"Yes, that death certainly had the old Blofeld touch!"

On Her Majesty's Secret Service; You Only Live Twice; The Man with the Golden Gun
by
Ian Fleming
Penguin Modern Classics, 2006

I have neglected the blog slightly over Xmas and New Year, largely because that period saw me transform into a globular entity composed of 90% chocolate and mince pies. My reading programme of the Bond novels continued apace however, and indeed saw me gulping down the books as greedily as I did the festive grub.

After the compellingly atypical 'The Spy Who Loved Me' it was back to business as usual with 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'. Or was it? For this of course sees Bond settling down and getting married. This is still a Bond story, so 'settling down' in this instance means bartering with a Mafia Don for the wellbeing of his beautiful but suicidal daughter, and the 'getting married' part is delayed slightly thanks to the groom conducting a one-man war against Blofeld and his new base in the Swiss Alps. Still, the principle's the same.

At first glance this novel is the biggest of the novels, page-count wise, but Fleming's weird hypnotic 'must-read-the-next-chapter' spell still holds true. Poor Bond is stretched to his limit in this one, and alas, for all of that it doesn't end happily for him (though even if you've seen the movie it still comes as a shock).


The surprise comes with 'You Only Live Twice'. There's a clear sense now, implicit since the experiments of 'The Spy Who' and 'OHMSS,' that Fleming is wearying of the old formula and looking for new angles - 'You Only Live Twice' is definitely the wildest of his ideas. Blofeld is now a full-bonkers 'Villain' who strides about the grounds of his Japanese castle in armour whilst suicidal Japs flock to his 'Garden of Death' (filled with toxic plants and the like). 'Bondo-san' teams up with the local secret service and revenge, when it comes, is sweet, if brutal.

'The Man with the Golden Gun' is atypical too. It opens with a shocker - a brainwashed Bond makes an assassination attempt on M! It fails, thankfully, and the Old Man sends 007 on an errand to test his fitness for duty. Slumming it in Jamaica, full of nostalgia for 'Dr. No', Bond agrees to act as a bodyguard for his target - the creepy Francisco Scaramanga, the titular assassin. Will Bond's faithful secretary Mary Goodnight blow his cover? Will hook-handed FBI man Felix Leiter end up with another limb missing? Will Bond regain M's trust? The novel is short - like 'The Spy Who', almost a novella - but never less than frightfully gripping.

It will be a pleasure to re-read these in the future and examine them in more detail. For now, I only have to close my eyes in moments of stress and a Fleming-penned scene of exotic relaxation drifts into being:

"The prairie fire of the sunset raged briefly in the west and the molten sea cooled off into moonlit gun-metal." 
(The Man with the Golden Gun')

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