I was looking for something light earlier this year. Something definitely for adults, and something with the potential to keep me occupied for a while, probably a series, and something I’d never read, but it had to be light. I wasn’t about to throw in Proust with Ulysses and the Autobiography of Mark Twain. I don’t remember exactly what made me think the James Bond books would be a good plan, but when I went to check them out, and discovered that they had been written by multiple authors over the years, I was a little dismayed. I decided I only wanted to read the real James Bond, the original, who had formed before the movies and was a creation all his own. So I decided that I would only read the books by Ian Fleming, or at the very least, I would consider the end of those books the end of the project. That meant, in order:
- Casino Royale
- Live and Let Die
- Moonraker
- Diamonds are Forever
- From Russia, With Love
- Dr. No
- Goldfinger
- For Your Eyes Only
- Thunderball
- The Spy Who Loved Me
- On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
- You Only Live Twice
- The Man with the Golden Gun
- Octopussy and the Living Daylights
I think that I was excited to start these because Casino Royale was the last bond movie I actually saw in the theater, and I knew I’d be starting there. And Casino Royale is an interesting story, and has a lot of action and drama, but I was totally unprepared for the level of terrible writing I was about to encounter. For what it’s worth, this was the first novel, and Fleming’s writing gets better as the series goes on, but in Royale it’s just a train wreck.
It also set a trend for the first few books: it’s a little unsettling to have to hear James Bond’s thoughts. You’re spared this in the movies, and I think helps make Bond a cool, charismatic character. You don’t have to come to terms with the fact that he’s a racist, a misogynist, obsessed with clothing and restaurants, and frankly, a bit of a bungler. He isn’t a master spy, his cover is perpetually blown. And he isn’t a master planner, he just gets lucky a lot. The only thing he’s really and consistently good at is gambling, but of course even there he prevails by luck. He’s simply a lucky man who brute forces his way through everything.
He’s also a very transparent author insertion fantasy for Ian Fleming, who was an unimportant dabbler in intelligence and an inveterate womanizer. When he talks about how all women want to be raped (it comes up a lot), it just feels like Fleming talking. So do the outmoded 1950’s racial ideas.
There are high points to the series — Thunderball and From Russia, With Love are pretty ok — and low points. Live and Let Die is dreadful. Two of the titles above (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and the Living Daylights) are short story collections, and they have a different tone than the novels. One, The Spy Who Loved Me, is told from the perspective of a Bond girl, and bond is only in the climactic middle chapters.
There are also some things that you know if you’re reading them now that you might not have known then, and they take away the suspense. Ultimately, no woman in any of the books is important, and I found myself constantly hoping that Bond would just ignore them and we could get on with it. Also, because Bond can’t die, a lot of the scenes that put him in personal danger are ineffective.
So 14 books in, and what do I think? I prefer movie Bond. He’s just a better secret agent. He’s cooler, he’s more likeable, and he’s less of a blunderer. Maybe Ian Fleming wanted a more flawed character, but once you have 14 books about someone, they are going to become a hero and you’re going to want to see them do well, go about their business competently. Because it isn’t as if Bond fails to stop the villain in Dr. No and we know that he can lose. Even when Bloefeld survives two novels and lives to have a final confrontation with Bond in the third, his plots have been foiled all along. So if Bond wins every time, and everyone he runs across knows his reputation as a crack agent, then showing him as a bungler is just unsatisfying.
In the end I’d recommend them if you’re looking for what I was looking for: light, fast-paced books you can get through in a night or two. They don’t have much literary merit, and they’re uneven in quality, but they’re good enough to read on the can.