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William Boyd on "The Man With the Golden Gun"
(Thanks to 007InVT)
A new article (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/10/man-with-golden-gun-fleming-william-boyd) in The Guardian, from the author of Solo.
***
The Man With the Golden Gun: Ian Fleming's glittering end
Ian Fleming's final Bond book, written just before his death, has been criticised for its plot holes and 'insipid' baddie. But, writes William Boyd, there is plenty to admire in The Man With the Golden Gun.
Goldeneye, Jamaica, February 1964. Ian Fleming, in chronic ill health, his heart condition worsening, is trying to complete what will prove to be his last James Bond novel, The Man With the Golden Gun. He is so unwell he can only manage one hour a day at the typewriter. His wife, Ann – a reluctant companion at Goldeneye – writes to her brother, Hugo Charteris: "It is painful to see Ian struggle to give birth to Bond, and manage but half the typewriter-banging of last year."
Only six months later, in August, Fleming died. The typescript of The Man With the Golden Gun was completed and delivered, but only partially revised. Consequently this last Bond novel may not be in exactly the form that Fleming would have wished – he was a strenuous reworker of his novels, always conscious of the deficiencies of his first drafts, which were written quickly, with dogged and disciplined application, during his two‑month Jamaican sojourns while he escaped the English winter.
After Fleming's death, his publisher at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, sent the typescript to Kingsley Amis, a self‑confessed Bond fan (who went on to write two non-fiction books on Bond and his world, and the first "continuation" novel, Colonel Sun, in 1968). Amis was disappointed with the book and wrote to Maschler with a list of suggested corrections and emendations, adding:
My greatest discovery has been to spot what it is that has done most to make the book so feeble. As it stands its most glaring weaknesses are:
i. Scaramanga's thinness and insipidity as a character …
ii. The radical and crippling implausibility whereby Scaramanga hires Bond as his security man when he doesn't know him and, it transpires, doesn't need him.
Amis then went on to speculate that the only reason Scaramanga employed Bond was that he was sexually attracted to him. It's an intriguing notion, but not one, I believe, that Fleming would have allowed or admitted to. Amis was the first to point out the novel's weaknesses; many of the reviewers of the book concurred when it was eventually published, the consensus being that The Man With the Golden Gun was something of a disappointment – Fleming's Bond going out with more of a whimper than a bang.
When I reread The Man With the Golden Gun, before I wrote my own James Bond continuation novel, Solo, I did so very conscious of its diminished reputation; but, as I read, I found my opinion steadily changing. I'll start with the second of Amis's strictures: Fleming's Bond novels are full of implausibilities and coincidences and convenient plot-twists – narrative coherence, complexity, nuance, surprise and originality were not aspects of the spy novel that Fleming was particularly interested in, and The Man With the Golden Gun is no exception. As for the larger criticism – that Scaramanga isn't a true Bond villain – I think this again can be answered by looking at the place of the book within the canon of the Bond novels.
It seemed to me, as I reread the novels and short stories, that the Bond adventures could be fairly neatly divided into two categories, namely those novels that were "realistic" and those that were "fantastical". I use the terms loosely, I should add. Here is my personal reckoning: the "realistic" novels are Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever and From Russia With Love. The "fantastical" ones are Moonraker, Dr No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. The short stories collected in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy all fall broadly into the "realistic" category also. By "realistic" I mean that these novels can be viewed as bona fide spy novels that would fit squarely and comfortably into the genre alongside similar works by, say, John Buchan, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. There's nothing manifestly absurd, outlandish or simply unbelievable about them. The "fantastical" novels, however – in my opinion – do abandon the basic realistic tenets of the spy novel and become, to put it crudely, somewhat cartoonish and implausible – however entertaining and diverting they may be along the way.
When we come to consider The Man With the Golden Gun it's immediately apparent that it falls into the category of "realistic", and this is what makes it particularly interesting – given that it was the last Bond novel Fleming was to write – and thereby undermines Amis's critique. The basic plot is simple: Bond is sent to Jamaica on a straightforward mission of assassination (as in the stories From a View to a Kill and For Your Eyes Only). We forget that Bond's 00-licence also qualifies him for assassination; in Moonraker we are reminded that Bond was "one of only three men in the service whose duties included assassination". M sends Bond to Jamaica to kill Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a notorious freelance hit man controlled by the KGB, whose weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt .45. My argument would be that because this is a "realistic" Bond novel, the villain doesn't have to compete with Dr No, Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld or the other larger-than-life antagonists that appear in the "fantastical" Bonds. Scaramanga is a credible scumbag hit man with delusions of grandeur, and M wants him terminated. Amis's desire for more outlandish colour and lurid grotesquerie is wholly misplaced in the context of this novel. And indeed Scaramanga's eventual drawn-out demise is almost low-key, by Fleming's standards, and as well written – in a brutal, deadpan sense – as anything Fleming achieved.
However, it cannot be said that the novel is wholly successful, elsewhere. One can almost sense Fleming's taedium vitae as he laboriously pounded out his one-hour-a-day segment of prose. Perhaps a proper revision of the text would have revitalised the moribund passages but, time and again, one notes the failing inspiration, the reliance on coincidence, the boilerplate expositional dialogue and the lackadaisical plotting. One lapse in particular is hard to explain. In the chapter entitled "Ballcock, and other, trouble" Bond takes great care to remove one round from the chamber of Scaramanga's Colt – ostensibly to gain him a moment or two of advantage when Scaramanga's gun misfires:
He … picked up the gun and slipped out the round in the cylinder that would next come up for firing … It was an amateurish ploy that Bond had executed, but it might gain him just that fraction of a second that, he felt it in his bones, was going to be life and death for him in the next 24 hours.
However, a few pages further on, in the next chapter, Scaramanga's gun does fire – six times, no less (as he downs a turkey buzzard for sport, and wings a shot past Bond's ear as a warning). What happened to the missing round? Had Scaramanga discovered the "ploy"? Fleming doesn't tell us, and I see this as evidence of his faltering concentration: you don't elaborately set something up in a plot and then forget about that very set-up a few pages later, if you're paying any kind of narrative attention. Oddly, no editor at Jonathan Cape noticed this either, as the typescript was corrected and copy-edited (and nor did Amis, come to that).
It's worth remembering, according to the chronology of Bond's life published in You Only Live Twice, that in 1964 Bond would have been 40 years old – the onset of middle age. According to Fleming, Bond was born in 1924, and I think you can detect Fleming's burgeoning sense of his own mortality in the seasoned weariness he gives his creation: "[Bond] decided that he was either too old or too young for the worst torture of all, boredom, and got up and went to the head of the table. He said to Mr Scaramanga, 'I've got a headache. I'm going to bed.'" In fact The Man With the Golden Gun is full of Bond's troubled introspection, and of all the Bond novels it is the one that gives us most access to his complex inner life, another reason why this last book is so fascinating.
As a noteworthy case in point, at the end of the novel, in recognition of what he's achieved in terminating Scaramanga, Bond is offered a knighthood. He declines, and in his long, dictated cable replying to M he says, "I am a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant." Mary Goodnight, who is taking the dictation, remonstrates: wouldn't Bond like to be a "sir"? Bond replies, "I'd like all these things. The romantic streak of the SIS – and of the Scot." It's surely significant that three times in less than one page James Bond pointedly refers to himself as Scottish. The Flemings were a Scottish family – even though you'd never guess it from hearing Ian Fleming speak. However, Fleming knew himself very well. In 1952 – before he wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale – in a letter to his future brother-in-law he described himself: "I'm a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of bilious and melancholic temperament, only interested in tomorrow." I wonder if, as he wrote his final Bond, cognisant of his impending death and that very few "tomorrows" were left to him – Fleming was thinking of his own origins and therefore decided to reinforce the point about Bond's Scottishness. Just before Fleming died, his mother died and, against doctor's orders, Fleming went to the funeral. Ann Fleming wrote to her son-in-law on 8 August 1964:
Ian's life now hangs on a thread. Such recovery as he could make depends on his self control with cigarettes and alcohol … Nothing funny except the funeral of Ian's mother … it was tearless, musicless, and practically wreathless, they are a very Scottish family.
Ian Fleming died four days later on 12 August. He was 56 years old.
A new article (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/10/man-with-golden-gun-fleming-william-boyd) in The Guardian, from the author of Solo.
***
The Man With the Golden Gun: Ian Fleming's glittering end
Ian Fleming's final Bond book, written just before his death, has been criticised for its plot holes and 'insipid' baddie. But, writes William Boyd, there is plenty to admire in The Man With the Golden Gun.
Goldeneye, Jamaica, February 1964. Ian Fleming, in chronic ill health, his heart condition worsening, is trying to complete what will prove to be his last James Bond novel, The Man With the Golden Gun. He is so unwell he can only manage one hour a day at the typewriter. His wife, Ann – a reluctant companion at Goldeneye – writes to her brother, Hugo Charteris: "It is painful to see Ian struggle to give birth to Bond, and manage but half the typewriter-banging of last year."
Only six months later, in August, Fleming died. The typescript of The Man With the Golden Gun was completed and delivered, but only partially revised. Consequently this last Bond novel may not be in exactly the form that Fleming would have wished – he was a strenuous reworker of his novels, always conscious of the deficiencies of his first drafts, which were written quickly, with dogged and disciplined application, during his two‑month Jamaican sojourns while he escaped the English winter.
After Fleming's death, his publisher at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, sent the typescript to Kingsley Amis, a self‑confessed Bond fan (who went on to write two non-fiction books on Bond and his world, and the first "continuation" novel, Colonel Sun, in 1968). Amis was disappointed with the book and wrote to Maschler with a list of suggested corrections and emendations, adding:
My greatest discovery has been to spot what it is that has done most to make the book so feeble. As it stands its most glaring weaknesses are:
i. Scaramanga's thinness and insipidity as a character …
ii. The radical and crippling implausibility whereby Scaramanga hires Bond as his security man when he doesn't know him and, it transpires, doesn't need him.
Amis then went on to speculate that the only reason Scaramanga employed Bond was that he was sexually attracted to him. It's an intriguing notion, but not one, I believe, that Fleming would have allowed or admitted to. Amis was the first to point out the novel's weaknesses; many of the reviewers of the book concurred when it was eventually published, the consensus being that The Man With the Golden Gun was something of a disappointment – Fleming's Bond going out with more of a whimper than a bang.
When I reread The Man With the Golden Gun, before I wrote my own James Bond continuation novel, Solo, I did so very conscious of its diminished reputation; but, as I read, I found my opinion steadily changing. I'll start with the second of Amis's strictures: Fleming's Bond novels are full of implausibilities and coincidences and convenient plot-twists – narrative coherence, complexity, nuance, surprise and originality were not aspects of the spy novel that Fleming was particularly interested in, and The Man With the Golden Gun is no exception. As for the larger criticism – that Scaramanga isn't a true Bond villain – I think this again can be answered by looking at the place of the book within the canon of the Bond novels.
It seemed to me, as I reread the novels and short stories, that the Bond adventures could be fairly neatly divided into two categories, namely those novels that were "realistic" and those that were "fantastical". I use the terms loosely, I should add. Here is my personal reckoning: the "realistic" novels are Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Diamonds are Forever and From Russia With Love. The "fantastical" ones are Moonraker, Dr No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. The short stories collected in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy all fall broadly into the "realistic" category also. By "realistic" I mean that these novels can be viewed as bona fide spy novels that would fit squarely and comfortably into the genre alongside similar works by, say, John Buchan, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. There's nothing manifestly absurd, outlandish or simply unbelievable about them. The "fantastical" novels, however – in my opinion – do abandon the basic realistic tenets of the spy novel and become, to put it crudely, somewhat cartoonish and implausible – however entertaining and diverting they may be along the way.
When we come to consider The Man With the Golden Gun it's immediately apparent that it falls into the category of "realistic", and this is what makes it particularly interesting – given that it was the last Bond novel Fleming was to write – and thereby undermines Amis's critique. The basic plot is simple: Bond is sent to Jamaica on a straightforward mission of assassination (as in the stories From a View to a Kill and For Your Eyes Only). We forget that Bond's 00-licence also qualifies him for assassination; in Moonraker we are reminded that Bond was "one of only three men in the service whose duties included assassination". M sends Bond to Jamaica to kill Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga, a notorious freelance hit man controlled by the KGB, whose weapon of choice is a gold-plated Colt .45. My argument would be that because this is a "realistic" Bond novel, the villain doesn't have to compete with Dr No, Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld or the other larger-than-life antagonists that appear in the "fantastical" Bonds. Scaramanga is a credible scumbag hit man with delusions of grandeur, and M wants him terminated. Amis's desire for more outlandish colour and lurid grotesquerie is wholly misplaced in the context of this novel. And indeed Scaramanga's eventual drawn-out demise is almost low-key, by Fleming's standards, and as well written – in a brutal, deadpan sense – as anything Fleming achieved.
However, it cannot be said that the novel is wholly successful, elsewhere. One can almost sense Fleming's taedium vitae as he laboriously pounded out his one-hour-a-day segment of prose. Perhaps a proper revision of the text would have revitalised the moribund passages but, time and again, one notes the failing inspiration, the reliance on coincidence, the boilerplate expositional dialogue and the lackadaisical plotting. One lapse in particular is hard to explain. In the chapter entitled "Ballcock, and other, trouble" Bond takes great care to remove one round from the chamber of Scaramanga's Colt – ostensibly to gain him a moment or two of advantage when Scaramanga's gun misfires:
He … picked up the gun and slipped out the round in the cylinder that would next come up for firing … It was an amateurish ploy that Bond had executed, but it might gain him just that fraction of a second that, he felt it in his bones, was going to be life and death for him in the next 24 hours.
However, a few pages further on, in the next chapter, Scaramanga's gun does fire – six times, no less (as he downs a turkey buzzard for sport, and wings a shot past Bond's ear as a warning). What happened to the missing round? Had Scaramanga discovered the "ploy"? Fleming doesn't tell us, and I see this as evidence of his faltering concentration: you don't elaborately set something up in a plot and then forget about that very set-up a few pages later, if you're paying any kind of narrative attention. Oddly, no editor at Jonathan Cape noticed this either, as the typescript was corrected and copy-edited (and nor did Amis, come to that).
It's worth remembering, according to the chronology of Bond's life published in You Only Live Twice, that in 1964 Bond would have been 40 years old – the onset of middle age. According to Fleming, Bond was born in 1924, and I think you can detect Fleming's burgeoning sense of his own mortality in the seasoned weariness he gives his creation: "[Bond] decided that he was either too old or too young for the worst torture of all, boredom, and got up and went to the head of the table. He said to Mr Scaramanga, 'I've got a headache. I'm going to bed.'" In fact The Man With the Golden Gun is full of Bond's troubled introspection, and of all the Bond novels it is the one that gives us most access to his complex inner life, another reason why this last book is so fascinating.
As a noteworthy case in point, at the end of the novel, in recognition of what he's achieved in terminating Scaramanga, Bond is offered a knighthood. He declines, and in his long, dictated cable replying to M he says, "I am a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant." Mary Goodnight, who is taking the dictation, remonstrates: wouldn't Bond like to be a "sir"? Bond replies, "I'd like all these things. The romantic streak of the SIS – and of the Scot." It's surely significant that three times in less than one page James Bond pointedly refers to himself as Scottish. The Flemings were a Scottish family – even though you'd never guess it from hearing Ian Fleming speak. However, Fleming knew himself very well. In 1952 – before he wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale – in a letter to his future brother-in-law he described himself: "I'm a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of bilious and melancholic temperament, only interested in tomorrow." I wonder if, as he wrote his final Bond, cognisant of his impending death and that very few "tomorrows" were left to him – Fleming was thinking of his own origins and therefore decided to reinforce the point about Bond's Scottishness. Just before Fleming died, his mother died and, against doctor's orders, Fleming went to the funeral. Ann Fleming wrote to her son-in-law on 8 August 1964:
Ian's life now hangs on a thread. Such recovery as he could make depends on his self control with cigarettes and alcohol … Nothing funny except the funeral of Ian's mother … it was tearless, musicless, and practically wreathless, they are a very Scottish family.
Ian Fleming died four days later on 12 August. He was 56 years old.
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Comments
Scaramanga fires his gun on the train to declare the fun begins. He is baffle when it clicks not shoots. Bond feels the tension, another tease. TMWTGG is Fleming at top of his game.
If the plot point stayed with Boyd so strong, surely he would not have skipped this pages of scene.
By God SOLO could have done with it - by comparison, TMWTGG, the weakest Fleming, was a masterpiece!
Do you have anything of substance to add to the discussions beyond more pounding of Boyd and his Bond work?
I haven't either. I'll read all the Fleming novels before I even bother going anywhere near the continuations, if at all.
The fact that you comment in a literary forum dedicated to novels that you haven't actually read is probably a sure indicator as to your intellectual capacity and emotional stability.
With regard to substance, there are multiple postings from @villiers53 and numerous other contributors that have read the Bond canon and thankfully are equipped to dialogue in detail with informed and entertaining opinions both positive and negative.
Until such times as you can find an adult to read and explain the novels to you, can I constructively suggest that you confine your postings to the movie threads?
I read the novel when first published, but put off rereading it in part because of its poor reputation. While not as polished as previous works, this is a gritty and enjoyable work.
In some respects the novel feels like the end of the series without the cliche of killing off the hero or his retirement. I particularly liked the scene in which Bond is powerless to stop the train from its grisly appointment.
He is right on the money with his division of the novels into the realistic and fantastic.
Too bad the filmmakers couldn't have drawn more inspiration from the novel, instead of the mess they concocted.
I continue to look forward to a continuation novel that feels as if it could have been written by Fleming.