Tour de Bond: Diamonds Are Forever (1956)

As I mentioned back in my entry on Live and Let Die, this week’s Bond is, unfortunately, one of the three that I don’t like that much (all of which, interestingly, take place in America). However, this novel is also one of Fleming’s best-researched.

Fleming threw himself into research on diamond smuggling, so much so that he didn’t leave it at background for this novel. He ended up taking that research and publishing it in the following year (1957), as The Diamond Smugglers, one of Fleming’s two non-fiction efforts (the other being the 1950s travelogue Thrilling Cities.
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Tour de Bond: Moonraker (1955)

Like Live and Let Die, this week’s book is also very much a product of its time. The difference is that in the case of Moonraker, I find that to be a positive, rather than a negative. The central action is concerned with the early nuclear race — when nations were building their nuclear arsenals, often by cherry-picking the former rocket program of The Third Reich. The enemy of the previous war had become the needed resource to defend against the enemy of the next.

Moonraker begins oddly — not an assignment for the government, but as a personal favor for M. M asks Bond to look into a multi-millionaire member of his private club, Sir Hugo Drax, whom he suspects of cheating at cards. That opening, heady with old-boy-ism and the strata of class, leads to a wider investigation of Drax’s efforts to build Britain’s first nuclear missile, The Moonraker. The Moonraker is, essentially, an updated V-2 rocket — and Bond quickly discovers that most of the scientists working on the project are Germans.

Going undercover at the missile complex on the South Coast of England, Bond encounters Gala Brand, a Special Branch operative who I find to be one of Fleming’s more interesting female leads. She’s presented as a three-dimensional character — an independent, dedicated policewoman who questions Bond’s usefulness on the case. She never gets romantically involved with Bond, either — by the end of the novel, she reveals that she has a fiancĂ©e, and leaves Bond alone.

Drax as a villain ends up being a Frankenstein’s Monster of everything viewed as a threat in England in the 50s — a Nazi, backed by the Soviets. He posed as a British soldier suffering from amnesia in order to build a new identity, and planned to use the Moonraker rocket (armed with an atomic device provided by the Russians) to destroy London. (This plot was later partially adapted, not in the ridiculous James-Bond-Meets-Star-Wars version of Moonraker in the late 70s, but in TWO different Pierce Brosnan films — GoldenEye (006 as the son of Lienz Cossacks, getting revenge on England) and Die Another Day where, incredibly, a North Korean Colonel is posing as a British billionaire).

It’s this mix of World War II and the Cold War that I find so attractive about Moonraker — it occupies that transition between two distinct eras, which I find fascinating (its the same reason why like the film Ronin, for example, occupying the border between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror). The uncertainty that accompanies those transitions are ripe for intrigue, which Fleming exploits quite well in this case.

Next week, a look at Diamonds are Forever (1955).

Tour de Bond: Live and Let Die (1954)

I’ll be honest with you up front about this: Live and Let Die is one of three Bond novels that I just don’t like (the other two being Diamonds Are Forever and The Spy Who Loved Me). The main reason for my dislike in this case is the casual racism of the book.

I usually have a fairly high tolerance for this sort of thing — I recognize that books are the products of their times, and a book written by an upper-class Englishman in the early 1950s is not going to have a particularly enlightened view regarding other races. Hell, I absolutely *love* the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer, and those have had a bad reputation for racism for decades now (in their presentation of the “yellow peril” — although I’d strongly argue that the books aren’t remotely as racist as their reputation suggests.) In fact, in many ways, Fleming is working a bit of a Fu Manchu pastiche with Live and Let Die — A “black peril,” if you will. The villain, Mr. Big, is a mastermind in the Fu Manchu tradition, and the omnipresent threat that ANY member of the race met in the story could be a member of the villain’s network is certainly plucked from the Rohmer novels.

So why does it bother me more in Live and Let Die? Not sure. Perhaps it’s that I’m more familiar with African Americans than I am with Manchurian Chinese — making portrayals of them as a mysterious “other” much more jarring to me. Perhaps, as an American raised in the post-Civil-Rights era, it strikes me as horrifying to have a chapter in this novel given the title “Nigger Heaven” (even if I know intellectually that the title is a reference to the 1926 novel set in the Harlem Renaissance). I can forgive references to “negresses”, since that was a perfectly acceptable word choice for an Englishman of his time… but I find it far harder to stomach references to them being “feral.” For all of these reasons, I find the book not just dated, but… ugly.

As a side note, I find it interesting that the three books I mention as my least favorite of the Bonds all take place largely within the United States. Maybe I want more exotic locations in my Bonds. Although, certainly, to Fleming (and to his UK readers) the US certainly qualified. Fleming’s view of the US certainly wasn’t flattering — his descriptions of the South as Bond heads from Harlem to Florida certainly echo my impressions from the time I spent living in Atlanta: The sense of decay that lingers through the oppressive heat, for example, matching the sense of a declining (and at times equally-oppressive) culture.

There are some good points to the novel — Fleming’s pacing is still in evidence here. Not perhaps as tense as Casino Royale, but it moves even faster, because he now takes the reader’s familiarity with Bond as a given, and just throws us into the tale. The book also features one of the more iconic bits of Fleming mayhem — Mr. Big’s henchman “The Robber” feeds Felix Leiter to a shark — when Felix is dumped at the safe house, barely alive and missing an arm and a leg, he has a note pinned to him that says “He Disagreed With Something That Ate Him.”

Moving on, then. Next week: Moonraker (1955).