"Now remember. You've got absolute protection."












The Spy Who Loved Me
by
Ian Fleming
Penguin Modern Classics, 2006


I knew this was an atypical Bond novel going into it - I wasn't prepared for how much! 

The first half isn't even a spy or adventure story but is in a totally separate genre, something like a mid-century society novel. It is the story of a young woman who, cast aside by uncaring men, seeks a new life in her native Canada with nothing but the Vespa she's driving on and a pair of overalls. I suspect many copies of the book were thrown across a great many rooms in disgust without the crucial mid-point of the novel being reached.

It's reasonable to want to ask - why? Why did Fleming change course for just this one novel? Why pick a female character to narrate the thing? Women are the focus of some of the Bond short stories, but even they are still told to us by the omniscient narrator (at his gold typewriter, cigarette holder clenched in teeth). So wherefore this experiment? I suspect it started life as a whimsical short story which Fleming found, probably to his surprise, he was actually enjoying. Was the female narrator perhaps to placate (a bit late in the day) his wife and her friends, known to have deprecated the Bond novels? (The answer probably lies in the biographies, but I haven't read them)

This novel, then, is itself a mystery. But once you get over the genre shock, it's a bloody good one.

The structure works. Part One ('Me') has Vivienne Michel tell us her potted history. For the supposedly cold-hearted misogynist of Fleming's popular contemporary image this characterization is practically minor-key proto-feminist. Viv has left England, and a succession of appalling boyfriends. Their betrayals and exploitation of her is awful to read. Was Fleming grimly reflecting on his own past conduct, from the 'opposite side' not of a Cold War but the battle of the sexes?

Part Two ('Them') has Viv's peaceful reflections rudely shattered by the arrival of the immediately unsettling Horror and Sluggsy - two Diamonds Are Forever-like gangsters there to torch the motel Viv's in (and her with it). But as luck would have it, James Bond happens to be passing by to take shelter in the storm. Viv ponders the work of fate (as the reader ponders the wonders of artistic license) and here in Part Three ('Him') the villains get their just desserts at Bond's hands... and Viv comes dangerously close to falling in love with Bond and his world of danger.

Its very atypicality probably means I'll have more to say in the future about this than many of the Bond books. For now I'll leave you with one of many superb details - the description of the loathsome 'Horror', whose lips are:

"thin and purplish like an unstitched wound"

Perfect Fleming!

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