James Bond #3

Another installment to our Siblings’ Book Club for 2020, this third book in the original James Bond series by Sir Ian Fleming is also the third of his books I’ve read. I sort of began the series in order, and by gum, I’ll continue them in order!

I’ve never gotten caught up in watching the old Bond movies, though I suppose as I make my way through the books I’ll want to. In perusing the plot of the Moonraker film, however, I recognized a massive adjustment: while both book and film involve a rocket named Moonraker and a villain named Drax, the film takes the manned rocket to outer space (and I assume 007 with it)! That there says the stories haven’t little to do with each other, and without ever having seen the film, I’ve got to say that I prefer the book.

The story is slower than I expected, beginning with an off-the-job card game at an exclusive club where James Bond catches a famous war hero cheating. His suspicions of why this successful gent would feel the need to cheat sets James off on an adventure where he lands a security job at the man’s secretive rocket compound on, I think, the Cliffs of Dover. Drax has been commissioned by the English government to create a rocket that will rule the Cold War, but Drax has other plans.

James of course meets a girl in this book, but nothing happens. As immoral as James Bond was supposed to be (according to my parents growing up), his behavior in this book is tame. The girl’s engaged, and that’s pretty much the end of it.

Two things caught my eye in this book, as I consider the world’s favorite spy. First, the attempted realism Fleming gives his character, and second, a philosophy that’s beginning to emerge.

Considering the realism that Fleming tried to give James Bond, it’s easy to catch his bumps and bruises, his exhaustion, and his need for sleep. All of these things come into play, but while they make the character somewhat more human, they don’t really feed into the realism that Fleming had hoped. Contrast an action-novel like this to John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The fear and tension in that second novel are true realism. The story literally makes you feel cold! You dread what’s going to come next. But with James Bond, his adventures and scrapes are so fantastic, you don’t really get that sense of “I wonder if he’ll make it!” Knowing he’s got a bunch of books coming, too, doesn’t help with the realism either.

In this vein, I’d also like to point out how Fleming laid the groundwork for Bond’s future novels. Perhaps we’ve all wondered how one dude could experience so many world-altering events (I get the same feeling with Dirk Pitt), as well as what these heroes do when they’re not saving the world. Fleming tells us:

It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior civil servant – elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford’s; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London. (11)

And in setting up all the other books in the rest of the series, he writes:

Eight years to go before he was automatically taken off the OO list and given a staff job at Headquarters. At least eight tough assignments. Probably sixteen. Perhaps twenty-four. Too many. (12)

In fact, Bond had eleven more assignments (in book form) over the next eleven years (1956-1966).

Considering some of Bond’s philosophy that seeps through in this book, I note two passages.

Whenever he had a job of work to do he would take infinite pains beforehand and leave as little as possible to chance. Then if something went wrong it was the unforeseeable. For that he accepted no responsibility. (47)

And following his adventure and nation-saving antics, England would be gone “but for a whole pattern of tiny circumstances, a whole pattern of chance. Whose pattern?” (211)

James Bond is a man in control, a man of preparation who leaves little to chance. But there still exists the unforeseeable, the un-seeable, and a hand that deals in coincidences and chances. He sounds like an agnostic to me, so I’ll try to catch more of his philosophy as I move through the series.

This was an all-right read. Slow at times, but adventurous. In fact, it sort of felt like a low-calorie version of a  Clive Cussler novel.

©2020 E.T.

Read More from Ian Fleming:

• Casino Royale (1953)
• Moonraker (1955)
• Diamonds are Forever (1956)
• From Russia with Love (1957)
• Doctor No (1958)
• The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)