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However, like Khan, I can't compare any of the continuation efforts to the originals. In fact I am reluctant to even rank the Fleming novels. I honestly can't do it. They all effectively tie for first place, even Spy and Golden Gun.
The Fleming oeuvre is one organic whole of Flemingism, far greater than the sum of its parts.
The Fleming canon illuminates as a sun source, the star at the centre of the Bond Literary Solar System. All continuation efforts, as worthy as some may be, can only emanate as rays from the brightly burning celestial source, much the way other Bond films, must be content to bask in the glow of the original-era Connery/Lazenby classics.
Where Fleming and Connery live:
Heh. I hope they have a pitcher of cool lemonade.
Sorry, but even the most ardent Flemingista must acknowledge that CS is head and shoulders above TMWTGG, YOLT & DAF - to name but three?
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Not a bit of it. YOLT is a very good Bond novel, and if not the best, certainly the most fascinating. DAF, while hardly Fleming's best, is probably a bit underrated and certainly tops a good 95% of thrillers ever published by anybody. Gun is the weakest of the lot, but was still livelier than CS, and with far more interesting characters. The section at Sav la Mer alone blows CS out of the water. IMO, of course.
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I admire your loyalty to the great man but several dry Martinis could not persuade me that DAF or TMWTGG are better, in any regard, than CS but Bondoligism is a broad church!
Very well said, @timmer. I concur.
What a difference eighteen months makes!
Back then, we had hope. Clearly Boyd didn't learn a thing from Amis' fabulous book and went on to deliver an absolute clunker that was about as thrilling as watching paint dry.
I do prefer many of the Gardners. I also found CS a little off. Amis, via the Ariadne character, romanticizes her marxist leanings. This comes out in the very final pages, during the discussions with Bond and the Soviet types. I thought it was a little off. I don't think Fleming had any delusions about the harsh reality of Marxism. Amis - I am not so sure.
What distinguishes Colonel Sun though from the other continuation novels, is that it is the only book of the bunch that was actually written in Fleming's time. ie it's a product of the '60s.
The Pearson book I think gets similar disctinction, as it was also written by a Fleming contemporary and was able to exist in both real time and the Fleming time-line.
Well, as confirmation of this, Amis was moving from being a Socilist voter to non-Tory voter to Tory around this time. Amis had even been a Communist in his younger days. I agree that I doubt that Fleming would have ever went down this route as he had been fairly (and rightly, in my view) harsh on the Soviets up until TB at least; he mostly stayed clear of politics though it's interesting to note that the Bond films from TSWLM onwards also showed a softer side to the Soviets through characters such as Major Anya Amasova and the long-running Head of the KGB, General Gogol.
"Amis had even been a Communist in his younger days." That explains it then. Good for his sake that he grew out of it then.
However,I honestly don't think he had delusions about the harshness and brutality of the Soviet regime. He and Fleming I'm sure would have been on the same page there. But based on his end-of-book musings, Amis did seem somewhat hookwinked by the Marxist ideal. It doesn't seem that he had completely let go of the idealism. Fleming on the other hand, I don't believe was ever seduced by the phony idealism of the infamous and thorougly discredited Karl Marx.
Re Anya, TSWLM etc. Yes, but these films were somewhat cartoonish. They were playing with fanciful notions of detente.The Russians are just people. It's the ideology that their society was burdened with for so long, which was vile.
I do think the Mi6 detente stuff with Anya and Gogol, circa 1977, was simply a reflection of the times. The cold war was still very much in force, but there was a softening of attitudes. Words like detente had entered the popular geo-political vernacular, so Eon had some fun with it.
I was a teenager when Spy was released. I don't remember the accommodation with the Soviets to be terribly schocking. I do remember Anya though as the lamest poorest excuse for a so-called deadly agent. And @luds was right. She does look like an alien.
Even Bianchi as Tatiana, 14 years eariler, was way scarier than Agent XXX.
Well, I can't disagree wirth that - she was the first Bond girl to be seen in nude after all!
Bianchi on the other hand was a classic beauty. She was Miss Universe runner-up.
I think they are both pretty nice. In order words, I'm tactfully sitting on the fence.
In terms of the Craig films, I'd like to see Camille return and not just because she's the only one who can :) as the rest of them were killed off aside for Moneypenny but she doesn't count (I don't classify her as a Bond girl in the traditional sense). Camille was a damaged, determined girl who was both vulnerable but capable of holding her own to an extent without being a trained clichéd field agent like MP, Wei Lynn and Jinx. I find her more interesting than a good few of the other cinematic Bond girls over the 50 years. On a side note, it's a shame what happened with the QOS script. It had real potential but fell short as did TWINE. Action replaced what could have been the development of story and characters for certain reasons and in the case of TWINE, cheesy, lacklustre dialogue in parts too.
No, Bach can't act but I do find her attractive in that unconventional model style. I'd pick Bianchi over her though...obviously in terms of acting skills but also in looks.
...and that torture scene is up there with the wicker chair IMHO!
Not quite--Mary Goodnight is introduced (albeit in a minor role) as Bond's secretary in OHMSS and later becomes the heroine of TMWTGG.
Tatiana would be difficult to reintroduce--Bond tells us her likely fate will involve resettlement in Canada, and presumably an exit from the world of espionage. Solitaire's fate is less certain, but unless she hooked up with more gangsters it's hard to imagine a plausible scenario where she'd end up running into Bond on a mission. And to be honest, while I think Tatiana is one of Fleming's best heroines, Solitaire has always felt less-dimensional to me.
One Bond girl I would have liked to see more of is Trigger from The Living Daylights. What if Bond was wrong, and his shot hadn't badly injured her? It would be fun to have Bond team up with the Russians' finest female assassin...
On to Colonel Sun...
I agree with most of the praise. It's easily the most convincing of the continuation novels. Why? Because you never get the feeling that you're reading a pastiche of the movies. Amis was defiant about avoiding such influences. Yet he might have gone too far in austerity--Colonel Sun feels even lower-tech and lower-scale than most of Fleming's novels. Even the weaponry dates back to WWII. And the climax doesn't have the explosive feel one wants from Bond (the film of FYEO, which was also set in Greece, featured a rock-climbing climax that felt suitably Flemingian and climactic).
The book also lacks "the Fleming sweep"--the writing is solid and straightforward, but it doesn't have Fleming's propulsive force. That's partly why the book sags in the middle. Another reason is that way too much of the book consist of deliberative dialogue (Amis is not an action novelist). And aside from the excellent villain, the book doesn't have the little bizarre/quasi-surrealistic touches that Fleming applied to his books. Lastly, given how deftly Amis examined the disturbing side of Bond and M's relationship in The James Bond Dossier, it's surprising that the characters' interplay doesn't have the emotional charge one would expect.
But that's the extent of my carping. You can tell that this book was written by a skilled writer who happened to be a student of the original books--a fan out to reclaim the Bondian elements he personally loved. For instance, in the Bond Dossier, Amis complains that outcry from the critics forced Fleming to drop the bravura torture scenes from his novels. So in CS he devises a torture worthy of Casino Royale, one that makes the reader squirm with not only pain but also sexual discomfort. Amis is also on record as admiring Dr. No, both for its setting and antagonist, and in CS we have have Bond journeying in a boat toward the island lair of a sadistic Asian villain.
I don't agree that Amis goes easy on the Soviets (nor do I condemn anyone who lived through the pre-WWII depression and might have briefly found Communism attractive, though holding on to that attraction is a different story). Bond and Litsas join in to criticize Ariadne's beliefs to her face, and aside from Ariadne and the bureaucrat at the end, the Soviets are portrayed in extremely harsh light. They maim and kill the Greeks that Bond traded boats with, and Ariadne's boss is presented as not merely incompetent, but also a pederast! True, Amis was naive in thinking the Anglos and Soviets might team up to combat the Chinese, but that prospect might still come to pass...
How right you are. After all these years, CS remains the gold standard and is proof positive that a great Bond novel can be written by somebody who is not called Ian Fleming.
If only the celebrity trilogy (Faulks, Deaver & Boyd) had studied and learnt from Amis.
Perhaps IFP should make it compulsory reading for any future continuation candidates?
I'm not sure about Trigger reappearing. I like how Bond only saw her and never met her. Keep the mystery there for all eternity.
As for the other girls I mentioned. I just meant for Bond to run into them in a personal situation. I didn't mean for them to be involved in the plot.
It's being released in paperback on December 15th. Finally, my chance to pick this thing up and give it a read!
Wonder if it is due to you know what?
Oh, I'm certain it is. For years and years I've waited for Colonel Sun to be put back in print, wondering what kind of an occasion or anniversary it would take. I guess this is all we needed in the end.
Agreed.