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I've always read it as incredibly sweet, and more romantic and realistic than if they'd had a big snog. Domino is like a child with a favourite toy she wants to see as soon as she wakes up.
But then I'm always moved by scenes in which characters have enough trust to fall asleep in each other's presence like that, because I find sleeping really difficult if there are other people around and awake; it makes me feel vulnerable. (Overnight flights are fun for me, yes.)
Agreed. And seeing that Hannes Oberhauser was the one to teach Bond the art of skiing, there really should have been an exciting skiing sequence in SPECTRE.
Washington village is very small and only has a pub, so I picked the Vintage Rose Tea Room a couple of miles up the road in Storrington.
As you can see, they discourage you from getting at the sugar, but I was having no truck with that.
Thank you! Just the standard iPhone Photos app; I try to resist fiddling around with the filters, but this time it seemed to work.
I wanted to get a pic of the sign for Fulking and Poynings, but there wasn't a good place to stop. Another time!
I think filtering works best when you're adding warmth or coldness to an image (like the former which you've done here), so there's definitely a use for it. You should have a specific, unique image for every Bond novel you're reading at the time. Could become a fun series. ;)
If I recall correctly, you took a photo with your copy of Moonraker in the foreground of a picture shot on location, so that is another version on this similar theme.
I was actually going to plead for an extension on the next round of short stories, as I have a trip to Berlin in late November and could enjoy some more reading on location...
A great point, and one I'd never thought about before. As Fleming said, it's Bond "though the wrong end of the telescope." But the view is just as interesting.
I liked the film, but the Express comic strip adaptation of the story did a much better job of preserving Fleming's story while sexing it up with the sort of material audiences have come to expect from the Bond films. You can read the whole thing online.
Indeed. These bits and pieces of Bond's past are precious precisely because there are so few of them. Fleming gave enough to entice us, and unlike the films he knew better than to give us too much, which would remove Bond's mystique.
I know some folks on here are familiar with it, but for those who aren't, here is Philip Larkin's review of Octopussy & The Living Daylights, which appeared in the July 8, 1966 issue of The Spectator. Besides being England's greatest post-war poet, Larkin was--like his friend of Amis--a fan of Ian Fleming.
***
Bond’s Last Case: ‘Octopussy’ and ‘The Living Daylights’
by Philip Larkin
These two stories, according to the blurb, were written in 1961 and 1962 respectively, and would have formed part of a similar collection to For Your Eyes Only if the late Ian Fleming had lived to add others to them. As it is, they presumably represent the last hard-cover splutterings of his remarkable talent. I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels. James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story-length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that requires elbow-room, and such Bond examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.
These are no exception. It would be difficult to deduce from them the staggeringly gigantic reputation, amounting almost to a folk-myth, that grown out of the novels. Indeed, it would be difficult nowadays to deduce it from the novels. No sooner were we told that the Bond novels represented a vulgarisation and brutalisation of Western values than the Bond films came along to vulgarise and brutalise—and in a way sterilise—the Bond novels. With our minds full of Sean Connery in Technicolor, or whatever it’s called now, this study of a retired Secret Service major drinking himself towards his final coronary, and its cover-mate, an assignment for 007 in Berlin to out-snipe a sniper, seem sensitive, civilised, full of shading and nuance.
How easy, for instance, to see in the career of Major Smythe an allegory of the life of Fleming himself! The two Reichsbank gold bars that the major smuggles out of the army on his discharge from the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau are Fleming’s wartime knowledge and expertise; he emigrates to Jamaica and lives on them—selling a slice every so often through the brothers Foo (presumably his publishers), and securing everything his heart desires: Bentleys, caviare, Henry Cotton golf clubs. For a time all is well. Then he has a heart attack; his wife takes an overdose; he has another attack, finding himself unwilling or unable to follow the regimen his doctor specifies:
“He was still a fine figure of a man, and it was a mystery to his friends and neighbors why, in defiance of the two ounces of whisky and ten cigarettes a day to which his doctor had rationed him, he persisted in smoking like a chimney and going to bed drunk, if amiably drunk, every night.
The truth of the matter was that Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death-wish…”
However inappropriate to Fleming’s life the details may be, this evocation of a fifty-ish ex-service émigré, whose only interest now is tropical fish, going steadily to pieces has a genuine plangency. Bond figures in the story only as a shadowy emissary from ‘Government House,’ come to dig up the nasty business of how he got the gold bars in the first place.
By contrast, the second story shows Bond as a kind of Buchan hero. Lying for three evenings on a bed covering the windows at the back of the Haus de Ministerien, Bond romances about a blonde cellist in a girls’ orchestra that regularly enters the building, presumably to rehearse. When finally the British agent makes a dash for the frontier, and the sniper appears at the window, it turns out to be—as if you didn’t know—the cellist. Bond’s reaction is interesting. Instead of shooting the sniper before the sniper can shoot the agent, he deliberately alters aim (the agent escapes only by luck) so as to miss her, excerpt perhaps left hand. The Secret Service No. 2, who is him, is understandably annoyed:
‘You had clear orders to exterminate…You should have killed that sniper whoever it was.’
But Bond is unmoved:
‘That girl won’t do any more sniping. Probably lost her left hand. Certainly broke her nerve for that kind of work. Scared the living daylights out of her. In my book, that was enough.’
This is the moralist Bond, who toys with resigning in Casino Royale and is quite incompatible with the strip-cartoon superman of the film versions or of popular belief, but who fits well with Kingsley Amis’s suggestion, in his amusing and pertinent The James Bond Dossier, that Bond is a re-hash of the Byronic hero. Perhaps. But it would support equally well the Sunday Times’s simpler and more devastating diagnosis quoted on the paperback editions: ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.’ Or are these still just two ways of saying the same thing?
But for now, I strike again like Thunderball...
Chs. 9-18 ("Multiple Requiem"—"How to Eat a Girl")
As @Birdleson pointed out, coincidence does take over in many aspects of the story here: the coincidence that Bond gets assigned to the Bahamas, the coincidence that Largo is sleeping with the sister of the man he murders, the coincidence that Bond and Lippe were at Shrublands together, the coincidence that Leiter also gets assigned to the Bahamas...
But the whole machine moves so beautifully, you'd have to really be stopping and picking the story apart to care.
Emilio Largo is unique among Bond villains in that he is "conspicuously handsome" with "an animalness that would devastate women." Despite lacking the requisite grotesqueries, Largo is still nevertheless quite larger than life with his fully detailed face like that of an ancient Roman. Visually, I think Celi approximates book Largo quite well apart from the color hair and a somewhat watered down portrayal of said animalness. All in all, Largo is a rather refreshing change of pace for the Bond villains: a physically fit ladykiller in his prime, whose appetites match those of Bond's or of Fleming's. I particularly like the detail of his downing his favorite drink "crème de menthe frappé with a maraschino cherry on top" after reporting to No. 2. Then after he devours the cherry—a rather obvious symbol of a female's sex—he takes another from the bottle and eats that too.
Domino certainly ranks in the upper echelon of Fleming's Bond girls. I agree with the remarks that she nicely blends film Fiona with film Domino: an assured seductress who drives fast and hard "like a man" and who drinks "soft" double Bloody Marys, yet has a deep well of hurt and longing within. This was certainly one of those novels where Fleming was interested in exploring the psyche of the Bond girl and he provides Bond and Domino some of the best conversations he ever would pen between Bond and gal. It is likely the strength of these conversations, more than anything, that once bolstered Thunderball to the #3 spot in my overall rankings.
Leiter shows up—good ol' Leiter, never can get enough of 'im—and illustrates how to get your martini done right.
The casino scene between Bond and Largo initially struck me as redundant and ho-hum, coming as it does after so many scenes of gambling and competition between Bond and the villain across however many novels. I thought to myself 'Do we really need another card game?' But Bond's needling with the "spectre" wordplay really does sell the scene in the end. Leave it to Fleming to really make something of "yet another" card game.
Domino's "cardboard hero" story is wonderful and tugs at the heartstrings, just enough.
Leiter sees an authentic blonde and gleefully calls her out.
Bond's swim down into the sunken plane presents some of Fleming's most superb nature writing in the novel. The real kicker, however—and a detail I'd completely forgotten about—is the colony of dark, bat-like octopi dwelling within the craft's interior. I've had a recurring nightmare throughout most of my life that involves myself swimming through a massive tank with giant 20-30 ft. long octopi spanning the bottom beneath me as I swim across. Though these are little ones here in Fleming's story, the scene nonetheless gave me flashbacks to my dream and I was able to fully identify with Bond's nausea and mad need to escape from that tentacle-filled torture chamber.
The "eating" of Domino's foot—the "small pink pads" of her toes "like the buds of some multiple flower"—is of course a very thinly disguised metaphor for a scene Fleming would really like to have been writing about. He betrays a bit of his sadist side here in details like "He saw the muscles of her behind clench to take the pain" and "Bond...bit as softly as he could, and sucked hard. The foot struggled to get away." Metaphor, I suppose, is really all he could get away with in 1961. I do question, however, how game Domino really would have been for some lovemaking with her foot bleeding and throbbing with pain, spines removed or no. Must have been terribly uncomfortable.
Too watered down perhaps. Celi might have been better suited to the role two decades earlier, and he did have Roman features, but in the film he doesn't come across as a man with "an animalness that would devastate women." Especially next to Connery, which is the big sticking point. In previous Bond films the actors playing the villains had enough charisma to play against Connery. After Thunderball this was not the case (except perhaps for Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again). Celi also seems muted in the role--I don't feel the alpha-male versus alpha-male aggression that's between Largo and Bond in the book. I think what the film needed was an actor with similarities to Connery (who would have been a terrific Largo himself).
He's a breath of life, and most of the humor in the book comes out of his mouth. I also like how he demands to swim along with Bond, despite his handicaps. We certainly can't accuse Fleming of ableism!
A wonderful interlude. Someone online said one of the best things about the books are the scenes where Bond just listens to women.
The cuffs and collars matched.
I've suggested elsewhere that "How to Eat a Girl" would be a memorable double-entendre title for a future Bond film. Don't think it'll get the nod though.
If she was like Ann Fleming, she might have enjoyed it. One of her letters goes on about how she enjoyed being whipped by her husband...
You're right, a younger Celi might have done the trick. He has a bit of slyness to him in the film, but could have been much more charismatic and much more potent.
Oh my!
Not as catchy in English (Defiled, Damned, and Betrayed) but still punchy. If that book really exists I want to read it!
Yes, short stories were Fleming's laboratory. He seemed more comfortable exploring Bond's doubts in the short story format--had he been able to craft a novel-sized story around them, he'd have moved toward Graham Greene/Le Carre territory. In the post-CR novels, Bond is sent on fewer kill-missions, and his targets tend to be so odious (Scaramanga) that his missions are free of moral ambiguity.
And the funny thing is that either should feel bad about killing Trigger. M after all says that Trigger is the KGB's best sniper, "the same man they've used before for sniper work." So Trigger has plenty of blood on her hands. She's practically a cold-blooded serial killer, yet Bond acts like a sentimental fool in sparing her just because she looks sweet. Judging purely by logic, Sender is right and Bond is wrong. But of course it would be a very boring story if Fleming felt the same. Bond is a romantic--that's what keeps him from becoming the sociopath his detractors think he is.
Indeed--it's been a long, strange trip since the blithe assassinations in Casino Royale. It's clear that Fleming had grown morally uncomfortable with the idea of having an assassin as his hero. In FRWL we're told that
No doubt about it, James Bond should be executed.
In some ways, Octopussy and the Living Daylights would be a stronger collection without "Property" and "New York," but those stories had to be collected somewhere. Otherwise "Property" would have taken on the mystique of a "lost" Fleming story and become a crushing disappointment when finally found. Still, it has a nice title, though I'm not sure if it's film-worthy. Oh, and what's with Bond's gaydar? What makes him think Fanshawe has homosexual tendencies?
Oddly enough, someone I follow on Twitter has just returned from a trip abroad embedded with sea urchin spines. I probably don't know her well enough to suggest she gets a friendly secret agent to suck them out.
Right there with ya! Finished over the weekend and just trying to find time to write up my thoughts. Hopefully tonight!
Well I thought that sentence was going somewhere else...
I may enjoy drinking what Bond drinks but I draw the line at eating what he eats. Especially if that's women.
Chs. 19-24 (When the Kissing Stopped—"Take It Easy, Mr. Bond")
As with many of Fleming's novels, as @Birdleson himself has pointed out, the ending creeps up much faster than expected (very much unlike the conclusion to my thoughts on Thunderball). So much so, that I found myself just a tad frustrated throughout Ch. 22, "The Shadower," reading about guys just chatting on a submarine, knowing there were only so many pages left in the book and that Fleming was spending them one-by-one writing about...guys chatting on a submarine.
But there's a lot of great stuff in this last third of the book, too. The standoff between Largo and the subversive No. 10 was a particularly great moment, and Fleming resolves the scenario in a way completely unlike how I thought he would. A very satisfying solution nonetheless. Largo delicately smelling the muzzle of his gun was a highly cinematic touch.
The real thrill of these final pages, however, is in the underwater battle, which was simply tremendously imagined and translated to page by Fleming. The build up is terrific, with the men accompanying Bond shrugging off the warning that there will be certain casualties. And then Bond himself goes absolutely nuts as he launches himself after Largo's men, tearing through them and taking blows and jabbing his spear first into one man then wrenching it out and into another. Fleming writes the whole battle scene superbly, making incredible use of the dimensions of being underwater, having allies and enemies not only in front or behind, but also above and below.
He saves the best for last with his amazing depiction of Largo swimming steadily but powerfully down through the water toward Bond "trapped" in the corals. You can't help but imagine this insanely wide camera shot of Largo descending mightily through the immense sea like Doré's Paradise Lost:
I'd completely forgotten how this final chapter concluded. After starting out with some pretty original endings from one novel to the next, Fleming started to write himself into formula with first Dr. No and then Goldfinger concluding with Bond entering the throes of passion with the girl. Thunderball rather offers a wonderfully sweet ending with Bond collapsing beside Domino's hospital bed and Domino pulling her pillow to the edge of the bed "so that she could see him whenever she wanted to" and closing her eyes to sleep. Definitely one of my favorite endings.
All in all, Thunderball offers a lot of great stuff. I don't know if I'd still call it Top 3—there are some dry-ish sections—but a helluva lotta great stuff nonetheless. Mostly to do with Domino and that terrific underwater battle writing. Who knows, maybe Thunderball still is Top 3 for me.
Total scrambled eggs count: 1
Now onward to the final 4 short stories and I'll be back on track for Spy!