123 replies to this topic

[Iceskater101]

Hi again, Iceskater101. 

 

TMWTGG is generally regarded as one of Fleming's weaker books, though I find quite a lot to like in it.  Fleming offers us three different views of women:  1)  Mary Goodnight (a character I like quite a bit), who's smart and brave, but tends a bit toward the ditzy side when she runs the danger "of overplaying her role" (chapter 11); (2) Tiffy (another appealing character), whom Bond treats protectively and even a bit affectionately (and note how cruelty to animals arouses Bond's antipathy); 3) the Jamaican dancers (who never are developed as characters and are present in the book just to give the gangsters, and perhaps the readers, with a bit of a thrill). 

 

This rather reinforces my assessment of Fleming's treatment of women:  he treats quite well those women with whom he interacts personally but stereotypes women more when they are present as abstractions.  You may think this contrasts with some public figures today, who talk a good line about women's issues but whose actual treatment of the women in their lives is vile.

 

I could understand why it would be a weaker novel. I hated what they did with Goodnight and the whole dummy thing and the train. I actually thought it was true at first and I just hated Scaramanga.....

I agree, I mean James does respect women even though his last line he talks about he could never be with Goodnight because he was describing her as a room with a view or something like that.

[Guy Haines]

If you've read OHMSS, or as I've done, listened to the audio CDs, you'll find that the film is probably one of the closest, if not the closest to the storyline of the book. As regards the book, I've already made some comments about the audio recording. It's a lot less sexist than earlier ones, I think, and of course it has Bond doing the one thing in his life he never thought he'd do - saying "I love you" to a woman, and meaning it. (Although in his post recording interview, David Tennant says that Bond spends a bit of time after the proposal trying to rationalise what he'd done!)

 

There are one or two bit's in the book I'd have liked to have seen in the film - I'd forgotten, from reading the book myself years back, about the grenade throwing device on Blofeld's cable car.

 

The final. tragic scene loses none of its impact whether by reading it, listening to an audio book or in the film, with David Tennant's "Bond" calmly explaining to the nervous police patrolman that he and Tracy have "all the time in the world."

 

So, I'm now on to You Only Live Twice read by Martin Jarvis - disc one of six so far. Different style, more magisterial, even when reading Bond. Tiger Tanaka sounds more authoritative than the "dubbed" actor in the film and Bond's contact Henderson is very, very different! He's an Australian, and Richard Lovelace Henderson will either amuse or annoy with his, er, "forthright" views on the world and its people in general and Japan in particular. And he gets worse when he's knocked back too much Sake!

 

(A note about the audio book covers. Two of them, Diamonds Are Forever and Thunderball have the following on the back cover "Warning: this audiobook, published in its original form, contains some language which today's listeners may find offensive". I can understand that warning being printed, but why for only those two? And why Thunderball, which I didn't find as potentially offensive for some of today's listeners as others - Live And Let Die, for example?)

[Guy Haines]

And now I've finished You Only Live Twice, the audio. On the issues racism and sexism, I've already mentioned Henderson, but Tanaka is also very opinionated about the way his country should be, and about the status of women (a distant second to men!) and "gaijin" (foreigners, like Bond).

 

It's sobering to hear disparaging remarks coming from an oriental about whites and non-Japanese - Tanaka is particularly scathing about the US servicemen based in his country, in a way which may displease Polish-Americans or Czech-Americans in particular. He is unimpressed by western influence in Japan. But as Martin Jarvis points out, this book is not just an adventure but attempts to be an introduction for the reader to the Japanese way of life, as it was in the early 1960s. Warts and all, it seems.

 

I found the chapter about the "Six Guardians" - the stone statues revered by the Ama people Bond stays with - oddly moving. It does seem as if Bond is seeking divine support before going into battle against Blofeld, as the chapter mentions, like a medieval knight.

 

For a doom-fraught novel, I'd forgotten about the moments of light relief. Bond diving with Kissy Suzuki - Bond shocked when his crab meal suddenly starts walking off the plate! - Kissy, purchasing a sex manual, shocked, but then reviewing a few more pages to make sure she's getting her money's worth. And Bond's almost cheerful invitation to Blofeld to get his geyser special effects and Irma Bunt put in a Broadway musical written by Noel Coward. (Ian Fleming's old friend!)

 

Blofeld - mad as a hatter. It's strange how this calm character in Thunderball goes to armour clad lunacy via pretentions of aristocracy. Undone by Bond, I suppose. And if an "Obit." can sound amusing as well as a tribute, Jarvis' reading of the one written by M does that.

 

Finally, as with many Cbn members elsewhere on the site, I'd like to see the "Garden Of Death" feature in a future Bond film There is a photograph in "The James Bond Archives" of a rather bizarre model made for the film of "Twice" which would have combined the volcano rocket base and the garden of death, but I can't see how that would have worked. But a villain's lair in a future film solely based on the garden might very well.

[Guy Haines]

Having listened to The Man With The Golden Gun, I was impressed by the brisk narration of Sir Kenneth Branagh. The book has on the surface a "ho hum" plot - investing in a hotel scam in Jamaica - but I can see now that there was a bit more too it than met the eye. But the villain's plot is secondary - the book's about Bond and Scaramanga, and the former's moral dilemma which can be summed up as "do I shoot this man while his back's turned?"

 

I found the book and the reading a darker adventure than I remembered, but not without levity - Mary Goodnight was light relief, but not in the way she appears in the film (I found Branagh's reading of Goodnight's "Joyce Grenfell" moment hilarious!)

 

As for Scaramanga - when I read the book in my teens I pictured not Christopher Lee - wrong accent - nor Jack Palance (Who had been mooted for the film) but, would you believe, Clint Eastwood as the man with the golden gun, and Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of him reinforces that.

 

Some of the content undeniably leans towards the pornographic, notably the dancing scenes in the hotel reception for Scaramanga and his "investors".

 

I'd always thought of "Golden Gun" as an afterthought. I caught up with it late in my first time reading. I'd assumed the series ended with You Only Live Twice, and was quite surprised when I found GG on the shelves of my local library one day. It's not the "fourth book of the "Blofeld trilogy" ", but the end suggests that Fleming might have been looking to wind up his involvement with Bond (The final chapter title is, after all, "Endit".) Or maybe, had he lived, Fleming might have given Bond a new lease of life. We'll never know.

 

And a word about the short story Octopussy, read by Tom Hiddleston. If The Spy Who Loved Me was Ian Fleming's attempt to write from the woman's point of view, Octopussy is the closest he came to a Bond story from inside the mind of a villain, albeit not a powerful one but a pathetic drunk former British Army Major gone to the bad. (And Tom Hiddleston's reading of Dexter Smythe sounds to me a bit like the British actor Leslie Phillips gone rather sinister!)