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Mass market paperback, 274 pages Published 2006 (originally 1964) Acquired October 2019 Read January 2020 |
This starts good, with a broken Bond reeling from the death of his wife at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It continues okay, with Bond traveling to Japan, and Fleming doing an unusually good job immersing one in the local color. (Fleming is often decent at this kind of thing, but this is one of his better takes in terms of how interesting it is. On the other hand, I somehow suspect it is reductive and not entirely inaccurate!)
Where it all falls down for me is that basically Bond bumps into the man who killed his wife by complete coincidence! There's no feeling of comeuppance or vindication here; Bond just happens to discover a plot by Blofeld. And though I love the idea of Blofeld's garden of poisonous plants, it's like: that's it? He's just hanging out there? Where's an even more dastardly plot? Fleming tries to explain this by saying Blofeld's gone totally insane... but that's not really satisfying. Imagine if after killing Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader went nuts off screen so that when Luke met up with him again, killing him was a doddle. Meh.
And what's the point of the epilogue where Bond loses his memory?
There's a really good "Bond's wife was killed and now he's angry" novel to be written, but this isn't it. And of course, the films didn't deliver on that potential either, thanks to the departure of George Lazenby.
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