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Bond, James Bond
Getting back to catching up on books I've read lately and never wrote about ... back in December I reread several of Ian Fleming's Bond books, at least the ones I have on hand, because I was thinking about writing a Yuletide treat for a Bond request (for the MI-6 office staff).
I didn't end up writing it, but it did remind me that while the books have their ups and downs, and the downs are DOWN, I do genuinely enjoy them. I first read these in college and, on subsequent rereads, I thought I would probably just continue being more and more put off by the racism/sexism/etc until I gave up, but I guess I've hit a sort of steady state with it, where the "ugh" parts are very ugh, but I know they're coming and the parts I like, I really do like.
For one thing, they're good action books, and good spy novels. In spite of the OTT-ness of the books at times, which gets worse as the series goes on, Fleming did know espionage, and a lot of the espionage aspects are both enjoyable and emotionally true. There's a chapter of one of the books in which Bond has to take his part of a rota covering the office phones at night, terrorizes the canteen girls for sending him tea (which he hates) instead of coffee, and generally wanders around the empty building having existential thoughts about his life. There's another book that opens with Bond coming off a two-day bender thinking about the emptiness of his existence. He's not supposed to be nice, the books are clear that he's cruel and terribly damaged, and both he and his author know it.
That being said, From Russia with Love is a deeply unpleasant book and I've never actually managed to finish it because the early parts are just so UGH and it goes on and on and on. By the time we finally get to Bond after the Squickiest Lesbian Seduction Ever, I do not caaaare.
There's a book in which Bond loses his memory and ends up spending A YEAR thinking that he's married to a Japanese fisherman's widow who lets him believe he's her dead husband, while all the rest of the world thinks he's dead. This is the last chapter of the book and YOU LITERALLY NEVER GET ANY CLOSURE ON THIS. It just ends with Bond still thinking he's her dead husband. What even, Fleming. Did you just get tired of typing or what.
Pussy Galore suffers from having the worst name in a Fleming book (although Kissy Suzuki is a close second; I CRY) and also being a wlw in a Fleming book, but she is also a genuinely enjoyable character who really deserves to go live her best lesbian life not in a Fleming book. (Fleming has this peculiar quirk of managing about 90% of writing really awesome female characters and then falling flat on his face on the other 10%. One of my other favorites is The Spy Who Loved Me, which I didn't end up getting to on this reread, but the narrator is a woman who is running away from an unhappy past as the caretaker for a roadside motel in the off season and gets drawn into Bond's life when Russian spies take over her motel and Bond, injured, passes out on her floor. It's a fun book that I was sort of afraid to reread for fear that Fleming and his bizarre relationship with female characters would ruin it in ways I had managed to block from my mind in the years since I last read it.)
However, I deeply enjoyed rereading the Felix-and-Bond arc, which consists primarily of Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Diamonds are Forever. (Felix Leiter shows up in subsequent books and is always a highlight for me when he appears, but those are really the only ones in which he and Bond get a serious amount of relationship development.) I love Felix. I described him once as "the light to Bond's dark" and he really is; he and Bond have an adorable, playful rapport, and Felix in general is just nice. He's as good at everything as Bond is, but less broken in spite of having every reason to be. He brings out Bond's lighter side and they're just really fun and sweet together.
I imagine that more people have heard of Felix now because he had more play in the Craig movies - which I haven't seen - but I still can't believe that what I love most about Felix Leiter never seem to get translated to the movies AT ALL, namely that he is a very capable, badass character with a serious disability, in a time period when that was a vanishing rarity in espionage/thriller fiction. Actually, it still is; the next character I can think of in a similar genre who has a similar disability and still goes out in the field is Daniel Sousa, 50+ years farther on. One thing I noticed on the reread is very minor but it's also something I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't researched this for Sousa, which is Felix using custom hand controls to shift gears in his car. Fleming had clearly either seen or heard about adapted cars for disabled drivers.
Live and Let Die has thoroughly delightful Bond and Felix scenes, but is unfortunately one of the most racist books in the series, which is saying a lot. But I love their parts! Felix escapes from captivity by bonding with his captors over music and generally being Too Adorable To Kill. (Meanwhile, Bond gets his hand broken because he does not bond with his captors. There's a lesson there somewhere, Bond.) There's canon cohabiting in a rented house in Florida in which Bond and Felix sleep in the same room because Bond gives his room to the female love interest of the book. Then Felix almost gets killed anyway and Bond completely loses his shit about it. It's great.
Side bonus from Live and Let Die is that you get Felix - who is American - coaching Bond through trying to talk with an American accent:
He was reminded to ask for the 'check' rather than the 'bill', to say 'laff' rather than 'larf,' and (this from Leiter) to avoid words of more than two syllables. "You can get through any American conversation," advised Leiter, "with 'yeah,' 'nope,' and 'sure." The English word to be avoided at all costs, added Leiter, was 'Ectually.' Bond said that word was not part of his vocabulary.
(Given some of their other interaction, I can only imagine that this was all delivered in between Felix thoroughly mocking his unconvincing American accent.)
Diamonds are Forever continues the Bond-and-Felix show and also has crooked horse racing, rigged Vegas gambling, and a completely BATSHIT climax involving a fake Western ghost town in Nevada, including a saloon brawl and an exploding steam train. Also, I particularly like the female side character in that book, Tiffany Case; she's neat. I genuinely ship her and Bond, which is really not true with most of his othernon-Felix love interests. She's angry and emotionally damaged, but he genuinely likes her as a person; it's just kind of a neat dynamic.
Also, one of the main themes of the book is that Bond would've been toast without his friends, and he explicitly notices it. The goodbye with Felix kills me a little:
Leiter drove them to the airport and dropped them there. Bond felt a lump in his throat as he watched the lanky figure limp off to his car after being warmly embraced by Tiffany Case. "You've got yourself a good friend there," said the girl. Leiter slammed the door and they heard the deep boom of the exhaust as he accelerated away on his long drive back into the desert.
"Yes," Bond said. "Felix is all that."
If you end at Diamonds are Forever as a stopping point, it's actually a reasonably happy ending, or at least as much so as these books get. Bond has a relationship that isn't a total disaster! He has friends! Obviously things can only get worse from here (they do) but it's also possible to pretend that this is the last book in the series and everyone's happy forever. You can imagine some sort of non-depressing AU in which Bond just like, quits MI6 and goes into the private detective business with Felix and Tiffany; that would be amazing.
... anyway I read these and then promptly went on AO3 and read all the Bond/Felix I could get my hands on, as one does. I also found some very cute bookverse fanart of them on Tumblr.
I didn't end up writing it, but it did remind me that while the books have their ups and downs, and the downs are DOWN, I do genuinely enjoy them. I first read these in college and, on subsequent rereads, I thought I would probably just continue being more and more put off by the racism/sexism/etc until I gave up, but I guess I've hit a sort of steady state with it, where the "ugh" parts are very ugh, but I know they're coming and the parts I like, I really do like.
For one thing, they're good action books, and good spy novels. In spite of the OTT-ness of the books at times, which gets worse as the series goes on, Fleming did know espionage, and a lot of the espionage aspects are both enjoyable and emotionally true. There's a chapter of one of the books in which Bond has to take his part of a rota covering the office phones at night, terrorizes the canteen girls for sending him tea (which he hates) instead of coffee, and generally wanders around the empty building having existential thoughts about his life. There's another book that opens with Bond coming off a two-day bender thinking about the emptiness of his existence. He's not supposed to be nice, the books are clear that he's cruel and terribly damaged, and both he and his author know it.
That being said, From Russia with Love is a deeply unpleasant book and I've never actually managed to finish it because the early parts are just so UGH and it goes on and on and on. By the time we finally get to Bond after the Squickiest Lesbian Seduction Ever, I do not caaaare.
There's a book in which Bond loses his memory and ends up spending A YEAR thinking that he's married to a Japanese fisherman's widow who lets him believe he's her dead husband, while all the rest of the world thinks he's dead. This is the last chapter of the book and YOU LITERALLY NEVER GET ANY CLOSURE ON THIS. It just ends with Bond still thinking he's her dead husband. What even, Fleming. Did you just get tired of typing or what.
Pussy Galore suffers from having the worst name in a Fleming book (although Kissy Suzuki is a close second; I CRY) and also being a wlw in a Fleming book, but she is also a genuinely enjoyable character who really deserves to go live her best lesbian life not in a Fleming book. (Fleming has this peculiar quirk of managing about 90% of writing really awesome female characters and then falling flat on his face on the other 10%. One of my other favorites is The Spy Who Loved Me, which I didn't end up getting to on this reread, but the narrator is a woman who is running away from an unhappy past as the caretaker for a roadside motel in the off season and gets drawn into Bond's life when Russian spies take over her motel and Bond, injured, passes out on her floor. It's a fun book that I was sort of afraid to reread for fear that Fleming and his bizarre relationship with female characters would ruin it in ways I had managed to block from my mind in the years since I last read it.)
However, I deeply enjoyed rereading the Felix-and-Bond arc, which consists primarily of Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, and Diamonds are Forever. (Felix Leiter shows up in subsequent books and is always a highlight for me when he appears, but those are really the only ones in which he and Bond get a serious amount of relationship development.) I love Felix. I described him once as "the light to Bond's dark" and he really is; he and Bond have an adorable, playful rapport, and Felix in general is just nice. He's as good at everything as Bond is, but less broken in spite of having every reason to be. He brings out Bond's lighter side and they're just really fun and sweet together.
I imagine that more people have heard of Felix now because he had more play in the Craig movies - which I haven't seen - but I still can't believe that what I love most about Felix Leiter never seem to get translated to the movies AT ALL, namely that he is a very capable, badass character with a serious disability, in a time period when that was a vanishing rarity in espionage/thriller fiction. Actually, it still is; the next character I can think of in a similar genre who has a similar disability and still goes out in the field is Daniel Sousa, 50+ years farther on. One thing I noticed on the reread is very minor but it's also something I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't researched this for Sousa, which is Felix using custom hand controls to shift gears in his car. Fleming had clearly either seen or heard about adapted cars for disabled drivers.
Live and Let Die has thoroughly delightful Bond and Felix scenes, but is unfortunately one of the most racist books in the series, which is saying a lot. But I love their parts! Felix escapes from captivity by bonding with his captors over music and generally being Too Adorable To Kill. (Meanwhile, Bond gets his hand broken because he does not bond with his captors. There's a lesson there somewhere, Bond.) There's canon cohabiting in a rented house in Florida in which Bond and Felix sleep in the same room because Bond gives his room to the female love interest of the book. Then Felix almost gets killed anyway and Bond completely loses his shit about it. It's great.
Side bonus from Live and Let Die is that you get Felix - who is American - coaching Bond through trying to talk with an American accent:
He was reminded to ask for the 'check' rather than the 'bill', to say 'laff' rather than 'larf,' and (this from Leiter) to avoid words of more than two syllables. "You can get through any American conversation," advised Leiter, "with 'yeah,' 'nope,' and 'sure." The English word to be avoided at all costs, added Leiter, was 'Ectually.' Bond said that word was not part of his vocabulary.
(Given some of their other interaction, I can only imagine that this was all delivered in between Felix thoroughly mocking his unconvincing American accent.)
Diamonds are Forever continues the Bond-and-Felix show and also has crooked horse racing, rigged Vegas gambling, and a completely BATSHIT climax involving a fake Western ghost town in Nevada, including a saloon brawl and an exploding steam train. Also, I particularly like the female side character in that book, Tiffany Case; she's neat. I genuinely ship her and Bond, which is really not true with most of his other
Also, one of the main themes of the book is that Bond would've been toast without his friends, and he explicitly notices it. The goodbye with Felix kills me a little:
Leiter drove them to the airport and dropped them there. Bond felt a lump in his throat as he watched the lanky figure limp off to his car after being warmly embraced by Tiffany Case. "You've got yourself a good friend there," said the girl. Leiter slammed the door and they heard the deep boom of the exhaust as he accelerated away on his long drive back into the desert.
"Yes," Bond said. "Felix is all that."
If you end at Diamonds are Forever as a stopping point, it's actually a reasonably happy ending, or at least as much so as these books get. Bond has a relationship that isn't a total disaster! He has friends! Obviously things can only get worse from here (they do) but it's also possible to pretend that this is the last book in the series and everyone's happy forever. You can imagine some sort of non-depressing AU in which Bond just like, quits MI6 and goes into the private detective business with Felix and Tiffany; that would be amazing.
... anyway I read these and then promptly went on AO3 and read all the Bond/Felix I could get my hands on, as one does. I also found some very cute bookverse fanart of them on Tumblr.
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'Ectually' - ha, guilty as charged, I say that all the time /o\
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Yeah, I came at it from the other direction and read The Spy Who Loved Me after I'd already read several of the other books, so it was a very delightful and refreshing surprise! It really is very different from the other books - and actually not that much like anything else I can think of in that sort of fiction from the era.
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Oh REALLY? Oooh. I love Macintyre's books; I'll have to read that.
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I also think this makes for one of the very few series where I like the OT3 vibes (e.g. Tiffany/Bond/Felix) a lot!
I think pretending that things stop at Diamonds are Forever is a good choice XD
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Whaaaaat? Which one is that?
Felix escapes from captivity by bonding with his captors over music and generally being Too Adorable To Kill. (Meanwhile, Bond gets his hand broken because he does not bond with his captors. There's a lesson there somewhere, Bond.)
Haha but also, between that and the disability, I may have to read the books where he appears.
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You Only Live Twice. For extra WHAAAAT, Bond losing his memory and thinking he's married to a Japanese fisherman's widow is how the book ends - it's not even a cliffhanger! It's just the last chapter of the book!
Honestly, Diamonds Are Forever is genuinely good, and has a lot of Felix working around his disability. (Which he acquires in the course of the series; that's the first book in which he has it, due to events in the previous book.)
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*cackles* Felix sounds great.
Interesting re: Fleming and female characters! I feel like that about a few writers/TV shows.