grumpy, more fun.

Except that Bond’s new-found good health only lasts a few pages before he’s back to his hard-drinking habits. What’s more, he and M being healthy horrifies the women around them. In Chapter 7, Bond's housekeeper and secretary are both appalled by him eating yoghurt and looking good. But Miss Moneypenny promises that, like M, he'll soon be on the “champagne cure” again, so hungover and difficult once more. She says:

“‘It's really the best for men. It makes them awful, but at least they're human like that. It's when they're godlike one can’t stand them’”.

Ibid., p. 65.

Bond’s record of health, as spelled out by M, is not so far from the author’s: too much smoking, boozing and good food, too little due care and attention. So perhaps this is an acknowledgement of Fleming’s own inability to change his unhealthy lifestyle.

There’s also something different about Moneypenny. When we first met her in Casino Royale, she was cool and sure, and almost seemed to run the secret service:

"What do you think, Penny?' The Chief of Staff turned to M's private secretary who shared the room with him.

Miss Moneypenny would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical.

‘Should be all right. He won a victory at the FO this morning and he's not got anyone for the next half an hour.' She smiled encouragingly at the Head of S whom she liked for himself and the importance of his section.'"

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, p. 23.

She’s always kept her distance from Bond and the other 00s – knowing they don’t survive long. But in Thunderball, we’re told she “often dreamed hopelessly about Bond” and there’s perhaps a hint of girlish fussiness in her having a beloved poodle (p. 14). Whereas before she seemed unattainable (and therefore strong), now she flirts openly with Bond – although I’m not sure “flirts” is quite the right word. For example, Bond tells Moneypenny that he smokes because,

“it's really only that I don't know what to do with my hands”.

Moneypenny responds,

“that's not what I've heard”.

Ian Fleming, Thunderball, p. 15.

I think that’s meant to suggest he knows his way around a lady, but it made me think at first that she'd called him a wanker. He then threatens her with a spanking, and though she gets the last word she’d also have a case for workplace harassment.

Is the change in Moneypenny a result of this being written for the screen – it’s cinema not prose that demands her subservience? Or is it the result of Fleming working on the original screenplay with a bunch of other (male) writers, so that something of his original character got lost? Or would she have been diluted anyway, a slow erosion book-by-book of her original character?

The books’ attitude to women is as fascinating as it is odd. Fleming (or Bond) often compliments women by likening them to men: the best Bond girls have boyish buttocks and masculine attitudes. In introducing new Bond girl Domino in Thunderball, we’re told that she drives like a man. And just in case we don’t fully understand this compliment:

“Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and women talk they have to look into each other's faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person's expression, perhaps in order to read behind the other's words or to analyse the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other's attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver not only has to hear, and see, what her companion is saying, but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.”

Ibid., pp. 109-10.

My pet theory is that Fleming worked this stuff into his books for his own entertainment and perhaps to annoy his wife, who looked down on the trashy adventures that financed their expensive lifestyle. But there’s plenty of evidence that he’s also just (to use a line from a later film) a sexist, misogynist dinosaur.

We can see how out of touch he is early on, when Bond chats to the young taxidriver taking him to the health farm. This kid, feels Bond (who served in the war), doesn’t know how lucky he is.

“He was born into the buyers' market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight. For him life was easy and meaningless.”

Ibid., p. 16.

I love the idea of Bond thinking life is easy for the young folks because they could be blown up at any moment. And yet, by page 17, Bond and this kid are equals – and can discuss the important matters of the day. It reminds me of the end of David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon, where the old man goes to a young people’s party. It’s a desperate attempt to suggest that the old guy is still relevant, still hip. But the more effort put into convince us, the more plainly it doesn’t hold true.

A page later, the taxidriver tells Bond about a local prostitute who’s done well out of the healthfarm’s rich clients. It’s an unusual bit of social realism from Bond – a sense of the strange and dirty goings on every day beneath the respectable veneer of austerity Britain. With its reference to Brighton gangs, it's a little like something by Graham Greene.

References to Rosemary Clooney (p. 19) and North by Northwest (p. 85) add a touch of realism and set the book firmly in it’s time. Bond also gets a fashionable shag in a bubble-car. And we get a hint of an as-yet untold Bond adventure, when he jumped for the Arlberg Express to escape someone called Heinkel in 1956 – during the uprising in Hungary.

The events of Thunderball occur in May and June of 1959 (p. 70) – two years before the book’s publication. May 1959 seems to be when Fleming met with the other collaborators to work on the screenplay, long before it became a novel. (The screenplay was written by Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo – the book is dedicated to the latter.) So for all its efforts at relevance, it’s set explicitly in the recent past. Bond films seem to be set just a little in the future, where technology is more advanced. Fleming seems to be taking a leaf from the Sherlock Holmes stories – telling us a ‘true’ story once it’s safe to do so.

Except that it isn’t safe. The nuclear bombs are recovered but the big, new villain gets away – indeed, he’s barely seen after he’s been introduced.

We learn on page 47 that Ernst Stavro Blofeld was born on 28 May 1908. That’s Fleming's own date of birth, but the likeness to Fleming quickly ends there. We're told, straight away, that Blofeld was born in Gdynia to a Polish father and Greek mother – another villain of mixed heritage. There then follows pages of description: his life and looks (he has feminine eyelashes), that he doesn't drink, smoke or have sex. He’s the opposite of Anglo-Saxon Bond (we’ve not yet learnt about Bond’s parents not being entirely English). References to Mussolini, Hitler and Rommell mixed in with the description help suggest Blofeld's in the same league.

Like From Russia With Love, there's lots on the villains planning their diabolical crime and the pains they've taken, to make it seem all the more impossible for Bond to beat. Chapter 5, which introduces Blofeld and SPECTRE, is full of authoritative detail: names of people and organisations that make it seem real and researched. I almost felt I ought to recognise some of these references. Fleming is almost saying to the reader, “As you know...”, making you complicit, making you agree.

The film Thunderball uses the same telling moment when Blofeld kills one of his underlings in the midst of a meeting. But in the book version, the underling’s mistake is that his team “violated” a girl they had kidnapped and ransomed. Blofeld insists that:

“SPECTRE shall conduct itself in a superior fashion”.

Ibid., p. 56.

As well as killing the underling, he apologises to the girl’s family and send back half of the ransom - I’m sure that would make them feel better. But this odd, fussy detail is just a more extreme example of Bond’s views on Windsor knots and the correct way to make omelettes. It's meant to show he's exacting, precise but edges – or leaps – into camp. Or is Blofeld bothered because he finds all that sex business beastly?

In the films, we learn of SPECTRE and Blofeld piece-by-piece. The film of Doctor No mentions the organisation over dinner, and SPECTRE then seeks to avenge his death in From Russia With Love. Goldfinger doesn't mention either SPECTRE or Blofeld, but when we get to Thunderball we already know what they're capable of. That killing of an underling is perhaps less shocking because we've already seen what they're capable of.

Having been introduced to Blofeld in the book, we then leave him behind. The theft will be handled by his second-in-command, Largo – a pirate complete with an eye-patch. Largo’s clever scheme is based on the Olterra,

“that merchant ship off Gibraltar during the war? The Italian frogmen used it as a base. Big sort of trap door affair cut in the hull below the waterline … One of the blackest marks against intelligence.”

Ibid., p. 133.

Fleming again seems keen to play it real. We’re told at some length about the kind of boat Largo uses and exactly where it was built. Later, Bond wants Domino to signal to him from her ship by turning the lights on in her cabin. She responds:

“‘That is a silly plan. It is the sort of melodramatic nonsense people write about in thrillers. In real life people don't go into their cabins and switch on their lights in daylight.’”

Ibid., p. 189.

Unfortunately, she's not such a natural secret agent, getting caught by Largo when she takes photos with the lens cap still on her “camera”.

We learn that Domino is the sister of Giuseppe Petacchi – the pilot who steals the bombs for Largo and is murdered for his efforts. In both films that's part of Largo's plan – he's manipulated Domino and her relationship with her brother cynically. Yet in the book it's a coincidence that her brother is mixed up in the plot.

“Probably even Largo, if Largo was in fact involved in the plot, didn't know this”.

Ibid., p.158.

Bond uses the death of Giuseppe to turn Domino against Largo. But, as I said, she gets caught and is tortured – and is left all tied up. So it's again a lucky coincidence that she escapes just in time to save Bond at the crucial moment and avenge her brother by killing Largo. All plots are contrivances, but this feels too much like cheating – and it undermines all the excitement Fleming has brewed up so far. If the resolution all hinges on coincidence and good fortune, then the ending is down to destiny rather than the skill of James Bond. He – and Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor – are at their best when they win by being smart and brave, not absurdly jammy.

Bond calls in the big guns for the chase at the end – he and Felix pursue Largo's yacht in a nuclear submarine. Captain Peter Pedersen rails against the madness of the nuclear arsenal in his charge – enough of them to wipe out England. He's meant to be the voice of ordinary common sense, offering Bond tea and tales of his idyllic wife and kids. That's reasonableness is not helped by him repeatedly using the word “niggerheads” to describe a type of coral (from p. 199). And when he tells us (on p. 212) that the interior of the nuclear submarine is multicoloured and optically interesting to stop the crew going mad, it's not exactly reassuring. Perhaps there's something of Neville Shute's On The Beach about it - published four years before.

Bond likes Pedersen – we can tell because he doesn't find petty ways to undermine him, as he sometimes does with those in authority. When they're first establishing their credentials, Bond admits,

“I was in intelligence – RNVR Special Branch. Strictly a chocolate sailor”.

Ibid., p. 195.

Which is not, in turns out, another way of saying “sea bent”. When Bond leaves the sub to swim after Largo, he has a big number one painted on his wet suit – which would surely make him quite a target. In the book, he's in a standard black wetsuit, but the film puts the villains in black and the goodies in friendlier orange. Bond doesn't even wear the leggings – and the more naked he is as he goes into battle, the cooler he seems.

I said of Casino Royale that it's the villains who have the gadgets – and, effectively, cheat. But Thunderball is most like the films in giving Bond a lot of cool toys and vehicles to call on when he needs them. Again, I think Bond's at his best when being smart against the odds, without this Batman-like gadgetry.

On the whole, the films follow Fleming's book. Both films split Domino in two. Domino is a nice, demure girl who'd never drive dangerously. And then there's Fiona Volpe and Fatima Blush – bad girls who die not long after Bond's shagged them.

But a lot of the cool sense of humour and innuendo in the films is Fleming's. Some of it edges of the filthy, as when Domino treads on a poisonous spine and Bond offers to help eat out the poison.

“This is the first time I've eaten a woman. They're rather good”.

Ibid., p. 184.

The film has Bond and Domina make love underwater rather than in a beach hut, which I'm informed by a diving chum isn't possible (cos man bits shrivel up in cold water).

The other big change is that Blofeld doesn't have a cat in the book – when we don't see the man's face in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, the cat makes him much more identifiable.

Blofeld's a great and intriguing character, introduced as a big deal at the start of the book, then vanishing halfway through (except for a couple of phonecalls to update him on progress). That's nicely done – creating a sense of scale that reaches wider than book and promising a rematch. Looking forward to the next adventure is something new to the series (where From Russia With Love killed off Bond. It's what the films will do, but here with a slight twist:

The end of Thunderball, but Blofeld will return...

Books finished, November 2010

Catching up on the books of 2010. Goldfinger deserves a post of it's own sometime - and I certainly made loads of notes. But blimey, it's an odd book, with a interminably dull golf match that stretches over chapters being followed by an equally dull drive to Switzerland. So many of the iconic moments from the film - such as the girl killed by being painted gold - are reported rather than seen, and even for a Bond book there's a lot of casual racism.

Some of that is the time in which it was written - Fleming also need to explain to the reader what karate is, and the term "'hit' - mobese for murder" (p. 186). But that will only go so far. Bond's thoughts on a girl who's not interested in him, and on where gayness might come from, are quite a surprise:

"Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterson was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality'. As a direct result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits - barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them."

Ian Fleming, Goldfinger, p. 189.

Of course, later Bond will convert the lesbian Pussy Galore so that she throws off a life of crime and ladies to help Bond stop the villains and get into his bed. We learn that Pussy is only a lesbian because she was abused by her uncle, and that all this time she's been waiting for a real man.

That this man turns out to be Bond is not merely reactionary fantasy but also a massive cheat in the plot. Pussy has only met Bond once - and briefly - before she switches sides. That's during a meeting between Goldfinger and America's fiercest hoodlums, where Bond is being Goldfinger's secretary. He doesn't say anything, let alone do anything to attract her attention. The 'real man' she falls for is the quiet one doing shorthand in a room full of toughs. Really not good enough, 007.

GCSE Astronomy - A Guide for Pupils and Teachers (1999) relates to an older version of the syllabus than the one I'm doing, but outlines the main topics and homework projects which is all very useful.

The Cosmos - A Beginnner's Guide is also me swotting up for class. Accompanying the TV series, it's an enthusiastic trawl through some of the big ideas and newer theories, with a particular pleasure in big machinery and diagrams.

Her Fearful Symmetry is sort of The Graveyard Book as told by Richard Curtis. The male hero is an embarrassed, slightly rubbish Hugh Grant type who falls under the spell of an American girl. He lives alone in a large flat in an expensive part of London without having to work, and is doing a PhD without apparently having to see a supervisor or, you know, actually do a lot of work or anything.

In fact, most of the characters idle along, going to museums and strange bits of London not in their lunch hours and stolen moments of the day but because they're filling time. There's none of the urgency, the effort, to earn enough for the costly capital city, and little of the noise and richness and mixture.

Highgate is just a stone's throw from Archway but is apparently an oasis of old-skool Englishness where no one is Black or gay. Everyone speaks English apart from two eccentric linguists - we get some wry stuff about the differences between American English and the local vernacular, but that's about it.

The volunteers running the cemetery are all sweet and understanding old dears - there's none of the petty jealousies, intrigues and empire-building that bother any place of work, especially one run by enthusiasts. As a result, it's an idyll of London which never quite rings true.

At one point, the book seems to notice this:

"Julia began to play a game that entailed travelling on the tube and randomly popping out at stations with interesting names: Tooting Broadway, Ruislip Gardens, Pudding Mill Lane. Usually the above-ground reality disappointed her. The names on the tube map evoked a Mother Goose cityscape, cosy and diminutive. The actual places tended to be grim: takeaway chicken shops, off-licences and Ladbrokes crowded out whimsy."

Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry, p. 255.

But this may all be intentional, as the veil of unreality about the world matches the strange and sad and beautiful ghost story. It reminded me chiefly of the death of Simon Callow's character in Four Weddings - with the same awkwardness of feelings amongst a group of decent but unfulfilled people, the same peculiar peccadilloes and the knowledge that there can't be a happy ending, only one that's bittersweet.

It's an odd book, and haunting, but not quite as brilliant as The Time Traveller's Wife.

No? Spelt like Yes?

I first read Doctor No when I was 11. I was all about James Bond at the time, thrilling at the new guy in the films and trying to work out which ones I'd not seen. Bond had been a staple of Sunday afternoons and bank holidays for as far back as I can remember, but at 11 I suddenly got it like a fever.

The books, I knew, were not like the films. They were harder and nastier, proper Grown-Up books. There were fewer jokes and explosions and a lot more stuff about sex. And while the films were all modern and gadgety – almost set in the future – the books were from the 1950s, packed with details about the clothes, foods and medicines of that prehistoric age.

Hooked on Bond, I was desperate to at least try them, whatever warnings I'd been given about how hard they'd be to read. Then, at some second-hand book stall, Raymond Hawkey's tinglingly simple cover (right) used nothing more than a cobweb to suggest the visceral thrills inside. I could not resist.

It's odd reading the thing again now and glimpsing the 11 year-old me in its pages. It's really not suitable reading – and I'd never had got away with it, or dared to pick it up, the version I've just reread, with the cover by Michael Gillette in which a sultry blonde is wearing only a belt. I remembered it as a serious, gritty thriller full of close and brutal violence. And, because I aspired to adolescence, I thought this made it somehow more gritty and real than the cool and enjoyable films, as if Bond – and Doctor Who and the other comics and books I adored – improved the more stark and humourless they were. Surprisingly, the book turns out not to be an experiment in documentary realism.

Like the film, Bond is despatched to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of local Secret Service agent Strangways. It's meant to be a routine job, almost a holiday – Fleming killed Bond off at the end of the last book, so he could do with taking it easy.

As with the film Castaway, before we get to the sunny islands, we start in drab, cold London, cursing the “hail and icy sleet” (p. 13). It's ten o'clock in the morning, but it's dark enough outside for M to need to turn the lights on.

It takes two whole chapters to brief Bond on his mission, even though M already assumes that Strangways has merely run off with his secretary. M is all about the infodump, lecturing us on guns, poisons and the bits of the body a man can do without (important, since Bond has just been resurrected). As always, there are mentions of academics who've written papers on this stuff, and a string of brand names also help make it all seem authentic.

Bond swaps his Beretta for the famous Walther PPK 7.65 mm – though it's the hammerless Smith and Wesson Centennial Airweight revolver .38 calibre that he actually uses on the job.

Then we're out to Jamaica, and with all the exotic description, there's a constant casual racism as Bond sizes up the local ethnic populations. His friend Quarrel, last seen in Live and Let Die, is a good friend and it's never made an issue that he's Black, yet he's also characterised as a big, superstitious child and Fleming's attempts to convey his speech suggest he's fluent in Minstrel.

At surprising speed, Bond and Quarrel are soon on the heels of Doctor No, who owns an island that mines bird guano as fertiliser, and who has upset some American bird geeks. Strangways also just happened to be looking into the complaint when he disappeared. Even if the trail wasn't any more obvious, Jamaica's “Chigro” (“Chinese negro”) population are all terrified of him and Chigroes keep trying to kill Bond.

With this useful clue, Bond races ahead far faster than he does in the film. So there's no Felix Lighter, no “He's just dead”, no Chinese girl up in the mountains who Bond shags even though he knows she's a villain, and no coolly killing an assassin that Bond's just disarmed. These are all inventions of the film, making Bond smarter and drier and a million times more cool.

When he finally meets Honey Rider on the beach, film Bond has bedded two girls already and gets stuck right in to the flirting. Book Bond has gone without since From Russia With Love and spends until the last page resisting Honey's advances and trying not to notice she's naked.

Yes, there's no white bikini in the book, but instead, scampering about on the beach:

“It was a naked girl, with her back to him. She was not quite naked. She wore a broad leather belt round her waist with a hunting knife in a leather sheath at he right hip. The belt made her nakedness extraordinarily erotic.”

Ian Fleming, Doctor No, p. 101.

Lucky he added that last sentence, in case we hadn't noticed. The description continues more oddly:

“The behind was almost as firm and rounded as a boy's ... She was not a coloured girl.”

Ibid., p. 102.

This before he's even told us the colour of her hair, which suggests some rather odd priorities. When Honey turns round, though, there's something odder. She's got a beautiful, perfect body and a broken nose that makes her – Bond will keep telling us until the final pages – somehow all the more perfect.

Though Honey then puts some clothes on, they don't stay on for long. There's a lot of nakedness in the book – taking her clothes off to wade through the swamp, or in the bathroom and bed before dinner with Doctor No, or when the dastardly villain leaves her pegged out to be eaten by crabs. That's not merely for titillation but to make her vulnerable – Bond is likewise naked in bed when a deadly caterpillar climbs over him. (Yes, that really happens.)

I'd remembered the naked girl on the beach from when I read it before, but had not registered how much of the adventure takes place in the nude. But then I was also a little naïve. My dad enjoys reminding me that he'd had a quick look at the book I was so avidly reading, and I'd got to the bit where Honey tells Bond about the career she's planning.

“And,” said my dad, “do you know what a call-girl is?”

I rolled my eyes. Of course I did. In the old days you couldn't just phone people. There were girls who connected the call... I was allowed to continue reading.

To Bond's horror, Honey confirms all Quarrel's superstitious talk of a dragon on the island. There's some discussion of the strange things that exist in nature, which Honey knows all about because she's read the first third of an encyclopaedia and was friends with the rats in her house. We're reminded of the giant squids, who have never been seen alive but whose tentacles have been found inside the bellies of whales. It clangs a bit as proof that dragons might exist.

They then discover that the dragon is real, if it's really a customised dune buggy with a flamethrower. Quarrel is killed – and really horribly – and Bond assumes he'll be next. But there's then a brilliant twist where he and Honey find themselves in a luxury suite, with all the pedicures and pampering they can eat. Doctor No is a perfect gentleman for all he's a perfect villain.

The oddness goes a bit too far when, over dinner, he taps his eyes with his metal fingers. It's revealed he's wearing contacts, but at the time it suggests he's got metal eyes. For a moment, Fleming fumbles the line between the compelling grotesque and the madly daft. Because for all the strangeness of the story, it's utterly absorbing. The more Bond is put through – spied on, attacked by caterpillars and spiders and a metal dragon – the more vivid and thrilling the story. It ends with him forcing himself through an endurance course of horrors, which ends with him battling single-handed against the legendary kraken – the giant squid Fleming nicely set up by mentioning on the beach.

The madness of events is tempered by continual reminders of the mundane. It's not a realistic story in any sense, but Fleming's good at making it seem just about credible long enough to keep us hooked until the next outlandish moment. Like M, Doctor No can quote the authors of recent papers that back up his claims. His fortune is based on nothing so grand as bird shit – and it's the bird shit that ultimately kills him. Bond and Honey escape in the dragon, which we've been carefully told already is the perfect vehicle for the terrain.

As a result, though I made notes on all the odd and incongruous details – Bond mentioning his war service in the Ardennes on page 118, or Doctor No's endurance test including an “asbestos baffle” on page 249 – I couldn't put the book down. It's a very silly, convoluted story, full of casual racist, sexist and culinary assertions. And it's nothing like the serious tome that I remembered. That's what makes it so good.

Also, while the Bond of the films has no compunction about killing a man in cold blood, the Bond of the books is made of nobler stuff – which is funny for a man with a licence to kill.

“Bond knew he wasn't going to like this, killing again in cold blood, but these men would be the Chinese Negro gangsters, the strong-arm guards who did the dirty work. They would certainly be murderers many times over. Perhaps they were the ones who had killed Strangways and the girl. But there was no point in trying to ease his conscience. It was kill or be killed. He must just do it efficiently.”

Ibid., pp. 278-9.

James Bond will return in Goldfinger.

Dahling again

Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger was one of my favourite books as a kid, mostly because I could read it in a single sitting. With illustrations, it's a mere 57 pages. I read it this time over a cup of tea.

The unnamed girl narrating is a proto-Matilda, with magic abilities that allow her to enact revenge on the horrid people around her. She turns nasty teacher Mrs Winter into a cat, and the Gregg family - who like shooting - into ducks. It's a simple reversal, told with delicious glee.

Esio Trot seems to be Dahl's last book, published after his death. It's a similarly slim, one-cup-of-tea volume, and altogether something more odd. Mr Hoppy fancies Mrs Silver in the flat downstairs but can't pluck up the courage to say so. Mrs Silver has a beloved tortoise, Alfie, who she worries is not big enough. So Mr Hoppy concocts a convoluted scheme to make Mrs Silver think Alfie is growing.

Dahl explains in a caveat that this story "happened in the days when anyone could go out and buy a nice little tortoise from a pet-shop", back before the government stopped traders who "used to cram hundreds of [tortoises] tightly into the packing-crates without food or water and in such horrible conditions that a great many of them always died on the sea-journey over."

Yet it still seems a bit cruel, Mr Hoppy buying a whole bunch of tortoises of different sizes just to fool the woman he fancies. The tortoises might not mind - and they eat up the lettuce he gives them greedily and all live happily ever after. But there's still something uncomfortable about Mr Hoppy's plan. He tricks Mrs Silver into liking him.

This is a terrible cliche in stories and adverts for deodorant - that the way to a woman's heart is through subterfuge. It's not enough - as Mr Hoppy eventually does - to just stumble up to the lady in question and tell her that she's lovely. You need to contrive the Right Words and the Right Attitude and the Right Smell; you need to start lying to her from the start.

Something I read in the last few weeks (I've completely forgotten what) talked about the standard wheeze in masculine fiction being the chap winning the lady through adversity. He rescues her from a tower or a dragon, or survives a war. It makes getting together with a nice woman something decisive and acted, and suggests she gets no say in the matter. It happens too often in Bond films: Bond saves the day so the woman is his, without him ever winning her over himself.

Perish the thought that a woman might like you not because you stop villains or enlarge her tortoise (so to speak), but because she thinks you're nice.

Something something eggs

I seem to keep saying this: it's all been a bit manic of late. Sort of finished a big thing as-yet unnannounced on Friday and sent it round the houses for corrections and approval. Then sped up to Victoria to get more material for the very thing I'd just finished. Had a beer with P. in the grotty pub in the station, where we swapped gossip and discussed Government policy.

Then home for fish, chips and mushy peas in front of Quantum of Solace. Much more intelligible and splendid second time round; perhaps the smaller screen size helps, perhaps it's 'cos I already know where it's heading. But the edit is still so frenetic it's an effort to keep up.

On Saturday, with the typing done, I dismantled my office in preparation for the new floor. This took pretty much all day, and ripped two holes in my trousers. I unscrewed and delegged the fitted, too-low desk but it wouldn't come away from the wall. It seemed to have been fitted with a combination of glue and magick. Decided I'd wait for the expert: at least if the builder should pull the whole wall down, I won't be the one feeling silly.

The Dr arrived back from a day's teaching to marvel at my efforts. We then schlepped round to M. and N.'s house for a nice fish tea. Some excitement at the mussels still being alive when we arrived. I imagined them shrieking "Help me!" like that bit at the end of The Fly.

Having done the shifting chores on Saturday, earned an unusual lie-in on Sunday. The Dr even brought me tea and Jaffa Cakes in bed, where I idly glanced through the paper. Margaret Drabble thinks writing a spell against depression, and workaholicism and alcoholism go often hand-in-hand. I suspect there's something in that; not sure it's something good.

Then up, and amid the mess of office furniture and files now heaped around our living room, I laptopped a rewrite of a pitch and did some general edits on Friday's writing. Still a few bits to add and tweak, but the end is nearly in sight. Then perhaps there might be an announcement.

Will also be able to announce something else next week, the first in a new foray for me. How exciting this mystery must make my tawdry existence sound.

Then to St John's in Smith Square to hear the Exmoor Singers do Bach's St Matthew's Passion. (The apostrophication like Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, but with less monsters and more singing.) My chum (+ neighbour + boss) G. was one of the singers, and even got a line of his own. We saved our whooping for the final applause.

Psychonomy was also in attendance, and without a programme for the first half was making up his own words. Apparently they featured Nick Griffin and something perhaps about eggs. In part two, he could follow the words in German and clunkily translated English. He didn't think much of the arias, but otherwise thought it Good.

Me and the Dr have been to a few versions of the thing; for my own future reference, the Dr would like the aria after Peter's denial to be playing when she snuffs it.

Erbarme dich, mein Gott,
um meiner Zähren willen!
Schaue hier, Herz und Auge
weint vor dir bitterlich.
Erbarme dich, mein Gott.

(Touch my willy, God,
Or I will cry!
See here, My heart and eyes
Want to drink buttermilk.
Touch my willy, God.)

Passion According to Saint Matthew, BWV 244 (1727)
Translation S. Guerrier (2009)

Beers after, and then home to thick slabs of cheese on toast. I left the Dr watching EastEnders and No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and fell to bed about half-midnight.

Up this morning to wash and shave in time for the arrival of S. the builder. He sussed the issue of the desk in five seconds, and undrilled some screws I'd not even noticed. With a clunk the desk was severed from its moorings. We'll need to replaster and paint, but we should have a wooden floor down by the time I get back tonight. Then I'll need to source a new desk. One that might actually fit me.

Life is manic and also a bit expensive. So you'll have to wait for the apoplectic rant about Clive Staples ****ing Lewis. Consider it a blessing.

Technological marvels

Here are some things I've been sent in the last few days.

The Dr sends this Gigapan of Obama inaugaration, where you can zoom almost right up his nostrils.

Peter sends this video of people falling off mountains without parachutes which laughs in the face of The Spy Who Loved Me, but I suspect might be in a future Bond film.

Jonny has been blogging every day of this year, but reminds me it's no longer secret.

And, as if science cannot create anything more wondrous, there's a Lego Admiral Ackbar and a Boba Fett hoodie! (I saw the latter for real last weekend, as modelled by my new pal Ha-vee-air Gree-joe Marks-watch.)

With both barrels?

Annoyingly, I've already called a post “50s way to leave your lover”. Indeed, that might be useful context before braving the review that follows of The Envoy by Edward Wilson.

Kit Fournier works as a senior diplomat for the US in London in 1956, ostensibly enjoying a “special relationship” with the Brits and fighting a Cold War against Russia. But things are never so simple... Amongst other plots and counterplots, the US don't like the UK's attempts to have their own hydrogen bomb. It just so happens Kit's cousin's husband is one of those doing the attempting. Trouble is, Kit has always had a thing for that cousin...

The Envoy is a thrilling read, filled with grubby detail and observation in the manner of good le Carre. In fact, there's a lot here that's familiar from the Smiley books: the “tradecraft” of codes and of chalk marks and dead-drops in Kensington Gardens, the olive oil drunk to line the stomach before boozing with the Russians. There's a lot on the mechanics and political pressures of day-to-day spy work.

“Mice, thought Kit. Not tiny rodents, but MICE: money, ideology, coercion, excitement. Basic training for case officers: the four means that you use to recruit an agent or persuade someone to betray their country. MICE, he thought, how apt an acronym. It wasn't that simple. The 'E' could stand for ego as well as excitement, but ego could cause problems – like bragging. Of the four, most section chiefs preferred 'money'. When you get someone to take a bribe you have a paper trail for blackmail, then you get 'coercion' as a bonus – and that's even better than greed.”

Edward Wilson, The Envoy, p. 17.

Like le Carre, the author's biography suggests he might have practical experience of this kind of stuff. I find myself, having read the book, reading between the lines and wondering how much Wilson shares Kit's own frustration with the country of his birth – the country he fought for – when compared to “civilised Europe”.

“Edward Wilson served in Vietnam as an officer in the 5th Special Forces. His decorations include the Bronze Star and Army Commendation Medal for Valor. Soon after leaving the army, Wilson became a permanent expatriate. He formally lost US nationality in 1986. Edward Wilson is a British citizen but has also lived and worked in Germany and France. For the past thirty years he has been a teacher in Suffolk. The author enjoys sailing and has a twenty-foot sloop at Orford on the River Ore. Arcadia also published his first novel A River in May.”

(The book sets the covert British nuclear programme at Orford Ness, and Kit spies on it from his boat.)

America is puerile and brash in the book: there's much made of its embarrassingly unsophisticated view of art and music, as the symptoms of homosexuality. And I don't think that the British were any less suspicious of gayness; the intelligence service's treatment of Alan Turning being a case in point. Another character remains closeted – Kit blackmails him - because the British won't tolerate his being gay.

Otherwise, Wilson's novel is crammed full of choice historical detail. Prime Minister Eden is sozzled on amphetamines as he gets manic over Suez. Just like in From Russia, With Love, one of the characters can reveal the truth about the secret killing of Beria. And Kit is responsible for the death of Lionel 'Buster' Crabbe – and the ensuing scandal, which I'd seen detailed in the IWM's Ian Fleming + James Bond exhibition earlier this year.

The acknowledgements oddly then claim that, “A few real names are used, but no real people are portrayed”. Which again isn't true: Joseph Kennedy storms in as early as page 6, after five pages all about his daughter.

I also think Wilson is a little disingenuous with his history. His intelligence agents are always bang on the nose with their secrets, as if they've got access to history books from decades in the future. Le Carre is much better at the sense of agents gleaning scant fact from the fug of misinformation and plain confusion (the hard work very like the kind of proper journalism Nick Davies pines for in Flat Earth News, which I shall write about later this week).

Yet I'm incredibly envious of the vivid, complex and rich 1950s Wilson conjures here, the compromises and moral dilemmas on every page, the way he has us siding with Kit despite his being such a relentless arsehole. Kit is selfish to the point of flagrant treason, vicious to the point of hospitalising a bloke he has already entirely outwitted, and a coward when running away from battle or a comrade being horribly killed. Yet we're with him all the way – perhaps just to see how long he can keep ahead of those who are clearly going to kill him.

“This is not the kind of escapist spy thriller generally found on the bestseller lists. Wilson's story has no heroes. It's a sophisticated, convincing novel that shows governments and their secret services as cynically exploitative and utterly ruthless.”

Susanna Yager, “Cynically exploitative and utterly ruthless”, The Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2008.

It's busy, it's exciting, it's bleaker than an unhappy goth, it's got things to say about the selfish motives and unlikely happenstance that influence the fumbling forward of history. And however much a shit Kit might be, he still believes in some kind of rules.

“Perhaps Vasili was right: Russians lose their soul when they leave Russia. That, thought Kit, was the good thing about being an American. If you wanted to find your soul, the best way to find it was to get the hell out of the country. They all did it: Whistler, Henry James, Josephine Baker, Eliot, Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald – even the Duchess of Windsor. And when they did go back, they usually killed themselves or ended up, like Pound, in St Elizabeth's insane asylum. Pound, thought Kit, had got off too lightly. The poet should have been shot for turning traitor and siding with fascists. Still, there's nothing wrong with being a traitor if that's what you think you've got to do – but in the end, they have to shoot you and you shouldn't complain. The rules are clear and simple.”

Wilson, pp. 172-3.

And then it does two things which really, really annoyed me. About page 200 (of 268) there are two major revelations about Kit which throw the story into a whole different gear, and which are at best a little elegant, at worse just plain cheating. The plot twangs off at an angle due to a past illness and a document he keeps at his home, neither of which have been mentioned before. It's like a Whodunnit where the murderer is someone we only meet – or hear of – in the final chapter.

And the final chapter shows us the fall-out that falls on Kit and brings us forward to the eighties. It denies any chance of a sequel and ties the whole thing up. But it breaks the rules of the le Carre shocker, and dares try a happy ending. He should die! He should suffer some bizarre, gruesome “accident” the press can't quite explain, like all those who've suffered his actions.

Kit said it himself: the rules are clear and simple.

James Bond = FAIL

After the not-so-great Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever, Bond Book 5 is a bit fab.

Bond himself doesn't appear until page 78 of From Russia, With Love – more than a third of the way through. In that time, a huge conspiracy is set in motion, the full apparatus of Smersh (the Soviet Union’s spy-killing squad) focused on ruining one man.

In the film, the scheme – by SPECTRE not Smersh – is revenge for Bond killing Doctor No. But here it’s not personal; the real target is to embarrass the British Secret Service, and by extension to fray the Special Relationship for sharing secrets with the US. Bond himself is not important and certainly not a hero. One top Russian says of him:

“The English are not interested in heroes unless they are footballers or cricketers or jockeys. If a man climbs a mountain or runs very fast he also is a hero to some people, but not to the masses. The Queen of England is also a hero, and Churchill. But the English are not greatly interested in military heroes. This man Bond is unknown to the public. If he was known, he would still not be a hero. In England, neither open war nor secret war is a heroic matter. They do not like to think about war, and after a war the names of their war heroes are forgotten as quickly as possible.”

Ian Fleming, From Russia, With Love, p. 43.

Their wheeze is to get Bond caught up and killed in a sex scandal, preferably in France where the press is most salacious. The honey trap includes a beautiful girl defector and a code-breaking machine. Bond knows it sounds dodgy but the prize is too much to resist; he heads off on the next flight to Istanbul.

The book is full of fecund exoticism – Istanbul itself, the Orient Express, Bond eating a kebab. As always, this is in sharp contrast to contemporary privations. The world is still deeply scarred by the recent world war.

“The clouds broke up and a distant blue haze, far away to their left, was Paris. For an hour they flow high over the burned-up fields of France until, after Dijon, the land turned from a pale to a darker green as it sloped up into the Juras.”

Ibid., p. 93.

That battered landscape reminds Bond of how much he himself has been ravaged by the last few years. He remembers his teenage self,

“bracing himself against the top of a rock-chimney on the Aigulles Rouges as his two companions from the University of Geneva inclined up the smooth rock towards him [...] If that young James Bond came up to him in the street and talked to him, would he recognize the clean, eager youth that had been him at seventeen? And what would that youth think of him, the secret agent, the older James Bond? Would he recognize himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear – this man with the cold arrogant eyes and the scar down his cheek and the flat bulge beneath his left armpit?”

Ibid.

I point this out chiefly because it implies Bond gets his scar after the age of 17, while SilverFin has Bond scarred during his first year at Eton. Pedantic sod that I am.

Fleming’s prose is often functional, brutal, yet littered with concise observations and occasional glimpses of poetry. The following, for example, seems to thieve from the famous quote by Viscount Grey of Falloden, watching streetlights being lit just before World War One:

“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.”

Ibid., p. 150.

Likewise, the Bond girl Tatiana is a surprisingly well-drawn character, with conflicted and developing motives. The film nicely makes her chose between Bond and her country at the end; in the book Bond seems to assume that he’s won her over but we never know quite for sure. She’s a graceful, good looking girl and Fleming makes a point of her classy, royal heritage. But he also likes women to have some kind of flaw. Tatiana’s might be evidence for those who think Bond is a secret gaybo.

“Her arms and breasts were faultless. A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man's.”

Ibid., p. 59.

Bond’s sex life is worth a post all of its own. He apparently considered marriage to Tiffany Case (from the last book) but agrees with M that it’s for the best it didn’t work out. But more importantly, his “normal”, “healthy” appetites serve to contrast with villainous extremes.

Fleming apparently found villains difficult to write, but in this he’s created two corkers. Rosa Klebb is a toad-faced, predatory bisexual – one of the cliff-hangers is that she’s a woman, another that she tries to seduce Tatiana. In stark contrast, Red Grant is a handsome if ginger-haired sadist with no interest in sex. You can tell he’s helluva tough because when Klebb punches him with a knuckle-duster he doesn’t even flinch.

Importantly, the villains seem better than Bond. Grant is taller than the six-foot Bond (p. 101), more powerful, more ruthless. Note that unlike the 007 of the films,

“Bond had never killed in cold blood, and he hadn't liked watching, and helping, someone else do it.”

Ibid., p. 141.

The Russians are also better equipped. Bond can’t see any trace of forgery in Grant’s faked documents.

“Bond knew most of the signs to look for in forged passports, the blurred writing, the too exact imprints of the rubber stamps, the trace of old gum round the edges of the photograph, the slight transparencies on the page where the fibres of the paper had been tampered with to alter a letter or a number...”

Ibid, p. 176.

Grant has a copy of War and Peace that shoots people, Klebb has poisoned knitting needles and shoes. Bond might have knives and gold sovereigns hidden in his brief case, but nothing quite so crafty.

“He puffed away at his cigarette. If only it had been a trick one – magnesium flare, or anything he could throw in the man's face! If only his Service went in for those explosive toys!”

Ibid., p. 195.

Spy stories are at their best when pitting one individual against huge odds. What makes this one so exciting is that the hero is so clearly out-matched. In some ways it’s like the creation of Moriarty to destroy Sherlock Holmes: it’s the extraordinary stakes that make this one memorable. There’s incident aplenty – naked wrestling gypsies, explosions and stuff – but even several chapters of train journey, eating meals and looking out the window, feels exciting because we know the jaws of the trap are straining at their springs.

The film version wisely stays faithful to the book. The documentary on the DVD explains where they reordered scenes in the editing to make more sense of the building conspiracy. Richard Maibaum's last minute rewrites – made when filming had already begun – also make more of Grant, brilliantly having him one step ahead of Bond at every turn. Again, this emphasises that Bond is out of his depth. The shooting War and Peace is also replaced with a less silly garrotte-wire hidden in a watch. It tightens up the structure, making more of the book…

And yet the book pulls off a singular coup which the film series never could. Bond seems to have dodged the claws of the conspiracy, but there’s one last brilliant twist in the tale. No film Bond would ever dare go so far as the killing of Bond…

You wouldn’t know it from the book, but James Bond will return in Doctor No.

Damaged goods

This blog has been a casualty of my chasing around on a number of projects, some of which are very exciting indeed. Announcements in due course...

Took the Dr to see Quantum of Solace on Friday, and generally agree with Millennium's glowing review. It's all played brilliantly, it looks absolutely gorgeous but I'm not quite convinced by the frenetic edit. Watching Nimbos' Blue-Ray Casino Royale earlier this week (cor!), Codename Moose noted how well told the action sequences are. They're fast and complex and intricate, but every shot is framed perfectly, and in any given instant you know exactly where you are.

Quantum of Solace continually loses you in the midst of action. There's an opening car chase where someone loses their driver-side door, and it took me a moment to realise who. There's a scene of Bond and a villain swinging from ropes where you're not sure which is which.

I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't learn the real name of Mr White – or “Ernst”, as he is to his mother. Nor do I really see the point of keeping the gun barrel to the end. But hooray for MK12's opening sequence: different but very pretty.

Also, ignore the fools who say this isn't really a Bond film. Or that it's the first direct sequel to the previous film. There are no gadgets in Doctor No - “Q” is in it but he's not called that and he only gives Bond a new gun. From Russia, With Love is a direct sequel to that first film, too – with the Doctor's buddies out for revenge. Quantum of Solace is, then, continuing a back to basics exercise, not just getting back to the Bond of Fleming's novels but the films as they began.

I've also read SilverFin, the first of Charlie Higson's Young Bond novels, which I enjoyed a great deal. The mad plot about eels and special serum is at the dafter end of Fleming (and more like the barking end of Sherlock Holmes). But it's a fun adventure.

A bit like River Phoenix in The Last Crusade, there's fun seeing Bong get his scar and learning to drive. In fact, Uncle Max explains to Bond for at least two pages exactly how a car engine works. I'd have loved this boy-stuff detail in my teens. It could almost have done with an Eagle cutaway.

Though we're never told the date in the book itself, the internet says this is set in 1933 – and Bond born in 1920. I think that's out by at least two years.

“[Moonraker] makes Bond 37 in a book first published in 1955, and possible set a bit earlier. He can't then be born any later than 1918.”

Me, 14 March 2008.

I'm now well into From Russia, With Love, and will report back as soon as possible. (I've also got notes on Baboon Metaphysics and a handful of other stuff. But you'll have to be patient.)

White - [house] - keys

It's been announced that the theme tune to Quantum of Solace will be by Alicia Keys and Jack White - and not Amy Winehouse or Dennis Waterman. Already there is much discussion about whether this can possibly be the right choice. By people who haven't heard it.

Even then, I was a little underwowed by Chris Cornell's "You Know My Name" on first hearing. Seeing it in the film itself, though, it's really rather good.

But in looking into this (and clearly NOT skiving) I discovered the work of one LuiECuomo. He's filled You Tube with Bond title sequences, matching the titles to tunes that were considered but not used. So there's the versions of Tomorrow Never Dies with singing by Pulp, St Etienne and k.d. lang.

The latter, clearly the theme used in David Arnold's score for the film itself, got relegated to being the end song. But the first two are just plain disappointing - especially from two of my favourite bands.

There's also different takes on the same song for You Only Live Twice, tunes that could have been Bond themes or that suggest what an artist might have been like. There's Scott Walker doing Die Another Day and also some fan film and gun barrell stuff too.

And then there's this marvellous conjuration:

I am, of course, listening to Shaken and Stirred as I write this.

There’s fire

Today is the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England. And, by complete coincidence, last night I finished watching the first series of The Smoking Room.

Brian Dooley’s rather brilliant sitcom rightly won him a BAFTA. It’s a deliciously simple idea: the people who pass through the workplace smoking room, but they’re not allowed to talk about work. In effect it’s a series of one-act, one-set comic plays, where the focus is the continually increasing gang of regular characters, the way they see the world and the more we learn about them.

Robert Webb’s Robin seems the lead character by dint of him being almost always on the screen. There’s a running gag that he never actually does any work (though in the Christmas special (oddly, a “special feature” on the DVD) he nearly succumbs to the tyrannical thrill of wielding his own clipboard). As a result, we tend to see characters through Robin’s eyes: its his reactions, rolled eyes and tutting, that signpost other character’s selfishness and stupidity.

I’d assumed, having foolishly not seen the thing when it was on telly, that it’d be more about terrible awkwardness and embarrassment, trying to thief from The Office. But there’s something much more generous about the situations here, something kinder about the relationships. Though they may be exasperated with one another, misunderstand or misuse each other, they’re united by the common aim of escaping the monotony of work for a blessed moment.

The gags come thick and fast: some downright crude, some slapstick, some silly. I realise already it needs rewatching because there’s so much crammed in there. At one point the cast are all unconsciously quoting Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” at Debbie Chazen’s character, Annie. Another time, Lilian (Paula Wilcox) comes in to find a whole room of people wearing masks of her face, bearing down on her like the Slitheen stalks poor Jackie Tyler at the end of Aliens of London. Also, this is the only telly I can think of that actually forks out for the right to have the cast sing “Happy Birthday”.

I’ve struggled to write something about individual characters but it would spoil too many great revelations. So if you haven’t watched it, watch it.

But it’s also a snapshot of a particular time: the brief period in English life between being able to smoke at your desk and then not being able to smoke anywhere on the premises. Full of trapped and bored people, longing for their holidays, the smoking room itself is itself an uneasy, unsustainable compromise.

On Saturday, we also saw The Smoking Room’s Selina Griffiths on stage in Afterlife at the National. Note performances and a clever set but I was a bit nonplussed by Michael Frayn’s script. It seemed to have things to say about the folly and hubris of man in the context of terrible history, and the role of drama in making sense of the real. But when you juxtapose one man’s ambitions for his theatre with the Nazis and exile and poverty, poncing about on stage and not worrying about the bills just seems a bit… self-indulgent.

On Sunday it struck me again how appallingly dated The Living Daylights is for foregrounding Bond with a cigarette. And jeez, how can he lecture his boss on questionable shopping while wearing that checked jacket? Anyway. Much more exciting, of course, is this:



How soon before I’m looking back on it in wonder as a snapshot of quaint, forgotten 2008?

Spectreville

I must have read Diamonds Are Forever when I was about 11 or 12. Reading it again, the only bit I remembered was James Bond meeting up with Felix Leiter, who pretends to hold him up and who is missing a hand and a foot after their last adventure. Even having finished it only yesterday, I’m struggling to remember the plot.

It starts in French Guinea with a scorpion and an arch-racist dentist who hates anything black. Including scorpions and ants. He hands some diamonds to a bloke in a helicopter. And thinks some not very reconstructed things.

Then Bond is given a crash course in diamonds and learns how to put a jeweller’s glass into his eye socket.

“’Don’t push it in. Screw it in,’ said M impatiently.”

Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever, p. 12.

Yes, even Bond laughs at that.

He’s sent to Valance, the policeman from Moonraker, who gives Bond some make-up to hide his scar and warp his cheekbones. Then they go to Hatton Garden and annoy a dodgy bloke flogging diamonds.

Bond’s mission is to locate and extinguish the diamond-smuggling line, and of course it just so happens that he’s spotted the villain straight off. To do this, he pretends to be a posh burglar called Peter Franks, who’s already been hired by a sassy broad called Tiffany Case.

Bond flies to America (the plane stops off in Ireland on the way) with diamonds hidden in his golf balls. He’s dismissive of the American mobsters he’s out to bamboozle, and they turn out to be tough customers – a ginger hunchbuck and a guy who lives a cowboy fantasy in his own purpose-built town just a little out of Vegas.

The blurb on the back of the book quotes fellow shocker-writer Raymond Chandler in the Sunday Times:

“The remarkable thing about this book is that it is written by an Englishman. The scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other writer who has accomplished this.”

But I kept feeling Fleming was pushing the clichés. Perhaps it’s because we’re more familiar with Las Vegas and the mobsters after a string of films about them. As Bond is told the story of Buggsy (sic) Siegel I was thinking of Warren Beatty. And Spectreville – the villain’s Victoriana train and playset – reminded me of the villain in Once Upon A Time In The West. It also foreshadows the villainous gang behind Thunderball.

Again there’s the pornographic level of detail: the simply dressed women with little make-up and jewellery, Bond’s woollen clothes, his drinks (bourbon and spring water; his famous Martini with a twist of lemon) and omelettes. There’s psychological realism (or verisimilitude) in describing how casinos are built to drive people to the games, and the dead-eyed women filling the fruit machines with change.

Tiffany Case is a funny, lively broad, and Fleming gives her an awful past to make her that much more interesting. But I felt it was “interesting” like early 80s Doctor Who companions – they become awkward and difficult because of the burden of backstory. In this instance, Tiffany got brutally raped in her teens and hasn’t slept with a man since. How does Bond flatten her prickles and cure her of her horror? He, er, looks at her in a certain way. And buys her a few drinks.

That’s the most frustrating thing: Fleming suggests real difficulties and complexities and then doesn’t deliver on them. Case just switches side at the moment most plot-convenient. Likewise, Fleming’s attempts to address the race issue are quite startlingly clumsy. One paragraph might as well open with, “I’m not a racist, but…”

“Bond had a natural affection for coloured people, but he reflected how lucky England was compared with America where you had to live with the colour problem from your schooldays up.”

Ibid., p. 91.

There then follows an ill-considered joke from Leiter about the response to insensitive language – along the lines of “It’s political correctness gone mad!”

And then of course there’s the two homosexual villains, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd. There’s admittedly a delicious bit of detail in Mr Kidd being a nervous traveller – he carries a suitcase with the label “My blood group is F”. But these two killers don't feel particularly gay: they wear the label like an eyepatch, just something to make them less bland as henchmen.

A friend who has recently started reading Bond has been surprised by the latent, repressed… well, everything about the man. So I was amused by Bond’s qualifications for the perfect wife: “Somebody who can make Sauce Béarnaise as well as love.” He’s joking of course:

“‘And you’d marry this person if you found her?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Bond. ’Matter of fact, I’m almost married already. To a man. Name begins with M. I’d have to divorce him before I tried marrying a woman. And I’m not sure I’d want that. She’d get me handing round canapés in an L-shaped drawing room. And there’d be all those ghastly “Yes, you did – no I didn’t” rows that seem to go with marriage. It wouldn’t last. I’d get claustrophobia and run out on her. Get myself sent to Japan or somewhere.’”

Ibid., pp. 163-4.

So no issues there, then. Case wins him over by, er, making a Sauce Béarnaise Bond finds “wonderful”. And she demands of him,

“’Everything you’ve ever done to a girl. Now. Quickly.’”

Ibid. p. 173.

Yes, that’s the mark of a Secret Agent. He can be in and out in perfect, swift silence – without you even knowing he was there.

No sooner has Bond got his leg over with un-legoverable Ms Case than Wint and Kidd turn up to bump them off. I’d mis-remembered Bond spotting them as crooks because one of them can’t whistle (yes, Bond thinks a man who can’t whistle is a homosexual, but he thinks it about Scaramanga) or because they’re wearing perfume (that’s what happens in the film). There’s a moment when Bond almost spots them based on a carefully dropped (clang!) signpost. But no. Instead, M sends him a telegram about the two would-be assassins just in the nick of time.

Bond stages a dashing rescue and leaves Wint and Kidd looking like they killed each other. But for all the slyness of this, it all feels convenient rather than clever. There’s no explanation of how Bond then traces the smuggling line back to French Guinea, where the last loose threads are played out.

No mention of what’s happened to Tiffany, last seen installed in Bond’s London flat. No mention of whether he’ll marry her. In all, it’s a disappointing book, with too few action sequences which anyway feel a bit abrupt and rushed.

Overall, I got the feeling Fleming was getting bored, and just wanted done with the thing. But that’s more true of the next one…

James Bond will return in From Russia With Love.