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Fleming's villains were almost always ethnically miscegenated. Lent them a certain exoticism.
I think of this as a healthy survival instinct that has since atrophied.
I'm not sure Goldfinger's Jewishness was ever confirmed. Rather, Fleming leaves it as a possibility. Pretty sure he does come from Latvia, though.
Yes, I think you are right, but he did have British citizenship or something if memory serves, so again not a true Britisher.
This is about the novel not the film.
Well the novel sounds good doesn't Leiter sent up Bond to kill Scaramanga?
Just get it and read it and all your questions will hopefully be answered.
@TheWizardOfIce, @Dragonpol, @hullcityfan: get a private chat room somewhere :)
Sorry. I guess we just got a bit carried away there. I won't allow it to happen again.
And yes, take a photo. It lasts longer.
"Redrafted" is a very curious word to use, and probably an inaccurate one. Amis definitely helped edit the book, but "redrafting" implies restructuring and rewriting, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Had Amis really rewritten TMWTGG, he would have probably incorporated his idea of Scaramanga hiring Bond because of sexual attraction. And he probably wouldn't have been as harsh toward the book as he was in the Dossier and other venues.
TMWTGG stands out because it's the only Bond book that Fleming seriously considered delaying the publication of. By 1964 he had lost interest in reading or writing fiction and was determined to stop writing Bond novels. Fleming intended TMWTGG to be the finale of the series, but he confessed to editor William Plomer that he was “not yet up to correcting my stupid book” and proposed giving it “another year’s working over so that we can go out with a bang instead of a whimper.”
This plan, which Fleming favored right up to his death, was totally unprecedented. Fleming knew TMWTGG was not up to scratch and needed revisions on a scale beyond those of any other Bond novel. But the same lack of energy and elan vitale that had hampered the writing of the novel (ill health cut in half Fleming's daily writing time) bedeviled its revision. TMWTGG has an unforgettably shocking beginning and a lovely and poignant final chapter, but what's in between is the work of an author no longer able to function at full capacity.
You can look at two sample pages here. And you damn well should, because the pages contain Fleming's own handwritten revisions to the book. We now know that Fleming added the last two lines after completing his first draft. The lines in question are: "At the same time, he knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any other woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking 'a room with a view'. For James Bond, the same view would always pall."
They are the last lines Fleming ever wrote about James Bond. And they are clearly in Fleming's handwriting, and thus put a nail in the coffin of the idea that Kingsley Amis wrote or rewrote the book. We now have definitive proof that the Fleming had finished a complete draft and was hand-correcting it before his death.
Thankyou so much for this post .
Yes, thank you very much indeed, @Revelator.