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This is interesting. Do you think the events of SP--foiled for the fourth time--could push Blofeld to this level of lunacy in Bond 25, or do Bond and Blofeld need more history first (something more with Swann, probably)?
If we're lucky, we'll get one more film with Craig and Waltz, so Eon unfortunately doesn't have the luxury of stretching this arc out over several films.[/quote]
Well since I wrote that post I have published that article I mentioned on my blog. It is called The Madness of 'King Ernst I' in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (1964) and you can now read it here:
https://thebondologistblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-madness-of-king-ernst-i-in-ian.html
Enjoy!
I'd really appreciate some feedback on the article too! :)
You aren't wrong.
There was a huge amount of controversy surrounding the launch. I remember going into 'The House Of Andrews', Durham city's premier book store, to buy it only to be told that they didn't stock it and that it was only available by 'special' order. When I said I wanted it, the manager advised me; 'Beware it's not like the other Bond novels. Everybody hates it and the publisher is trying to withdraw it.'
This only intrigued me more and I have to say that when I read it, it did shocked me. By standards back then it was considered border line pornographic and as we now know, Fleming placed restrictions on both the paperback publication and film rights.
That said, I recently re-read it and frankly I think it's an excellent work. Fleming experiments with another style to great effect and writing in the first person he really succeeds in getting into a female's persona.
It is true noir and very Hitchcock.
Bravo. Couldn't have put it better myself. I was reading some reviews of FRWL on Good Reads, oh and how superior and enlightened some of those reviewers were. Thankfully I don't fall into that category and enjoy Fleming's books for what they are, bloody well-written escapist entertainment.
Also he let his prejudices shine through too readily. He was a proud racist, sexist and misogynist. I also refuse to agree that the books were ‘products of their time’. There are plenty of people who still think like this today, Fleming is just an example of someone who was given a podium and money to espouse his views. He was a pretty deplorable individual. I suppose there is a certain charm to his lack of politically-correctness, but his overly conservative mindset is in direct opposition to my own views.
Finally, he had little to no humour in the books which is a total misstep. Bond’s world is inherently ridiculous and failing to acknowledge this made the books overly dry and drab affairs. The films rectified this. Even Terence Young acknowledged this, he’s stated that he was shocked how seriously Fleming took his own nonsense, and that slightly self-aware fun of the Bond flicks really comes courtesy the filmmakers rather than 007’s creator.
The best books in the series:
- CR: There is a lack of self-consciousness. There is no inbuilt attempt to create a series of novels – it is quite simply a raw, violent, sexy spy thriller.
- YOLT: Surprisingly reflective and introspective. There is a certain degree of melancholy which isn’t present in the other novels.
Worst book:
- GF: Stupid and lazy plot. Badly-told story which is overly plodding. All of Fleming’s vulgar personality is on show throughout.
I agree with much of this. I feel where Fleming truly excelled as a writer was at the level of his prose. He could take the most mundane of roadside diners on some forgotten American highway, have Bond breeze through for coffee, eggs and toast, and make it sound like the most interesting place the reader has never visited. His prose flows, exhilarates, and transports in a way few pulp writers have rivaled. That strength took his stories far.
And Goldfinger has always been my least favorite of his novels by a good, safe margin. I was shocked by just how bad it was compared to the six novels that had come before it—both in terms of its treatment of characters and subject matter and its execution of plot—and I wasn't even that big a fan of its immediate predecessor, Dr. No. I was really worried heading into Thunderball. Thankfully, the underwater settings are where Fleming tends to excel and I think Thunderball offers some of Fleming's most excellent prose.
I feel like I've always appreciated DAF a bit more than most. It can't compete with any of Fleming's heavy-hitters that's for sure, but I like it as a low-key, straight-shot pulp thriller. The best parts of the book for me are Bond palling around with Felix and Bond's thoughts on and interactions with Tiffany, whom I find one of the more interesting Bond girls. (I also dig Spang's faux cowboy town Spectreville, though things wrap up there a bit too quickly.) I just finished reading DAF for the third time not too long ago in fact. Didn't hold up quite as well for me as the first two times, but I still like the parts I like.
One thing I'll say for Fleming is that he rarely wastes an opportunity to make things a bit, well, larger-than-life. Even with a relatively disposable character like Michael "Shady" Tree, Fleming chooses to make the guy a hunchback with flaming red hair and a face like Alfred E. Neuman's who chugs milk for his ulcers. Because...why not? He'd otherwise be just another guy behind a desk.
I know exactly what Birdleson means and he puts it well.
I'm probably of a different vintage to many of the haunters of this hallowed cyber hall and was lucky enough to read many of Fleming's novels as they were published. I remember that he was well regarded and certainly seen as setting a whole new standard in thriller writing. Consequently I find these blowhards who seek to posthumously categorise him as misogynistic, sadistic and racist as not only disingenuous and tiring but actually downright wrong.
Friend Ludovico is so correct. Fleming was an absolute master of combining narrative pace with perceived attention to detail, vivid descriptions and restless changing scenes that he blended to create terrific atmosphere.
Most of his plots had more holes than a Swiss cheese but he swept you along in such a way that you never stopped to question things. Chandler and Spillane were similar insomuch as atmosphere trumped everything else.
It was the authors who surfed on Fleming's wave, the likes of Deighton and Le Carre that turned out to be the meticulous plotters.
Very little of that strikes me as true. Plotting was rarely Fleming's strong point--the only Bond book I would praise for that quality is From Russia With Love. Fleming didn't sit down and structure his books. He wrote them in one go, dumping his imagination onto the page for a few hours each day and never looking back at the previous day's work until he was finished. This gives the books their headlong, dreamlike quality, but it also explains their rudimentary plotting. What holds each book together is not the plot but Fleming's writing style, which drives the pace, makes the flagrantly improbable elements probable, and gives flesh and blood to Bond's world through its deployment of detail. As Fleming said, thrillers may not be literature, but they can written like literature, and at his best Fleming was an excellent stylist. The gambling, sports, and underwater scenes in the books can be studied as examples of good writing, thanks to their direct, elegant, and vivid style.
The films of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Goldfinger are the only ones I'd regard as better than their sources. The other "true adaptations" tend to be less than fully true because they water down the originals.
Perhaps you should. If you look at contemporary reviews of the Bond novels, you'll find little in the way of complaints about racism or sexism. Most of the fuss was about "sex, sadism, and snobbery"--a useful reminder of how morals change over time. And not everything in the books should be taken at face value. Bond's misogyny in Casino Royale is clearly marked as the sign of a personality Fleming wants the reader to regard as excessively harsh, which will be broken down by first love. Goldfinger on the other hand is Fleming's most self-parodic book, and some of its more outrageous passages likely result from the author pulling our leg.
The canard about the Bond books being humorless only holds for Casino Royale. Afterwards you can see more wisecracks, aphorisms, and humorous reflections, especially in GF and You Only Live Twice, or whenever Felix Leiter shows up. The Bond books don't need more humor than what they have. If you're writing about improbable events and people, the last thing you want is to remind the reader of their improbability. Your prose has to do the opposite and build up a credible world.
The opposite applies in movies. What is filmed by the camera is instantly rendered plausible--perhaps even too plausible, too intense. In order to avoid overloading the viewer, the Bond films used humor as a safety-valve. We should remember that they might otherwise have seemed too violent and lascivious to 1960s audiences. Unfortunately, the humor kept up while the films grew tamer, and has created the expectation that a Bond film should be stuffed with excruciating puns and lewd wisecracks.
Also, when reading the books, I certainly envision the 1950's setting in which they were written and picture the atmosphere akin to a film noir. I picture characters like The Spang Bros and Horror and Sluggsy looking like they are right out of a Warner Bros B&W film.
I actually find DAF to be underrated as I enjoyed it immensely. I actually had a hard time getting thru YOLT, the first time but then again I read it in middle school. I appreciated it more later.
As for post Fleming novels, I only liked Kingsley Amis and John Gardner's attempts. Weird, I guess. I tried to read Benson's Zero Minus Ten, but it felt like when you go to the store to get Coca Cola- and end up with the generic dollar store brand soda instead.
In addition I thought most of his titles and pretty much all later Bond continuation titles sucked. Especially THE FACTS OF DEATH, and SOLO.
Wizard, you shall not pass!
With the new release of the Pegasus book comes a new look upon this Markham/Amis 007 book.
It's last on my list (of those I've read). Surprisingly I didn't really like Moonraker that much.
Best non-Fleming Bond I have read.
I think it s the best.
GF isn't the best Bond book, but I've always enjoyed it in contrasting it with the film version. The Flemings I've left unread are DAF and TSWLM and still haven't completed DN after multiple attempts over the years. For whatever reason I've just never went back to finish that one.
I need to read TSWLM again as I've only read it once eight years ago.
My favorites are CR, LALD, FRWL, DN, GF, and TB.
In the end it's in the nature of any continuation novels (not only Bond ones) : they are lesser pastiches at best. At worse cheap imitation. I'd rather have someone emulating Fleming in his own original creations than imitating him in a Bond copy.
As for using material from the continuations in the movies I'd rather use Fleming material that we haven't seen yet.
That surprises me though to be fair. I remember the first lot of books being fairly straightforward thrillers (although I'm not an expert to be fair; I'm sure someone who has read them more times than I have will be able to quote loads of passages proving me wrong). Goldfinger is where he really starts to get inside Bond's head and get into the drama of him as a character, being conflicted about his job and killing and all that, which is what the Dalton and Craig films are often praised for when people talk about them being close to Fleming. So it weirds me out a bit that the book where that really started to become apparent is thought of as one of the lesser ones.
The film is better in a lot of ways but Goldfinger is still one of my favourites and this might be controversial, I actually prefer the later books overall. I love how introspective they got and how you can see the origins of the film series start to creep in. Smersh were better over arching villains than SPECTRE though.
I like MR, FRWL, GF and the Blofeld trilogy the best, with YOLT being my favourite.
It helps that the film doesn't overstay its welcome.