by Sean Egan
Significantly, the brand names thrown in by Fleming at the start of Thunderball are Phensic (a type of aspirin) and Enos (a liquid stomach settler). M has been disturbed by Bond’s latest medical. Accordingly, M – a recent convert to health regimes – has booked 007 into a Brighton health farm called Shrublands. We have never seen Bond so emasculated as in his horrified reaction: he speaks in a ‘strangled’ voice and tries to protest. (‘But, sir, I mean, I’m perfectly all right.’) Once outside, Bond vents his spleen at Moneypenny in what is actually the series’ first long exchange between the pair.
Bond’s taxi to Shrublands is driven by a cocksure young man with a duck-tail hairstyle. This leads to a silent soliloquy by Bond that is anti-Beveridge and anti-rock’n’roll: ‘This youth, thought Bond, makes about twenty pounds a week, despises his parents, and would like to be Tommy Steele … He was born into the buyers’ market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight. For him life is easy and meaningless.’ Yet, in the conversation Bond then initiates, the youth reveals that he has been industrious enough to have already saved up half of the money he needs for a new car, leading Bond to decide that he has misjudged him and to tip him handsomely. We, once again, wonder whether the author is trying to placate the politically minded Bond-haters. However, Fleming could never reinvent 007 as working-class and, when later summoned by red telephone, Bond races to Regent’s Park in his new Mark II Continental Bentley, which has cost him £4,500 – in today’s money in the area of eighty-five grand.
At Shrublands, the contretemps into which Bond gets with one Count Lippe, who bears a Tong tattoo, features extraordinarily pulpy text. Bond, for instance, vocally impersonates no fewer than two of the facility’s staff, one of them at length. It seems to betray Thunderball’s origins as a project intended for a coarser and generally more stylised medium.
Bond – euphoric over raised energy levels and enhanced wellbeing – is carefully masticating his food, consuming yoghurt and restricting his smoking to low-tar cigarettes. Housekeeper May is disgusted by the ‘pap’ that ‘Mister James’ is eating. She thinks such sustenance will be insufficient when he is dispatched on another of the dangerous assignments she is not supposed to know about. The Scots brogue in which Fleming renders May’s admonition (‘I’m knowing more about yer life than mebbe ye were wishing I did’) is both delightful and a lot more convincing than the taxi driver’s Estuary English.
Once in the office of M – who is back to his harrumphing, unhealthy self – Bond is handed a blackmail letter that the Prime Minister has received from SPECTRE. The organisation reveals it is in possession of a missing British aircraft carrying two atomic weapons. It demands for the bombs’ return £100,000,000 in gold bullion, upon pain of detonation. In stating, ‘This, Mr. Prime Minister, is a single and final communication,’ SPECTRE are displaying a faith in the efficacy of the Royal Mail uncommon even for the late fifties. It also strikes one as odd that the villains don’t just request the traditional and far more readily transportable banknotes with non-consecutive serial numbers. The real credibility problem, though, lies in the fact that it will transpire that Count Lippe is an employee of SPECTRE. It is truly remarkable how often Bond happens to run into villains in his off-duty life just before he is assigned to deal with them via his work.
SPECTRE is headed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a Pole concerned only with the accumulation of money, whatever the means. His lack of interest in sex, cigarettes and alcohol is something common enough in Bond villains to make one suspect Fleming considers an abstentious state as much a shorthand for evil as ugliness. Despite being twenty stone and having eyes with no discernible irises, Blofeld is not the often-deformed figure of film adaptation but a man with a crew cut and ageless face. Nor does he stroke a cat. (He also has a birthdate – 28 May 1908 – that Fleming’s family would have found familiar.)
The official response to the crisis is styled ‘Operation Thunderball’. M sends Bond to the Bermuda/Bahamas area to investigate a suspicious radar reading. Before he departs, a failed assassination attempt on him by Lippe makes Bond realise that life is short and he has May cook him up a gloriously unhealthy send-off meal. Once overseas, Bond inveigles his way into the circle of Emilio Largo, SPECTRE’s man on the ground. The denouement is a mass underwater fight between Largo’s frogmen and some Royal Navy men Bond has recruited who are equipped with nothing more hi-tech than knives attached to broom handles. Bond’s life is saved by the intervention of the book’s romantic interest, Domino, armed with a harpoon gun. Thus ends what is by a considerable margin the weakest Bond book so far.
Bond’s health-farm encounter with Lippe is just the start of the unlikely coincidences and improbabilities. In Nassau, Bond by simple happenstance hooks up with Domino, who is not just the kept woman of Largo but – unknown to Largo – the long-lost sister of one Giuseppe Petacchi, an Italian pilot who was subcontracted by SPECTRE to hijack the missile-carrying plane before being murdered. That it was reportedly Jack Whittingham’s idea to make the book’s Bond girl related to the hijack pilot raises another possibility about the reason for the book’s preponderance of shortcomings, namely the ‘too many cooks’ principle. Fleming also seems to be straining to make the necessary wordage. Among several examples of tedious digression is Domino’s imagined backstory of the sailor with ‘Hero’ on his cap band featured on packets of Player’s cigarettes.
Meanwhile, Fleming’s penchant for real-life brand names is taken to an absurd degree when Bond notices that the sweat boxes at Shrublands are manufactured by the Medikalischer Maschinenbau GmbH, 44 Franziskanerstrasse, Ulm, Bavaria. One can only hope he is taking the piss.
Kevin McClory had been provided an advance copy of Thunderball in the hope that it would quell the noises he was making about litigation. It had the opposite effect. McClory and Jack Whittingham tried to secure an injunction preventing Thunderball’s publication. They failed on the grounds that the book had already shipped to bookshops and reviewers, but the presiding judge made the point that this ruling was without prejudice to the validity of the plaintiffs’ claims. McClory and Whittingham immediately launched a civil action in pursuit of rights and recompense.
‘McClory sued for plagiarism,’ explains Benson. ‘He sued both Fleming and Bryce.’ Bryce was on the receiving end of a writ because of what McClory claimed was his involvement as a ‘false partner’ in Xanadu, a production company set up by the two to make the first Bond picture.
One strand of McClory’s claims was that the organisation SPECTRE was not a Fleming invention but had been devised by committee. This was potentially important because, by the time the court case was heard in November 1963, Fleming had used the organisation again in his novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even more importantly, Eon – the Broccoli–Saltzman production company that McClory clearly felt had usurped his rightful role as the captain of 007’s cinematic voyages – had also used SPECTRE, if in a more background role.
The original meaning of the SPECTRE acronym was actually less cartoonish than the final one: the Special Executive for Terrorism, Revolution and Espionage. What was more important, though, is who devised the organisation. ‘We don’t know,’ says Benson. ‘Bryce told me that McClory did. Ernest Cuneo told me that McClory did. However, there is evidence that Fleming was the one who invented it. It just sounds like his kind of work. Maybe McClory said, “Let’s create a criminal organisation that works for hire” and Fleming came up with the name SPECTRE. In Cuneo’s first outline, the Mafia was the bad guys. Then it became the Russians and finally SPECTRE.’
The name in various ways did speckle Fleming’s previous writing: the ghost town Spectreville in Diamonds are Forever and the Spektor code cracker in From Russia with Love. Benson: ‘But who created it really didn’t matter. It was who owned it.’
The month after McClory’s failed injunction, Fleming suffered a heart attack. It wasn’t, of course, a consequence of McClory’s action. Although that may have contributed
to it, Fleming’s prodigious intake of cigarettes, fatty food and alcohol and his lack of exercise and overwork were the chief culprits. Although Fleming did make a serious attempt to reform his ways afterwards – even resorting to a hypnotist to try to give up smoking – pretty soon he abandoned any efforts to prolong his life. Fleming could not even be dissuaded from this long, slow act of suicide by the news in August 1961 that the deal had been made between Eon and United Artists to produce a Bond motion picture, the breakthrough of which he had been dreaming for years.
THE CELLULOID AGENT
In 1959, The Sunday Times was sold to Roy Thomson. The new owner seems not to have perceived Ian Fleming as an ex facie member of the newspaper aristocracy and to have therefore questioned his cushy arrangements. Fleming subsequently left the staff of the paper to set up as a freelancer. However, Fleming was now a big and prestigious name. As such, he continued to have close links to The Sunday Times. He received a retainer of £1,000 a year, attended its Tuesday morning conferences and in 1962 was given the important role of setting up The Sunday Times Colour Section (later The Sunday Times Colour Magazine).
This innovation was a matter of no little controversy, its implications ranging from whether British newspapers were being dragged downmarket by a garish, foreign gimmick to whether newspapers giving them away might destroy the market for paid magazines. Fleming helped make the 4 February 1962 inaugural edition of the ‘supplement’ an even bigger deal than it already was by gifting it a new Bond short story, ‘The Living Daylights’. Although he was no doubt properly remunerated, it is nonetheless remarkable that that story was no throwaway. (The story appeared in US title Argosy the following June.)
Bond is sent to Berlin to enable agent number 272, based in Russia since the war, to cross Checkpoint Charlie. To prevent 272 being picked off by the East, 007 keeps a Sniperscope trained in an apartment overlooking the crossing point. Inconveniently, it is not known on which night 272 will make his dash for freedom. For three days Bond and the rather uptight Captain Paul Sender have to bear each other’s company as they await the appearance of their colleague.
During the third day, Sender rebukes Bond for pouring a stiff whisky. Bond replies, ‘I’ve got to commit a murder tonight. Not you. Me … I’d be quite happy for you to get me sacked from the double-O section.’ At five minutes past six, Sender – acting as Bond’s eyes at the crossing point in lieu of Bond’s ability to take his attention from the suspected sniper’s nest in a building opposite – spots the figure of 272 making his way across the wasteland towards the West. Noticing something moving in a darkened window, Bond realises 272 has been spotted. Bond is amazed to see that the would-be assassin opposite is a golden haired, beautiful female. He hastily alters his aim and his bullet merely disables his target. Bond has to interrupt Sender’s celebrations about the fact that 272 has made it over the Wall to tell him to get down: a searchlight sweeps over their window and bullets start howling into the room.
When everything has quietened down, Sender confronts Bond with the fact that he had seen him adjust his aim, pointing out, ‘KGB have got plenty of women agents – and women gunners.’ Bond knows that the girl is in worse trouble than he is: she has possibly lost her left hand and – having had the living daylights scared out of her – had her nerve broken.
Bond’s humanity-dictated unprofessionalism probably provided the interesting tension in the story for readers unfamiliar with 007 fiction. However, the regular Bond reader would have been au fait with the fact that bucking orders and succumbing to emotion – for reasons of whim as often as humanity – is so common with 007 as to make him something approaching a loose cannon.
Fleming impresses with his knowledge of rifle handling and espionage routine in a story whose gloominess, location and circumstances make it a quintessential Cold War tale.
Despite Ian Fleming’s stated determination to ‘write the spy story to end all spy stories’, the word ‘spy’ does not occur much in his Bond books.
Although the terms ‘spy’ and ‘secret agent’ have become conflated in the public mind, spying more suggests inveigling oneself into a long-term position in enemy territory in order to procure intelligence, something that Bond did not do. Fleming tends to employ the term ‘secret agent’. Bond himself – as a function of being an employee of an organisation that at the time did not officially exist – explains his role to members of the public by saying he is ‘a kind of policeman’, ‘from Scotland Yard’ or ‘from the Ministry of Defence’.
He is, though, sometimes referred to as a spy by third parties. In Casino Royale, the assassin of Le Chiffre brands him with an abbreviation of ‘Shpion’, Russian for ‘spy’. In From Russia with Love, the Soviets discussing Bond refer to him as both secret agent and spy. Bond is also referred to as a spy in the title of the tenth Bond book.
Published on 16 April 1962, The Spy Who Loved Me is a unique James Bond novel. In place of the broadly objective, third-person narration of all the books thus far, we are presented with a first-person account that gives us a rounded view of Bond’s arrival into another individual’s life. This is unusual enough, but an even more unexpected departure is that the narrator is a woman.
The Spy Who Loved Me originally appeared credited to ‘Ian Fleming with Vivienne Michel’, the latter being the book’s narrator. In the American edition, Fleming included a whimsical note stating that he had found Michel’s manuscript on his desk. Fleming would soon distance himself from the work in a somewhat less playful way. The author was so bitterly disappointed by the reception given to The Spy Who Loved Me that he quickly became ashamed of it. Nothing better demonstrates the way that Fleming increasingly came to resemble a weathervane in his reaction to criticism of his work than what he did next. Although he could hardly recall the circulated editions, he did the nearest thing by refusing in his lifetime to allow a paperback edition to be published and by banning any film version.
Those coming to the novel after having learned this will be surprised at how good it is. The two-thirds of it neither involving nor requiring Bond’s presence – and especially the parts about the narrator’s youth and sexual liaisons – form a highly respectable literary novel. The departure from the series template works enormously well in that we feel and cheer for this protagonist, her narration creating an intense empathy that the cold tone of normal Bond books could never engender. That the book actually declines in quality with Bond’s arrival is a matter of regret for the 007 fan but a separate issue.
Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel is a French-Canadian in her early twenties who is house-sitting Dreamy Pines, a remote New York State motel that is closing up as the tourist season comes to an end. Due to hand over the keys the next day to the owner, one Mr Sanguinetti, she is driven by her isolation to reminisce about her life. This part of the book is titled ‘Me’. In it, Viv takes us through the backstory that has led her here. Viv’s prose is, in literary first-person tradition, often implausibly eloquent. However, her Quebec childhood, student life and coming-of-age are rendered very convincingly. Particularly powerful is a deflowering scene in a private cinema box: breathless date Derek arrives back from a chemist with a ‘thing’ but the two are humiliatingly discovered.
Her next lover dispenses with her when Viv – now an up-and-coming journalist – falls pregnant and has to be bought an abortion in Switzerland, where it is legal. A devastated Viv sets off aboard a Vespa on a solo journey across America.
Bizarrely, ‘Me’ feels like nothing so much as a precursor to the prose depictions of Swinging London and ‘promiscuous’ culture that the availability of the contraceptive pill was soon to make fashionable. Its distaff perspective is astoundingly convincing. Viv in no way comes across as a dummy manipulated by a patriarchal author-ventriloquist. We have never had any reason to believe that a male who had never wanted for anything materially could understand a young woman living on a budget, nor had we been given any reason to believe that such an apparent advocate of sexually predatory be
haviour would have insight into how badly this person might feel treated by the men she has known intimately.
‘Me’ is, remarkably, far more sexually explicit than any previous Bond book. We are not prepared for lines like, ‘… as he told me, it was essential to a happy marriage that the climax should be reached simultaneously by the partners’, nor the jaw-droppingly candid recounting of being discovered in the cinema (‘I imagined what the manager must have seen when Derek got up from me. Ugh! I shivered with disgust’).
In Part 2 of the book – ‘Them’ – an unsavoury pair of characters nicknamed Sluggsy and Horror turn up unexpectedly at the motel on the night before the handover. Viv is just about to be raped when the door buzzer sounds – the transition from ‘Them’ to ‘Him’.
Forced to open the door to allay suspicion, Viv is confronted by the sight of a man whose hat, belted raincoat and cruel good looks make her think, God, it’s another of them! It’s the series’ first third-party sight of Bond that seems organic, not contrived. Bond’s car has a puncture and he has been attracted by the lit ‘Vacancy’ sign. Viv warms to Bond when he smiles, and then further when she sees in his eyes his quick apprehension that something is wrong.