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Mass market paperback, 198 pages Published 2006 (originally 1962) Acquired November 2018 Read December 2018 |
by Ian Fleming with Vivienne Michel
One wonders if, having perfected the James Bond plot in Thunderball, Fleming felt his only option for going on was to abandon it completely. The Spy Who Loved Me is told from the first-person perspective of a young Canadian woman who was largely raised in England and is now traveling the United States; it covers her entire life up until she meets Bond, which means he doesn't appear until the 58% mark, when he happens to stop at the motel where she's being menaced by a pair of gangsters.
I like it but I don't love it. Like with his experiments in For Your Eyes Only, I think Fleming is surprisingly good at straight literary fiction, but this doesn't quite measure up to them. Fleming has an interesting objective here of exploring the tensions between a woman's sexual desires and the kind of sex both men and society expect of her (one gets quite a negative image of "sexual liberation"), and there's an effective undercurrent of minor tragedy to the whole thing. But other writers have certainly covered these areas with more insight than him, and the coda where the fatherly police chief tells Vivienne to get over Bond was a bit obnoxiously paternalistic.
Still, one is never un-entertained (I can really only say that of one Bond novel so far), and the climax is Fleming doing his Fleming thing the best he can: a small-scale series of action scenes that are nonetheless intense for how real and difficult Fleming writes it. Killing is never easy, even when it's James Bond against two small-scale mobsters. I enjoyed reading it, but it will never be my favorite Bond novel.
Next Week: Blofeld is back... in On Her Majesty's Secret Service!
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