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).

Tour de Bond: Introduction, and Casino Royale (1953)

Because I obviously need yet another project to occupy my time (especially an unpaid project driven by my inner fanboy), I’m ripping offtaking inspiration from Ken Hite’s 2007 blog series and 2008 book Tour de Lovecraft, to cover the James Bond canon of Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming is my favorite author, and has been since I first discovered him when I was 10 or so. By that time I was familiar with the James Bond films (they had formed a fair number of my parent’s early dates), but reading the books, completely different from the films, was like opening a door in my head. My love of Fleming, Bond and spies in general led to my first gaming experiences (when my friend John Cochrane gave me a copy of the 1st edition of TSR’s Top Secret for my 12th birthday), leading to other games, and my chosen profession, and well, everything. I named my son Ian.

So what is the Tour de Bond? Just some commentary and thoughts on the novels, in their publication order. No heavy literary criticism (it’s been done), or a lot of time spent on plot synopsis –although the reader should be aware that my comments may at times contain spoilers (I don’t feel particularly guilty about this, when the books are 50 years old and most plot elements have been used in the very well-known films). Nothing too long — again, just thoughts on the works, which I’ve read many times over the past 30 years or so. I’ll be shooting for weekly updates — every Monday, from today’s entry on 1953’s Casino Royale to the final entry for 1966’s posthumous collection of short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which should take us to the last Monday in November.

So here we go:

Casino Royale (1953)

This book, the first in the series, was also my introduction to the Bond novels. A dog-eared 1960s signet paperback in the various volumes of our living-room bookshelf. It caught my interest because it was a Bond story that wasn’t one of the movie titles (at the time I was unaware of the “groovy” 1967 parody film). It remains, by shared virtue of nostalgia and actual quality, my favorite of Fleming’s novels.

The pacing is what strikes me — this is a blistering-fast read. Fleming sat down and wrote the book at his vacation home in Jamaica as a way to get his mind off his pending marriage at age 43. As he outlined in this 1960 article on ‘How to Write a Thriller’, he would work for 4 hours per day on pure narrative, not stopping, not hemming and hawing over word choice — just go, go, go. In 6 weeks, he would finish a book and any problems would be ironed out during editing. It shows in the text — no other author I’ve read has the mastery of pacing that Fleming demonstrates, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard. Fleming hurtles along from event to event, with details left as touchstones for the reader to expand into a full tapestry (he was especially fond of brand names, which he felt immediately carried not only detail but context and emotional content on the part of the reader — hence the very specific mention of Bond’s clothing, food, drink, gear, etc.).

The plot of this novel is perhaps the most straightforward espionage tale of the Bond canon, inspired directly by events that took place during Fleming’s career with British Naval Intelligence during World War Two. A fairly direct and simple plot — an enemy agent who has gotten in over his head with his organizations’ money, holding a card game in order to win it back. Bond’s assignment is to bankrupt the agent, so that his masters will discover the transgression and eliminate the agent. The tension is built from the very first line of the novel: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”

The plot structure is even a bit odd — the main thrust of the action (bankrupting Le Chiffre, the enemy agent) is pretty much resolved two thirds of the way through the fairly short book. The rest of the novel is taken up with the consequences of those events, which actually lends more of a realism to the proceedings: a modern thriller would build to a “boss fight” in the final act.

Bond in this novel is nothing like the hypercompetent superspy of the films (or, some might argue, the later books). He’s a dark, complex character — a consummate professional, called in simply because he’s the best card player in the service. Fleming has him fail, in fact — victim of a betrayal which leads to one of the most harrowing torture sequences ever written, where he’s strapped naked to a seat-less wicker chair to have a carpet beater used on his genitals. This changes the character, makes him darker and more cynical, which carries over to the subsequent novels that follow perhaps the best final line of any novel I’ve ever read:

“Yes, I said was- the bitch is dead now.”

…and with that, we’re off. Next week: Live and Let Die (1954).