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I'm writing this one up and I intend to look at Colonel Sun from the widest of perspectives. I want to include a look at how the world and popular culture both become more violent in the period between the death of Ian Fleming in August 1964 and the publication of Colonel Sun as the first Bond continuation novel in 1968. I find this subject matter fascinating to explore in depth and I'd hope some folks on here do too.
All contributions to the debate on the increased level of violence in Colonel Sun are most welcome, as always.
Thanks - looking forward to your thoughts on it when you get it read, @Thunderfinger. It's highly recommended.
By the time he wrote Colonel Sun, O'Donnell was firmly established with the much more violent and sexually explicit Blaise adventures (Amis was a huge fan), Adam Hall was on the scene with Quiller, James Munro with John Craig and Adam Diment had brought us the cool, pot smoking, King's Road cruising anti-hero, Philip McAlpine.
All had their own approach but one thing they had in common was a level of violence and in some instances, sexual content, that had gone way beyond Fleming.
In short, the sixties were well and truly swinging, the market had changed and Amis responded in a way that Fleming would doubtless have been obliged to had he lived.
In my opinion, this accounts for the overal harder edge that Amis gave his Bond adventure.
The simplicity of the dental torture scenes reminded me of Colonel Sun torturing Bond.
Is this the nearest Amis' novel has come to being filmed (in part)?
Are there any other films that come to mind with similar torture scenes to Colonel Sun?
I'd love to hear from you!
And that is, none of the writers have managed to get into Bond's head and thoughts the way Fleming did, and in CS I was surprised to find how much Amis doesn't focus on this aspect either. It wasn't as I remembered it when first reading the book years ago.
Yes the book is violent, and yes the torture scene is particularly nasty, but it seems to lose massive credibility towards the end. Sun suddenly wants forgiveness from Bond, and Bond suddenly regains his strength miraculously after a horrendous ordeal to kill Sun.
I found this moment in the novel to actually become borderline silly, rather than horrific as such a torture scene should have been, and certainly not a patch on the grisly scene from CR.
I agree with @jetsetwilly's sentiments, but in a more general sense I found the read to be a real slog.
Fleming though, wrote real page turners.
Another issue is the author himself. Like Fleming he used his characters to regale us with much of his own contemporary world view, but unlike Fleming, I found Amis' observations to be uninteresting, dull, facile even.
Fleming, though, no matter what he was going on about, I found to be always interesting, entertaining, provocative
I'm glad Amis retired from the job after one book.
I reallife I probably would have found Fleming to be an interesting sort to listen to, while Amis I might have found to be a dullard.
But Amis, I think was the only continuation author bold enough to mimic the Fleming style, ie insert one's own world view on almost anything, when mood strikes - problem is I just didn't relate.
Fleming was way more engaging.
So true really. No-one else could really write a Bond thriller like Fleming, as Sir Ian put so much of himself into the books.
Best thing about CS though is Ariadne. Despite her tedious blatherings at the end of the novel (mouthpiece for the author) she was one fiery Mediterranean Bond girl. Sex appeal to spare!!!
If they ever film the book, it sure would be fun to see who gets cast in her role.
You'd need a young virile Bond actor to keep up!
This cover image I think astutely attempts to capture the star of the book.
but I think this image might be closer.The gorgeous Tonia Sotiropolou, wasted in SF, but reborn as Ariadne in Colonel Sun. I wish that at least.
This subject matter is still an area of deep interest of mine and I am again working on an article partly based around this topic. The occasion for updating the thread has been the 2023 republication of Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun (fifty-five years after it was first published by Jonathan Cape) by the new publisher Ian Fleming Publications. This reissue came with a new foreword by Bond continuation author Anthony Horowitz. I will quote a few passages from this foreword (dated July 2023) below as they refer to the Colonel Sun torture scene and so they are relevant to this thread:
"[T]he Guardian newspaper marked the fiftieth anniversary of the book with an article by John Dugdale in which he described Colonel Sun Liang-tan as "the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals." Well, I can play the usual get-out clause: different times, different attitudes. There are many characters in the Bond canon that we now find contentious, But I suppose, as much as it pains me, I must issue something close to a trigger warning and admit that Dugdale may have a point. I just hope they don't put it on the cover.
Dugdale also criticises Amis for the "protracted, gruesome torture scene" at the climax of the book (in Chapter 19). Well, the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, had a memorable, very violent interrogation scene so you could argue that there's nothing out of place here. The chapter has some great dialogue and a great premise: Colonel Sun delicately explains that he will only use items "that the average kitchen provides". From his very first appearance on a Greek island ("In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed"), Sun has radiated evil and in some respects he prefigures Hannibal Lecter, another remorseless yet somehow compelling psychopath. Again, I'll be honest and say that the torture scene does not make for a pleasant read. I think Amis goes too far and the turnaround at the end is, to say the least, unexpected.
You have been warned! But historically, artistically and thematically, it's my view that Colonel Sun more than earns its place in the Bond canon."
(Foreword by Anthony Horowitz taken from Kingsley Amis, Colonel Sun, Ian Fleming Publications, 2023, p. xvii.)
Just for reference here is a link to the Guardian article on Colonel Sun by John Dugdale which Horowitz refers to in the passages above:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/28/colonel-sun-kingsley-amis-james-bond-novel-ian-fleming
In that article Dugdale has the following to say about the Colonel Sun torture scene:
"Colonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like."
So what do we think about all of this? Do Horowitz and Dugdale have a point about the nastiness of the Colonel Sun torture scene? Does Amis go too far, beyond the pale so to speak? Or is the torture scene creatively extend that which was already there in the Fleming Bond works?
Personally, I take the latter view that the torture scene merely extended what was already there in Fleming and the world was getting ever more violent by the year 1968 so Amis was surely only holding up a mirror to the violent age he inhabited. It is a brilliant torture scene (and a great follow-up to the one in Casino Royale) and Sun's demise is masterfully handled with him rather pathetically even showing some remorse before Bond knifes him through the heart. So, in my view, Amis really made a novel out of Colonel Sun with these sorts of scenes. He took a little of Fleming's inherent genius and ran with it himself adding his own genius to the mix as one of the greatest post-war British novelists along with Fleming himself. There are some nice little surprises in store for the reader already familiar with Fleming's Bond works. For me, Colonel Sun still stands as the best and most authentic of the James Bond continuation novels. The partial filming of the torture scene in Spectre finally cements its place in Bond history.
From what I remember I thought CS was by far the best continuation Bond novel. It's not pure Fleming (I agree, the idea of Bond helping the Russians likely isn't where Fleming would have gone) but it's not necessarily meant to be. It's Amis' individual spin on the Bond character/story formula. Amis is a fascinating writer in the sense he actually understood the Bond novels on a deep level, far more than even Benson and Horowitz do nowadays. So I'm inclined to agree, what he did with CS is an extension of what we see in Fleming's books.
I agree, I think Amis had an intelligence to his writing that is on a similar level to Fleming, far more than any other continuation writer has managed. And I do find that torture scene rather gruesome, probably worse than anything Fleming ever came up with. Sadly the adaptation in SP was a massive letdown, particularly Bond's immediate recovery after the ordeal.
However, where CS lets itself down is a lack of introspective `Bond thoughts' that Fleming always delivered. We never really get too much under the skin or in Bond's head during CS, which is what the lets the book down for me.
This is the one thing Horowitz actually grasped much better with his 007 novels.
CS is definitely due a re-read on my part. I remember Bond in that novel feeling a lot more 'real' than he did in TMWTGG though.
The Horowitz novels just aren't my thing, but they have their moments. I like the scene where Bond is dosed with heroin in Forever and a Day. It's the sort of thing that really evokes that physical/mental hardship villains put Bond through in the Fleming novels, and of course he's basically saved by the Bond girl, so it's within the precedent of the early books.
My issue is that Horowitz lacks that sense of real creativity and even sadism that Fleming, or indeed that many of the other Bond authors had, when it comes to these situations Bond is put in. Earlier in that same book Scipio taunts Bond and pretends to throw acid in his face. Of course it's all pretend, but it feels like this bizarre cop out, as if Horowitz couldn't write Bond out of this (rather dull) situation so went for the most obvious thing to do. Scipio is also a bit of a lame villain anyway (a sort of weird second rate Le Chiffre but much less intimidating). Same with the Magic Room/the brainwashing stuff we get in With a Mind to Kill. On paper it's putting Bond through a mental and physical hardship, so again a sort of cool spin on Fleming, but I personally felt it was all a bit limp and unoriginal. It defaults to some vague descriptions of slanting walls, Bond hallucinating about stuff from previous books a bit. It just doesn't have that same sense of twisted originality or weirdness that Dr. No's obstacle maze had, or Spectreville/the stomping in DAF had, or even what I remember the mad violence of CS having.
Horowitz is a disappointing Bond author for me in that sense. I think he gets the Fleming books, and it allows him to develop interesting ideas in theory, but he's just so boring and unimaginative in how he writes villains/scenarios. Even Benson, as much as I'm not a fan of his books, was brilliant at putting Bond in often weird but interesting scenarios (the eye torture in one of his Union trilogy books which renders Mathis blind is particularly horrifying and very relevant to the blind Bond villain, and it's something I can imagine Fleming doing, albeit perhaps slightly differently. Same for the villain putting Bond into a bullfighting ring to test him in Doubleshot).
Many men have taken hits to the testicles, burned themselves, been kicked or been forced to push the limits of their stamina Perhaps less, but some have also broken fingers or swum in fear of some wild animal. By extending these situations to the max, Fleming gets heightened reality. I suppose this is more of the Fleming Effect that Amis himself defined!
As for Colonel Sun as a novel, it has steadily grown in my evaluations. The beginning of the novel is quite thrilling and action-packed. We get Bond feeling boredom and fighting complacency (common start for Fleming's novels) and then he gets hurled into action with great effect. I think the hand-to-hand combat in this novel surpasses any unarmed fight Fleming himself wrote. And then there's the MI6 plan: the falling into a trap that Fleming loved and of course the "gambling on even chances" that main character takes to his profession. Beyond that, and the escape from the fake Russians and Colonel Sun's men, the novel grinds to a halt and has quite a slow period on the boat, although I can appreciate the breath that it brings. I think this similar to the slow middle chapters of Dr. No, but maybe a little longer. The few water action scenes don't move me much, but once on the island the finale is excellent.
I agree with others in the thread stating that the sex of the novel is its greatest difference from the Fleming novels. Amis wholeheartedly goes for it in his descriptions and the downtime on the boat is filled with Bond and Ariadne's erotic and romantic connection. I think Amis is probably the furthest one could go with Bond's sex: Benson's felt a bit crude. Like he has the one where the Bond girl "feeds him" her breast, or Bond involved with twins or perhaps the worst of the lot, Bond's detailed work with an actress. Gardener perhaps also toed the line sometimes: in the GE novelisation we get Bond sliding in "long and thick." The others have had to good sense to keep the act off-screen with only the seduction shown.