It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Hmm, that's pretty powerful and well done. Bond is allowed to think that the girl is fine, while the truth of her fate is concealed to him.
I actually have all those comics and just have never cracked into them. Now with all the Flemings fresh in my mind, the holidays might be the perfect time for me to start going through them.
I guess it wasn't included because the books are mostly from Bond's perspective and I think a lot of the power of the reveal would be ruined if Bond discovered the headline and connected the dots about Trigger and her fate. It's much more powerful to have only Tanner or M know and have that sad truth hidden from Bond. At most I could see Fleming finishing the story with Bond leaving Regent's Park and M and Tanner having a talk about the Russian woman and what Bond should never know about her fate, but that wasn't really Fleming's style on the whole.
We're meant to believe the girl lives in the story though. Bond matter-of-factly thinks to himself: "She would be in worse trouble now than he was! She'd certainly be court-martialled for muffing this job. Probably be kicked out of the KGB. He shrugged. At least they'd stop short of killing her—as he himself had done." No wishful thinking, and Bond by now would know the way the KGB operates with its own agents. Fleming writes nothing into the story to imply her fate should turn out any differently. The KGB may have operated differently in real life, but this is, of course, the world of Fleming's fantasy.
There are moment where the action cuts from Bond's perspective at times (like the cut to Whisper and Big's crew in the New York parts of Live & Let Die) or the out of body experiences Bond can sometimes have as he daydreams, etc. I just think it would've been weird for him to end the story with a quick little aside between M and Tanner that would be awkwardly set at the end.
Ah, I see. Yes, Fleming usually ends either with Bond or with a bigger, more sweeping view of things. He might close with a remark upon an exchange between M and Tanner from a bird's-eye view, but you're right, probably not "in scene" with them.
You'll have a great time. The strips from CR to GF are dutiful visualizations, but the real greatness starts with OHMSS and YOLT. The strip took more time with these stories, and the comic YOLT remains the only visual adaptation faithful to Fleming's novel. As for the strip versions of OP and TSWLM, they're terrific expansions of Fleming's stories that add more action/adventure without straying too far from the originals. And the comic strip TMWTGG is arguably better than Fleming's. The completely non-Fleming comics that I've read are less succesful--fun, but without the Master's touch.
Lawrence, the adapter, seems to have had an even darker view of the KGB than Fleming, and I imagine Fleming's reaction would have been "why didn't I think of that?" But if he'd tried to convey the final point of the comic using prose, it would have been more awkward and less efficient than the comic, which took perfect advantage of the visual immediacy of comics. In prose the impact would have been softened by the intervening narrator and--as you point out--Fleming's tendency to keep most of the narrative from Bond's view. Adding a non-Bondian scene would have alerted the reader that something was up.
On an off-topic note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
That all sounds wonderful. Can't wait to get to them.
And a Happy Thanksgiving to everyone from me too!
"As Bond vacated Regent's Park, his mind wandered to the fate of Trigger and what her reception back in Russia would be. Was he right to assume that her encounter with him would yield no dire outcomes from her superiors, or did he simply leave the girl open to a worse fate by not taking the lethal shot? He tried to brush the thoughts clear from his mind, knowing too well what happened when he deliberated the minute decisions he'd made on a particular job. What had happened had happened, for better or for worse."
But as you say, I don't see Fleming addressing the issue in a separate scene right at the end that doesn't have Bond in it. It was definitely important for Fleming to finish his stories from his heroes' perspective, without looking back.
Didn't see you'd posted this, @Revelator, but I agree. Your point about the power of a visual image versus that same visual having to be laboriously crafted in prose is right on. There are so many moments from the films that only work visually because the camera gives the audience a hint at something occurring that heavy prose/explanation would spoil, and this is another such case in comic form. The sneaky plant of the article title, something you could either spot or miss entirely, is a nice touch and all the more powerful for its subtle suggestion. It definitely wouldn't have had the desired effect or same a-ha shock if Fleming had to explain it away via description or even scene.
Kudos to the adapter and to Horak, who really crafted a great ending. The composition of the final panel is great, with Bond in the background and facing the truth of Trigger's fate without realizing it as the headline is turned away from him. Very nice drama. It also addresses his sorry position as a foot soldier. He does the dirty work but the suits still hide the outcomes of his work from him.
Very well put. I'm actually almost done with the book—been plowing right through it—and you've very aptly described Bond's entrance.
I also have been impressed by Fleming's inhabiting the mind and voice of his female protagonist. With the exception of one or two instances of Viv using out-of-character terms to describe something, like using "shrapnel burst" as a simile for something, he has me pretty convinced. Sure, other authors have inhabited very unlike characters far more flawlessly, but considering Fleming typically wrote in such a set voice and from such a set perspective, color me impressed.
Absolutely. I give Fleming a lot of credit for making women characters who don't dissolve into what they so often can in the hands of men, essentially very fickle and helpless sorts who need the hero to come calling with little personality of their own to make them stand out. Fleming certainly wrote helpless women at times, but he also made Bond helpless a lot too. It was the personality and depth he gave to the characters that really shines through.
Fleming was able to give the vast majority of his women a lot of depth and unique personalities and dreams that made each give off a different feeling, all of which is a testament to his writing ability considering he was pumping a new book out annually. He also used these women to paint a picture of Bond and show off his varying levels of humanity through his relations and feelings for them, from his lust, compassion, sorrow and more in very intriguing ways. When Bond and the girls talk their dialogues feel real and genuine, like they're the words of real people. For someone who could easily be written off as a creator of airport thrillers, Fleming was true to his word and brought some craft to the genre that really made his books stand out and that made the characters jump off the page.
Personally, I like the John McLusky strips best -- the art style is so very '50s. But each to their own, of course, Horak certainly does have his moments. A few of the early novel adaptations (LALD, MR, and DAF if memory serves correctly) are narrated from Bond's point of view, so there is that difference from the Fleming original. TMWTGG has a very interesting bit with Bond learning of Scaramanga having tortured one his fellow agents early on in the tale rather than having "Pistols" relate the incident himself late in the book. Something like this -- and Richard Maibaum's work on the movie script for Goldfinger -- makes it clear that there are indeed times when Fleming would have benefitted from taking on a collaborator.
True! I tend to prefer Horak myself--McLusky is occasionally stodgy, and his tough guys tend to have the same faces and expressions. Horak's style is livelier, with more creative staging, and his Bond looks ideal.
It's an excellent case of expanding a tiny off-stage incident into a sub-plot that really shows how vile Scaramanga is and gives Bond good reason to want him dead.
Indeed--and I'd add Paul Dehn's work on Goldfinger too. Maibaum's own scripts were dependent on the quality of his co-writers's work. His original solo script for Thunderball sounds superior to the one co-authored with John Hopkins.
Wish all editions included that. It's pretty cool.
Another friend, Ernest Cuneo, intriguingly mentions that Fleming had a “terrifying experience which he remembered with horror” and claims “it was psychologically traumatic, and modified, it appears as one of the incidents in his books.”
So, this grim scene was based on Fleming's own experience, but--in a startlingly sympathetic reversal--portrayed from his partner's point of view. The reader keenly feels Vivienne's humiliation, while Derek, a self-portrait of Fleming as a young man, is portrayed as a callow cad. Fleming not only viewed Bond "from the wrong end of the telescope," he also viewed himself though it. And almost all men--Fleming presents a devastating portrait of male hypocrisy and selfishness. The Spy Who Loved Me is the closest thing we have to a feminist James Bond novel. The only good man Vivienne meets is James Bond, an eternally unattainable fantasy figure. What does this say about men?
Drawing on his own life, Fleming "found writing The Spy Who Loved Me the easiest thing he had ever done," according to Lycett. His letters confirm this: "I am a 23 year old French Canadian girl & writing rather breathlessly which comes, deceptively I suspect, easy." From another letter on the book: "Absolutely no idea what it's like but it wrote rather easily which is a bad sign I expect." Perhaps the personal content explains why he was so hurt by TSWLM's reception at the hands of the critics.
Male reviewers were openly misogynistic, dismissing Vivienne as an "upper-class tramp", but as Kingsley Amis pointed out, TSWLM had a better reception from female critics. Esther Howard in The Spectator wrote that the early sex scenes “rather well done" and "only just as nasty as is needed to show how absolutely thrilling it is for… the narrator to be rescued from both death and worse...by a he-man like James Bond. Myself, I like the Daphne du Maurier touch and prefer it this way but I doubt his real fans will.” Ann S. Boyd, in her book The Devil with James Bond!, called TSWLM "a devastating parody of the misuse and manipulation of sex." Those words deserve to be on the back of every copy.
Fleming's "literary tranvestism" remains underrated. He convincingly writes in a female voice by reveling in his feminine side (the fanciful, coy side that loves shampoos, exclamation marks and melodramatic pronouncements). But that notorious line about "semi-rape" rudely breaks the illusion and gives critics a reason to dismiss the book by ignoring thousands of convincing sentences in favor of a single bad one. Why Fleming chose to include this line is a mystery. What woman would think such a thing? What on earth is "semi-rape" anyway? The term is confusing and muddled.
The book also has a muddled, ambivalent attitude toward its hero. In Casino Royale Fleming intended Bond to be a cold, unlikable blunt instrument, but as the series progressed he fleshed Bond out, making him more heroic, attractive and human. In TSWLM he tried to grapple with this change.
Take a look at the letter he wrote to his publisher:
"And on that note the book closes." Except that it doesn't! Fleming seems to have entirely forgotten that on the last page Vivienne completely dismisses the detective's homily: "I just didn't believe him. The scars of my terror had been healed, wiped away, by this stranger who slept with a gun under his pillow, this secret agent who was only known by a number." She knows that Bond is the only man who treated her with true affection and chivalrous understanding, and cannot repudiate him. Neither could Bond's creator. Writing as a woman, Ian Fleming had fallen for his own character.
The Spy Who Loved Me rarely gets the attention it deserves, from either the press or academics, who would surely find it fascinating. But the Guardian did a publish a highly recommended article about the book in 2012.
I'll close with a question for the forum. In a letter Fleming says in TSWLM "there is an excellent opportunity to kill off Bond, appropriately & gracefully." In what part of the story was this opportunity?
Thanks, guys, I am now REALLY NERVOUS about this :)
Looking forward to the re-read, though! A few quick short story thoughts to come.
“He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one."
Very simple, very understated, but delivers a hell of a whack. I knew it was coming and it still got me. The most intimate glimpse of Bond's past we've been given so far, and a revelation that adds depth to the story.
There's a lot going on in this one: the character study of Smythe, a ruined man mostly of his own devising; a sinister wartime adventure straight out of Alistair MacLean; and the appealingly bizarre Octopus Vs Food experiment.
It starts with a man talking to an octopus, which is instantly intriguing and funny. We soon see, however, that we're not supposed to like Smythe - a man who anthropomorphises fish but holds human life cheap.
Bond's role is small, but he's the catalyst that gets things moving and introduces a fatal change to Smythe's passive state.
I find it interesting in the context of FYEO, which sees Bond and M doubtful about taking on a mission with a personal aspect. Here, Bond has specifically asked to be assigned to a case that concerns him. Sure, it's not a cold-blooded assassination, but the end result is the same and one feels Bond hoped and suspected it would be.
The autopsy postscript explains how we know what happened to Smythe, even though there were no witnesses. I like the way we're pulled in from an omniscient narrator to a more personal focus.
Drinkwatch: I don't have any rum, so am currently unable to report on rum and ginger. I will fix this at some point.
Anyway, what kind of drunk is everyone? I reckon I'm a Sanguine: 'gay to the point of hysteria and idiocy'. Happy to demonstrate sometime.
‘First appearance in book form of this Bond Bonus from PAN’, according to my 1968 paperback (third printing).
I know it’s only a puff piece for Sotheby’s, but I find this one disappointing. There’s no real suspense; Bond sets out to attend the auction and spot the underbidder, and this is exactly what happens.
I guess Fleming, the old journalist, still has the journalist’s ability to bang out words on demand for a client willing to pay. Can’t blame him.
We do get a peek at HQ, my favourite thing, with some humour about British weather and these wretched secretaries cosseting Bond by having the temerity to install a coat hook in his office.
Perhaps the most interesting part is when Bond (rather foolishly in my opinion) pops in to the Communications Section to check out Maria Freudenstein. She’s described as unattractive, and her propensity to turn traitor is blamed on her unattractiveness; a very handy explanation for the handy fact that beautiful women in the Bond universe tend to be on the side of good, and ugly ones on the side of evil!
It all falls a little flat after that (though I, too, assumed there was a ‘going, going, gone’ at auctions, and was disappointed to learn this is not the case).
The central conceit of the payoff by auction is a brilliant one, as is the completely phoney operation being run for the benefit of the KGB (and involving two presumably innocent members of staff as well as Freudenstein). I just wish more had been done with these ideas.
Bond auction, 2001 (I didn’t attend, but blagged the catalogue by pretending to be a journalist. Fleming would be proud):
Indeed, but he ended up souring on the project. Lycett's biography reports that "Property of a Lady" was "commissioned for Sotheby’s yearbook, The Ivory Hammer, by a young auctioneer, Michel Strauss, the son of Ann’s friend, Aline Berlin...Like Bond doing his office paperwork at the start of the story, Ian found the task boring. He enlisted the help of Fabergé expert Kenneth Snowman of the jeweller Wartski. But he never became fired up about the project and eventually wrote to Peter Wilson, the chairman of Sotheby’s, saying he would not accept payment for what was a lacklustre effort."