All posts tagged Blofeld

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming (1964)

This is a strange and eerie tale about a ‘Garden of Death’ in remote and exotic Japan, so I liked it more than the straightforward adventure yarn of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, set in France and Switzerland.

As often, Fleming uses a simple but attractive structure for his tale, in this case dividing it into two parts: 1. ‘It is better to travel hopefully…’ 2. ‘… than to arrive.’

Plot summary

If Bond was hacked off in OHMSS (which began with him composing a letter of resignation from the Service), in this one he has lost all interest in not just his job, but life itself. Eight months have passed (p.24) since his wife, Tracy, was shot dead just hours after their marriage, by the dastardly Blofeld, and Bond has gone to pieces. He’s drinking heavily, not sleeping, missing appointments (to the anguished concern of his secretary, Mary Goodnight, and M’s PA, Miss Moneypenny). Bond has (not very believably) been sent on two missions during this period, both of which he’s ballsed up (p.22). Again he says he wants to resign (p.29).

M calls in the latest of umpteen nerve specialists, Sir James Molony (p.20) who says Bond needs to be shocked out of his gloom with a good tough mission, just like the last war forced so many people to stop dwelling on themselves and pitched them into challenging situations, which ‘cured’ them.

Cue M calling Bond in and giving him a rather peculiar mission. Turns out the Japanese secret service have been cracking Russian codes in the East (‘from Vladivostok and Oriental Russia’, p.30) and deciphering vital information about nuclear weapons testing, giving the system the codename MAGIC 44 (p.49). But they only share it with the CIA, not us. Bond’s mission is simple: go meet the head of the Japanese secret service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka, and do whatever it takes to persuade him to secretly share their deciphered information with us (behind the backs of the CIA; maybe not that difficult as Tanaka is given a page-long speech expressing his dislike of American ‘culture’ and its revoltingly decadent exports, p.59).

Tanaka is a hard man. He gained a First in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) at Trinity College, Oxford, before the war – and so has a veneer of Western manners – but returned to Japan to join the military, becoming a member of the Kempeitai (‘their wartime Gestapo’), rising to be personal aide to Admiral Ohnishi before training as a a kami-kaze in the closing stages of the war, only saved by the abrupt nuclear end to the war from flying his plane into an American battleship (p.15). Now he has risen to the top of his country’s secret service, the Koan-Chosa-Kyoku and is a canny, sly, ironic operator.

Rather oddly, Bond will be posing as a member of the Australian secret services, under the guidance of the loud, drunk, profane head of Australia’s station in Japan, one Richard ‘Dikko’ Henderson. (‘Henderson looked like a middle-aged prize fighter who has retired and taken to the bottle’, p.37). This leads to a sequence of hard drinking nights in geisha bars, and a lot of background briefing on Japanese culture, politics and society, all presented as drunken rants by the colourful Dikko.

(At one point he makes a typically tipsy and grandiose reference to ‘brother Hemingway’, p.43 – the only use of the ‘brother X’ formula in all the Bond books – and I immediately thought of John le Carré, many of whose self-mythologising, grand-standing characters refer to others in their little circles as ‘brother’ this or that. Also, the hard-drinking, swearing, boorish ex-pat culture which Dikko represents reminded me of The Honourable Schoolboy, the overblown middle novel of le Carré’s ‘Karla’ trilogy, set among Hong Kong’s hard-drinking, boorish, ex-pat community.)

As so often, Fleming uses flashbacks to depict the various scenes outlined above and to give selected highlights of the month or so Bond has spent in Japan, steadily getting to like and respect Tanaka, which are all told from the position of the ‘now’ when the story proper begins.

‘Now’ is a lengthy sake-fuelled session lasting into the early hours, during which Tanaka finally states the terms of his deal. First a little background: He and his superiors have been dismayed by Britain’s decline and fall, by the speed with which she lost an empire and divested herself of her colonies, and then appalled at the fiasco of the Suez Crisis (1956). The long, apparently rambling conversation then wanders round to Japanese national characteristics and to the national fondness for suicide as an ‘honourable’ way out of various problems and of gaining face with family and ancestors. (Some 25,000 Japanese commit suicide every year and Tanaka is lavish in his praise of the rituals of seppuku, pp.70-73 [the current annual rate is 30,000, according to Wikipedia]).

In fact, Tanaka, goes on to explain, over the past year a strange sequence of events has occurred. Nearly a year ago a foreign scientist – Dr Guntram Shatterhand – and his wife, Frau Emmy (p.61) came to Japan, toured the country, then bought a derelict castle in the southern island of Kyūshū. From here they have imported every form of poisonous plant, tree, fish and insect known to man (spiders, scorpions etc) to create a ‘Garden of Death’. They gained permission from the Japanese authorities after promising to ultimately leave the garden to Japanese botanists, as well as to make available various rare poisons which Japanese scientists could use to experiment with cures and serums. (Fleming gives a four-page list of the poisonous species of tree, shrub and bush in the Garden, complete with Latin names and precise properties – pp.66-69).

But news of this intense ‘Garden of Death’ has leaked out to the general Japanese population with the result that depressed, unhappy, shamed or humiliated Japanese have been making their way there to kill themselves – to break into the ‘Garden of Death’, assured of being stung, bitten, grazed, poisoned or infected by any of the poisonous life forms in it. In the past year no fewer than 500 (!) Japanese have died in the Garden, despite Dr Shatterhand’s best attempts to put up security fences, employ security guards from Japan’s notorious Black Dragon Society (p.64), and so on.

The deal

‘So, Bond-san,’ Tanaka says. ‘My government is willing to share the secret Russian information we are intercepting – on condition you show your country still has pride, still has valour and that you enter the Garden of Death, uncover its secrets, render it harmless.’ In other words, kill Dr Shatterhand. No Japanese could do it, because the government would lose face if it failed. If Bond is caught or exposed, the government can claim he was a foreign agent (which he is).

Kill Dr Shatterhand and you get the secret information. Then Tanaka shows Bond photos and maps of Shatterhand’s hide-out on a remote coastal promontory, along with photos of the man himself and his wife. Bond is electrified: it is Blofeld, the wicked evil Blofeld who planned to detonate atom bombs in America in Thunderball and to decimate British agriculture in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and who, along with his squat ugly accomplice, Irma Bunt, shot dead Bond’s newly-wed wife, Tracy on the last page of the previous novel.

Bond had been hesitating before, about the propriety of assassinating a foreign national on foreign soil. Now his heart is set. Now it is personal. It is going to be revenge, pure and simple (p.115).

Turning Japanese

You Only Live Twice often reads like Fleming swallowed a guide book on Japan whole. There’s a friendly amount of cultural background on Jamaica, whenever Bond goes there; Fleming provides 2 or 3 page backgrounders to Saratoga races or Harlem or Las Vegas when Bond visits them in the States; half of From Russia With Love is set in Turkey which gives Fleming plenty of opportunity to describe Istanbul, Turkish food, customs and people: but none of the previous books has been so saturated with local colour as You Only Live Twice, which offers up guidebook facts and schoolboy explanations of Japanese history, customs and language on every page. Among many other things, we learn that:

  • samisen is a three-stringed musical instrument played at geisha parties
  • sake is Japan’s alcoholic spirit, to be drunk warm and, ideally, giving no outward sign that you are getting drunk
  • sumo wrestlers oil and massage their testicles from an early age so that, before a fight, they can retract them into their body cavity
  • bonsan means priest (p.54) so the Japanese can make a pun on Bond’s name, since it is polite to add san to the end of a name, thus Bond-san
  • futon is Japanese for bed
  • gaijin is Japanese for foreigner
  • a tanka is a poem with 31 syllables
  • a haiku is a poem of three lines and 17 syllables whose master was probably the 17th century poet, Basho (pp.100-101)
  • in Japan they don’t close doors to ensure security, they open all the doors and slender partitions in their houses so they can see that no-one else is eavesdropping
  • light switches go up, taps turn to the left, door handles likewise
  • samsara is a generic phrase for the good life, for wine, women and song
  • ‘All Japanese have permanent ON [a kind of moral/spiritual duty] towards their superiors, their Emperor, their ancestors and the Japanese gods.’ (p.42) The only way to discharge this burden of ON is to do the right thing, to behave ‘honourably’.
  • futsukayoi is an honourable hangover
  • four is an unlucky number in Japanese culture, as unlucky as 13 is for us in the West
  • According to Tanaka, the Japanese have no swearwords, which Bond finds hard to believe and gets him to explain at length (pp.83-84)
  • Food: Bond is astonished when the lobster he’s served begins to move – he is expected to eat it alive (p.89). He is similarly unimpressed at the fine strips of fugu, raw poisonous blowfish he is served later (p.104), or the bland and over-salty seaweed which comes with everything – although the raw beef he eats after meeting a farmer and massaging his cattle (!) does turn out to be the best steak he’s ever tasted (p.93). But he politely refuses a bowl of fresh bull blood when it is offered.

But for all the book’s immersion in Japanese culture, Fleming and Bond are still very sceptical and uneasy about the Japanese and their well-proven taste for the violent and the bizarre.

This suicide business in Japan is nothing more than a form of mass hysteria – an expression of the streak of violence that seems to run all through the history of Japan. (p.71)

It doesn’t change his mind when Tanaka gives a long and moving account of what inspired him to become a kami-kaze pilot on pages 87 to 89 – describing the excitement of dive bombing an American aircraft carrier, with detailed advice on where best to aim the plane (at the deck-top cranes and equipment). Tanaka makes it sound moving and heroic. Even worse is his eye-witness account of watching his boss, Admiral Ohnishi, commit ritual suicide by inserting a dagger in his belly and moving it from left to right and then upward to cut into the breast bone, all without flinching. Ohnishi in fact didn’t die of these self-inflicted wounds, but refused to move from his position and sat expiring for 24 hours. ‘A most sincere gesture of apology to the Emperor’ (p.89), Tanaka remarks.

Bond dislikes ‘the automatic, ant-like subservience to discipline and authority of the Japanese’ (p.152). Even the half-mad Blofeld is made to discuss ‘the profound love of horror and violence of the Japanese’ (p.134).

And the exaggerated politeness and stifling rituals get on his nerves. Bond becomes very exasperated at the never-ending bowing and sibilant hissing all the Japanese make from extreme politeness –

Bond had had about enough for one day. There weren’t many bows and smiles left in him, and he was glad when he was left alone… (p.85)

Bond hates having to sit on the floor in the lotus position until your knees are screaming with pain, and finds it impossible to sleep on an uncomfortable futon.

The isle of Kuro

Tanaka plans the operation with his lieutenants and Bond: the promontory with the Garden of Death is not far from a group of islands inhabited by the Ama, a self-contained tribe of Japanese who make a living diving for pearls in awabi or oysters (p.135). The divers tend to be lithe young women who often dive completely naked. They plan to dye Bond’s hair and skin to give him a Japanese complexion, then embed him in the little fishing village of Kuro, population 200 (p.121).

Travelling south Tiger takes him to visit a training camp for ninjas or ‘stealers-in’ (pp.93-98). Bond will be given a ninja black outfit, climbing rope and knife.

Here, Tanaka smirks broadly, Bond will be helped by the presence of one of the daughters of the community, Kissy Suzuki (p.113), a young girl who was talent spotted by roving Hollywood agents and went all the way to Hollywood to make a feature film, hated it, and has returned to the bosom of her family and community, but with a good working knowledge of English and of the Western mind-set.

So they travel down to the southern island, taking in various tourist sights along the way (the oldest whorehouse in Japan (p.99) taking the Murasaki Maru, a modern ocean liner to cross to Kyūshū (p.100). Here they meet the commissioner for police of Fukuoka, the administrative capital of the island. There are a few incidents along the way, most notable of which is when a stranger jostles Bond in the crowd and picks his pocket. Later they become aware of a motorcyclist who’s following their car. Tanaka orders the driver to ram the biker, who then puts up a fight and is killed. The body is found to have Bond’s wallet on him. Hmm – someone knows who Bond is and is paying hoods to trail his movements. Suspense!

Once again, Fleming gives a very persuasive description of this idyllic place and of his first sight of the simple fisher people. In the midst of this perilous mission and Bond’s personal trauma, Fleming is able to convey the sense that this is a ‘good place’, these are good people. You often come across these persuasive and powerful scenes in Fleming.

Bond is introduced to the smiling sardonic Kissy, her ancient parents and the local priest. For the next few days he goes pearl fishing with her, obviously attracted by her firm sexy body which wears just a g-string while diving, but Fleming also devotes pages explaining the diving technique, the lives and values of this community.

The idyllic setting makes Fleming relaxed and whimsical: he invents a pet for Kissy, a tame cormorant who she keeps tethered to a string, who dives with her and who she calls ‘David’ after the only person she met in Hollywood who respected her, the English actor David Niven.

This sequence climaxes rather beautifully when Kissy takes Bond to see the squat stone statues of the six Jizo guardians, the ‘Kings of Death’, old Buddhist gods who look over the island and its people, also known as ‘the Children of the Sea’ (p.136). Kissy prays devoutly to them for Bond’s safety and Bond finds himself making a prayer and then – in an astonishing moment – thinks he sees the one he prayed to nod its head. Nonsense! Just a trick of the gathering dusk. Pull yourself together man.

The Garden of Death

That night Bond slips into the ninja outfit Tanaka left him and Kissy accompanies him as he swims to the mainland setting of the ‘Garden of Death’ and the ominous, ruined Japanese castle at its centre.

Using his ninja grappling iron, Bond ascends the defensive wall, then steps carefully through the Garden, witnessing two Japanese who are killing themselves – one whose face and hands are hideously swollen by some plant poison and who blunders into the central pond where he is shredded by piranha, another who bows politely and walks down into one of the Garden’s stinking fumaroles or volcanic mudholes, voluntarily incinerating himself with a final shriek of agony (p.147). Bond finds a work shed and hides behind a big pile of sacking, eating and drinking a little, and waiting till dawn.

He is awoken by the sight of Blofeld dressed in medieval chain mail (as protection against all the poison) and Irma Bunt in a rubber suit with a beekeeper’s hat, strolling around their macabre domain. Bond is tempted to attack them there and then but the armour would be difficult to pierce and he has seen members of the violent Black Dragon Society roaming the Garden as security.

Inside the castle

Bond hides until night falls and then breaks into the castle. A couple of tense pages describe his faltering process up dark stone staircases, along deserted corridors etc, all eerily empty. Finally, he enters a corridor he saw a servant just leave and is half way along it when it swivels in the middle and tips him helplessly into a stone oubliette where he cracks his head very badly. He comes to being beaten around the face by some of the Black Dragon goons and then Blofeld intervenes.

These final scenes feel oddly disconnected: they’re gruesome enough but somehow lack conviction.

First of all it takes Blofeld, dressed incongruously in a silk kimono, a little while to realise that this intruder is in fact James Bond, come to kill him. Blofeld and Bunt take their captive to the ‘Question Room’. This turns out to be a stone throne Blofeld has built over one of the Garden’s many volcanic geysers. Bond is forced to sit on a toilet seat above a little hole up which a spurt of 1,000 degree-hot volcanic mud erupts every fifteen minutes. So Bond sits there as the minutes tick by till the next eruption, his flesh crawling as he imagines the devastating fiery impact incinerating his lower body.

Except that, oddly, Bond isn’t actually tied there and, a minute before the eruption, he simply gets up and strolls over to Blofeld and admits who he is – just as the volcanic mud squirts up the hole. So not that dangerous, really.

Even odder, Blofeld allows Bond to be escorted back to his ‘audience chamber’ and then dismisses his guard, relying on his own skill with a massive, razor-sharp samurai sword to keep Bond in check.

And now, he does what all the baddies do – conducts a long soliloquy in which he justifies all his wicked actions, insofar as they have roundabout beneficent results. And, as usual, this long rant gives Bond the opportunity to scope out the room and make a plan. As it draws to an end (‘and now to finish you for good, Mr Bond’) he makes a leap for a long wooden stave one of the guards had left leaning against a wall.

Bond a) clouts Irma Bunt in the head, knocking her out, then b) embarks on a long and tense fight withg Blofeld, the latter’s razor-sharp sword against Bond’s stave, with Blofeld steadily getting the upper hand, until Bond desperately throws himself at Blofeld, grabbing for his throat and, despite all blows, pummeling and biting, proceeding to strangle Blofeld to death, and to carry on choking and bludgeoning him long after he’s dead in a red mist frenzy.

Balloon escape

Bond comes out of his bloodlust daze and runs into the Question Room, using the machinery he saw to move a lid over the volcanic vent – that should block it up then cause quite an eruption! Back through the audience chamber and out onto the balcony, but it’s a sheer 100 foot drop to the ground, when he sees that a big balloon is tethered to the balcony balustrade. He tethers the loose rope round his body, then undoes the knot and – whoosh – is immediately lifted up into the air and moving away. Only at about this point does he become really bothered by the very painful throbbing in his head from the large bump he picked up when he fell into the oubliette. A few shots from the castle graze him as the Black Dragon goons realise he’s escaping before, suddenly, the entire castle shimmers, shakes and explodes with the force of the mini-volcano he had blocked. Cascades of boiling mud and then flames as various gas pipes etc rupture.

Bond clings to the rope as the balloon flies out over the sea, but the pain in his head is obliterating everything else and he can feel himself getting weaker and then, and then… He feels the rope slipping and passes out as he falls hundreds of feet into the sea below.

Amnesia with Kissy

If certain parts of the previous narrative had seemed disconnected and dreamlike, the final ten pages are unique in the Bond oeuvre for their strange and floaty feel. For Bond has complete amnesia. Impact with the sea completed what the heavy blow to his temple had begun, and he has completely forgotten who he is and what he does. Kissy and Bond had arranged that she would swim out to meet him every night, and so she sees his body fall from the balloon into the sea. But when she gets to him he doesn’t recognise her, doesn’t know what he’s doing in the sea.

Kissy’s heart sings as she realises she can make him hers forever, and she ferries him slowly in the rescue position back across the straight to Kuro, where she calls the village doctor, then fixes up with the village priest to tell the people to keep his presence a secret. While she tends his wounds and nurtures him back to health, the villagers stonewall a succession of visitors from the outside world, first Tiger, then British embassy officials. To all of them the villagers say they saw him depart, then the castle blew up, and they haven’t seen him since.

Far away in London, six months passes and the Service concludes Bond is missing presumed dead. M contributes an official obituary to The Times, in which we get a potted biography of Bond’s life, parents, upbringing and so on. But on the small island Bond is lovingly nurtured to health by Kissy and enjoys the simple healthy life of a pearl diver.

It may be a far-fetched comparison but a lot of this reminded me of Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In each of its six books a knight from the court of King Arthur sets out on a heroic Quest, encountering, battling and overcoming various allegorical figures along the way. By the sixth and final book, though, you can feel Spenser’s tiredness and are not surprised that, when Sir Calidore encounters a rural community living in complete equality, peace and harmony with its rural surroundings, the knight simply abandons his Quest and decides to live with them and enjoy pastoral simplicity and happiness.

In the last ten pages of You Only Live Twice, something similar happens and James Bond, cynical city slicker and worldly secret agent, forsakes his livelihood, forgets his raison d’etre and, tired and ill like his maker (Fleming was a sick man by the time the book was published in 1963), longs to become part of a simpler world, a healthier life, a place without conflict.

But will it last…?

Bond as Saint George

When Tanaka offers him the challenge, he puts it in Arthurian medieval form: ‘you are to enter this Castle of Death and slay the Dragon within.’ (p.78) Similarly, when Bond realises Shatterhand is Blofeld, he not only declares it is now a matter of personal revenge – he says: ‘It was ancient feud’ (p.116). ‘Ancient’? Hardly. His wife was murdered 9 months earlier. Calling it ‘ancient’ is part of the process of giving Bond a mythic, archetypal overtone.

Later Tiger says: ‘Does it not amuse you to think of that foolish dragon dozing all unsuspecting in his castle while St George comes silently riding towards his lair across the waves?’ (p.119)

In The Spy Who Loved Me Fleming had the female lead, Viv Michel, refer to Bond several times as her knight in shining armour, as her Sir Galahad, and Thunderball contained references to St George. It doesn’t especially deepen the pleasure of reading the books, but it is an indicator of the kind of quest-like, rather simple-minded Victorian-medieval hero worship, which is one thread underpinning the texts.

Visions of paradise

It’s only a paragraph or two, but as Bond arrives at the island community of Kuro he is struck by how it seems to be one of the world’s good places.

It was a pretty scene, with the delicate remoteness, the fairyland quality of small fishing communities the world over. Bond took an immediate liking to the place, as if he was arriving at a destination that had been waiting for him and that would be friendly and welcoming. (p.120)

Fleming’s writing conveys a genuine sense of peace and tranquility. It has several times before, especially in Jamaica or when he was in the hotel in Istanbul looking out over the Bosphorus at sunset. But here the setting has the added fairy tale element which threads strongly through the book.

At that moment, it all seemed to Bond as the world, as life, should be, and he felt ashamed of his city-slicker appearance, let alone the black designs it concealed. (p.123)

This ability to perceive and respond to natural beauty, and to find a refreshing innocence and loveliness in it, is one of Fleming’s most appealing features.

Male camaraderie

Bond may be a figure of male fantasy fulfilment in a number of obvious ways (easily available women, fast cars, tough fights which he always wins). One of the under-reported ones is his male friendships.

There’s the deep, abiding warmth of his father-feeling for M (‘James Bond felt a quick warmth of affection for this man who had ordered his destiny for so long’, p.32).

There’s the buddy-buddy act with his CIA pal Felix Leiter, who appears in no fewer than six of the novels and allows Fleming to let rip with pulp American slang and indulge Bond’s boyish bantering side.

There are the one-off friendships, forged in the intense closeness of a dangerous mission would include the elemental life force of Darko Kerim (From Russia With Love), the wise and clever Marc-Ange Draco (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and in this novel, the canny clever ex-kamikaze pilot Tiger Tanaka, owner of a ‘formidable, cruel, samurai face’ (p.14).

All three are elemental figures of masculinity, rooted in foreign cultures untouched by Western norms or political correctness; they have very dubious morals or pasts (Darko involved in various scams against the Russians, Draco the head of the Corsican mafia ie a dyed-in-the-wool criminal, and Tiger with his unapologetic devotion to the kami-kaze ideal); and all three smile big grins every time they explain another outlandish custom, extravagant scam or unacceptable piece of behaviour.

There is an elemental male aspect to their bonding; but there is also naughty schoolboy japery as well.

Credit

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming was published in March 1964 by Jonathan Cape. Fleming died in August the same year.

All quotes and references are to the 1965 Pan paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers published in 1964

James Bond reviews

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by Simon on May 27, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2016

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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming (1963)

Royale-les-Eaux

The opening chapters are rather downbeat, casting a more sombre mood than we’ve been used to. The narrative skips the adventure recounted in The Spy Who Loves Me altogether and refers back to the events of the previous-but-one novel, Thunderball, ie the attempt by the fiendish Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation to blackmail the West with the threat of detonating two stolen atomic bombs.

Bond is fed up because he has spent a year tasked with tracking down Blofeld in so-called ‘Operation Bedlam’, and has got precisely nowhere. In fact the novel opens with Bond cruising through northern France in his beloved Bentley, mentally composing the umpteenth version of a letter resigning from the Secret Service. He is woken from this gloom when a sports car tears past him, driven by a sexy young lady. He follows her into the next village along the road, and then spots her again at the French coastal gambling resort of Royale-les-Eaux (setting of the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale).

Here, in an uncanny repetition of the central gambling scene in that first novel, Bond once again plays baccarat, initially winning, and then gallantly comes to the rescue of the girl when she gambles rashly and loses – paying her debt for her. (A casino employee tells Bond she is La Comtessa Teresa di Vicenzo, p.20). This leads, rather inevitably to chatting her up in the bar – ‘no one calls me Teresa, call me Tracy’ – and then rapidly to her bedroom, where she rather violently asks him to shut up and take her roughly, hard, but afterwards bursts into inconsolable sobbing.

Bond realises she is deeply depressed and her wanton behaviour reflects a deep unhappiness. Having tried, and failed, to comfort her, Bond – in a telling phrase – pads back down to the hotel corridor to his room, ‘feeling, for the first time in his life, totally inadequate’ (p.40).

Flashback All the above is told in a flashback, a technique Fleming has got into the habit of using extensively. The actual text opens with Bond spying on the girl at the end of a day sunbathing at the beach, and then following her out across the sand to the water’s edge where he suspects she is going to drown herself. Instead, two goons come up behind him with guns and an inflatable dinghy comes powering into the shallows, and Bond and the girl are forced into it.

All the events outlined above are Bond’s remembrance flashing back from the ‘now’ which is his kidnap and transport in the dinghy..

So who are the goons? Are they SPECTRE? Was the girl bait in a trap? Is he going to be tortured and executed? The boat speeds round to the harbour, docks and Bond is forced at gunpoint into the presence of a short, powerful man who announces that his name is Marc-Ange Draco and he is the head of the Union Corse, the notorious Corsican mafia (p.46).

No, he isn’t going to be harmed – instead, Marc-Ange surprises him by explaining that the girl Bond has been ‘seeing’, Tracy, is his Marc-Ange’s. Her mother was an English governess who Marc-Ange married and swept off into the mountains of Corsica – but Tracy grew up to be a troubled, wayward young woman, who hid her depression by moving in the European Fast Set, eventually marrying a worthless Italian playboy (hence her title, p.54).

The marriage didn’t prosper but when Tracy fell pregnant Marc-Ange hoped it would improve her humour and she indeed loved the resulting baby. But then the baby died of spinal meningitis (p.54) and Tracy made the first of a series of suicide attempts.

Now, in just a few days of their affair, Marc-Ange has noticed that Tracy’s mood has improved and so he has made checks into Bond’s background. Now, Marc-Ange announces that he will pay Bond £1 million to marry Tracy. Bond is flabbergasted, impressed, taken aback. but he knows himself – he is a rolling stone, he doesn’t want to be tied down. Bond turns down the offer but promises to continue the affair and be gentle with Tracy: it’s the best he can offer. But, thinking about work and his frustrated quest, Bond does ask for one thing: does Marc-Ange’s organisation know the whereabouts of a certain Blofeld? The Corsican makes a phone call and establishes that, yes, this Blofeld is somewhere in Switzerland. Aha.

Although this opening is predominantly about the men in Tracy’s life discussing her situation and fate (and so is easily criticised as sexist) nonetheless, it is another long sequence all about a woman, about her life and psychology, about the care and concern she prompts in those who love her. Not something commonly associated with Bond.

The College of Arms

Two months later Bond is back in London, keeping in touch with Tracy by phone, but being briefed by M. Extraordinarily – improbably – London’s College of Arms has been contacted by a man named Blofeld who has asked them to confirm him in what he claims is his ancestral title of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. There is some gentle and enjoyable social comedy as Bond reluctantly visits the College and meets the scholarly and obtuse experts there, the main one (Griffon Or – they all have heraldic noms de guerre) mistakenly thinking he’s visiting about his own heritage, and insists on telling Bond (and the reader) a lot about the Bond family (and title) before Bond manages to communicate that he’s come about Blofeld!

At which point Bond is handed over to a younger, more switched-on scholar – Sable Basilisk (p.75) who he consults about the Secret Service plan. Basilisk confirms the queries from Blofeld and confides that no force is as strong as snobbery; once bitten, people will do almost anything to prove they’ve got noble ancestry. This Blofeld fellow is totally hooked.

Would it be possible for Bond to adopt the identity of a heraldic expert and be sent as the official representative of the College out to Blofeld’s address in Switzerland? Yes, the man replies: they can rig him up with the false identity of one Sir Hilary Bray, and it will only take a few days’ mugging up of heraldry books to know enough about the subject to out-bluff anyone.

Switzerland

Bond briefs M, puts the finishing touches to his fake identity and flies to Switzerland as Sir Hilary, where he is met by representatives of Blofeld and driven to a remote Alpine resort, then by cable car up to a swish, modern skiing complex atop the Alp named Piz Gloria, near Pontresina in the Engadine (p.104).

NB Once again, there has been absolutely no detection involved in the novel. MI6 monitor communications coming in and out of Britain and so simply picked up the name Blofeld in his correspondence with the College of Arms. The baddy is a) known already and b) his whereabouts simply revealed. The narrative isn’t interested in crime thriller/Holmes-style detection – it instead focuses on the suspense of wondering when the (inevitable) big Confrontation / Shootout, which we all know will happen, will actually occur.

Bond is met by a squat venomous matron, Irma Bunt, taken up in the ski lift to the mountain-top complex, shown around and to his room. Along the way he identifies a dozen or so goons who are obviously SMERSH professionals. Bond finds it a strain keeping up the masquerade of being a posh heraldry scholar, especially when he is introduced to the ten stunningly good-looking young women who are sharing the base with him, ‘the girls’. To his surprise, he is told that they are all taking part in pioneering scientific work which the ‘Count’ is conducting, to help each of them overcome terrible allergies.

Over the course of a few days Bond (inevitably) gets chatty, then flirty with the women, and ends up going to bed with Ruby. He discovers she used to have a severe phobia of chickens, which was inconvenient because her family run a massive chicken farm. Sleeping in her bedroom Bond is surprised to hear a hypnotic tape start at midnight which lulls her to sleep and then – lullingly tells her that she loves chickens, she’s never happy unless she’s among chickens, and so on. Bond realises the ‘cure’ is a form of hypnotherapy, which is being applied to all the girls and their strange phobias.

Meanwhile he has the long-awaited interview with ‘Blofeld’ but is disconcerted to find a man significantly at odds with the reports of his appearance (Bond, of course, never met him in person in Thunderball). Where Blofeld was reported as immensely fat (20 stone), this Blofeld is lighter, taller and has no earlobes and also wears green (?) contact lenses (p.132).

So the narrative spends quite a few chapters slowly revealing details of the hypnotherapy, slowly revealing that each of the girls has a different phobia or allergy, each of them based on a different agricultural product (chicken, potatoes, beef cows and so on). Bond spends quiet days pretending to work studiously in his (bugged) room, poring over his books of genealogy, in the evenings enjoying the hearty meals and company of the giggling girls, having several interviews with Blofeld posing as Sir Hilary Bray, all the time trying to decide if this really is the Blofeld and what the devil he’s up to.

Two disconcerting incidents disturb the quiet flow of these days. Early on he is in his room when he hears a blood-curdling scream. Later, in the dining room, the girls are all gossiping that one of the ‘helps’ (a ‘Yugo’ named Bertil) tried to molest one of the girls; and Frau Bunt confirms the self-same man has had a terrible ‘accident’, slipping and falling down the mile-long iced bobsleigh run (unable to stop and travelling at speeds of over 60 mph, he will have been scoured and flayed to death by the ribbon-sharp ice walls.)

Secondly, Bond is at a particularly dicey moment in one of his interviews with Blofeld – a moment when Blofeld is apparently on the verge of bribing Sir Hilary – when two of the goons burst into the office and throw a blood-strewn figure down in front of him. To Bond’s horror, he realises it is the number 2 of Zurich Section, a man he knows is called Campbell (p.178).

The goons say he was caught snooping around the complex and Bond’s heart stops when the dazed, beaten-up Campbell recognises him and calls him by name – ‘James, help me, tell them I work from Universal Exports’ etc. Blofeld tells the goons to drag Campbell off to the Pressure Room where he will no doubt be tortured and then turns his green contact lenses on Bond. Bond bluffs confidently, ‘never saw the chap before in my life’ etc, but he knows it’s only a question of time till Blofeld’s men break Campbell who will blow Bond’s cover definitively.

Blofeld abruptly ends the interview and from that moment Bond is tensely planning his escape. He sidles into the ski locker room noting which pair would fit him (p.191), secretes a pair of goggles, steals the biggest pair of the girls’ gloves and so on. While poking around he opens a door into what appears to be a laboratory, illuminated by a dim red light, with sinister white-coated men moving about in it.

After a tense dinner with the girls who have obviously been told not to fraternise with him, Bond withdraws to his room, goes about his usual ablutions, and then pretends to fall asleep for the benefit of any hidden cameras or microphones.

Escape from the mountain

He gives it half an hour then gets up, dresses in his warmest gear, takes goggles, gloves, boots along to the ski room where he knocks out a guard (p.197). The phone rings (as in the corniest movie), Bond answers it in German and is told by the Head Goon that they are coming to arrest den Engländer in ten minutes. Ten minutes head start! Bond feverishly straps on boots, skis, grabs some sticks, exits the door onto the snow, locks it and throws away the key, then heads off as fast as he can down the piste.

There follows the only ski chase in the novels, although it was to become a common motif in the movies. Because it focuses on Bond’s consciousness as he tries to figure out the best way down the mountain, as he becomes aware that the ski lift is chasing him, as he cringes as bright flares are shot into the sky above him to make him an easy target – we don’t get descriptions of the pursuing forces, unlike the movies which dwell on pursuers as well as pursued. Bond has to guess what is going on behind him.

The chase ends as Bond deliberately skis out into a black run deep in new-fallen snow and deliberately triggers an avalanche. He then skis full tilt ahead of it, through a gap in a break of trees, through the narrow passage and then skis round into the protection of the woods. He and we are not absolutely sure but it seems like the pursuing skiers were swept away. As he continues downhill he gets to a road where he flies over and skewers with his ski stick a baddy who was shooting at him next to a car; Blofeld has obviously phoned his men in the valley.

In the same sequence he has seen a train steaming along the railway parallel to the road and realises he’s going to just about squeeze in front of it. The train has a snow clearing fan-rotivator fixed at the front to chew up fallen snow and spurt it out of the way. Bond whistles past it by a hair’s breadth but hears a terrible scream and then is pelted with red snow and clumps of hair and flesh from the goon pursuing him who was not so lucky (p.211).

Tracy to the rescue

Exhausted, dripping with sweat, body aching from the physical endurance test he’s just undergone (‘a grey-faced, lunging automaton’, p.212), Bond staggers on into the village at the foot of the mountain to discover it’s in the middle of a fiesta, with people everywhere drinking, wearing funny costumes, partying, congregating round a funfair and ice rink area.

Bond staggers up to the rink, not looking much the worse for wear than many other revellers, buys a ticket to the rink, gets a festival mask to wear and is staggeringly joining in some conga dancing, when up to him skates the fresh-faced, happy figure of Tracy, his beloved!

He knew she was in Italy but even so, this is a breath-taking coincidence. She immediately takes command of him, helping him towards her nifty Lancia sports car, both of them realising a crew of goons are watching out for him from a black Mercedes. As they hustle the last yards to her car, they realise the baddies have spotted them and are jumping into their car to give chase.

Cue a car chase along slippery, zig-zagging Alpine roads with the baddy car slowly accelerating and firing shots at them whenever there’s a straight line of fire, until Tracy and Bond hurtle round a corner to see a big Warning notice directing people away from a bridge which is being repaired. Bond jumps out and reverses the direction of the signs, so that the Sedan, hurtling round the corner seconds later, takes the wrong turn and goes flying over a cliff wheeeeee smashing and rebounding and crashing to the rocks below. Bond rejoins Tracy in her car and passes out before she’s even got going again.

A proposal of marriage

A few hours later they are in grey Zurich airport at dawn. Bond firms up his tickets for a flight back to London, then goes goes to sit with Tracy. She has tended his wounds and now is concerned at his wrecked state, at his health, his future. Suddenly Bond realises this is what he wants more than anything else in the world: the love of a good woman. And as he lets himself feel his love for Tracy flood through him, it dawns on him that he also needs to love. To his own surprise he asks her to marry him, and she accepts (p.231). Suddenly they are gleeful as children, and set about making plans to be married at the British Embassy in Munich. He has to fly back to London to sort out business; she will drive to Munich, sort out hotels and practicalities.

The conspiracy unmasked

Cut to later that day in London, where Bond has submitted his report to M who has called in some experts from the Ministry of Agriculture, the smartly dressed, beady-eyed Mr Franklin (p.248, it is Christmas Day but no-one is observing the niceties).

In between sleeping with her, Bond had extracted from Ruby a list of the names of the other girls who were receiving the hypnotherapy at Blofeld’s base, and got Ruby to indicate roughly where in the UK they lived (p.186).

The Agriculture expert examines the list, then points out that each of the girls lives in the main production region for the product they claimed to have a phobia of – ie one each to the country’s main areas of potato, chicken, beef production, and so on.

Now it just so happens (very conveniently for the plot) that one of the girls had already left Blofeld’s headquarters and returned to the turkey-producing region of East Anglia a few weeks earlier, and within weeks there had been the most severe outbreak of turkey blight in Britain’s history.

So the team in M’s office hypothesise that the girls are not only being hypnotised to overcome their phobias, but are being issued with germ warfare sprays or aerosols which they are being told to release at trade fairs and sales rooms ‘to boost and improve the nation’s stock’. Except the sprays infect the livestock or crops with virulent diseases: Blofeld’s fiendish plan is to decimate Britain’s agricultural sector and bring the nation to its knees.

Bond is ordered to travel back to Switzerland and foil this dastardly plot. He phones Tracy to tell her he has a bit of business to look after, but will join her in Munich in a few days time.

In Marseilles with Marc-Ange

First stop on the mission to capture Blofeld is Marseilles, the base of Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange Draco. Bond has an entertaining taxi ride from one of Marc-Ange’s tough Marseillais, along with some interesting travelogue description of France’s toughest city, and arrives at Marc-Ange’s base in a dockside warehouse to ask him a favour.

Marc-Ange is thrilled to bits that Bond is actually going to marry his daughter, as he wanted all along. So Bond takes advantage to ask him for a wedding present: will he and his organisation help him organise a raid on Blofeld’s mountain-top retreat? Marc-Ange willingly says yes and the men get down to careful planning, along with several of Marc-Ange’s lieutenants.

Shootout on a hilltop

Marc-Ange is given an interesting speech about how irritating the political situation is in France (1962-63) with the country tearing itself apart over whether to give its African colony, Algeria, independence. The conflict has led to the emergence of a far-right military organisation, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), devoted to keeping the colony French, whose most notorious action was an attempt to assassinate the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in August 1962. (This historical incident forms the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s superb thriller, The Day of The Jackal.) Marc-Ange complains to Bond that the criminal activities of the OSS – and the counter-measures of the special French security agency set up to combat them – have made for peace-loving criminals like himself and his Union Corse much harder (p.285).

Marc-Ange Draco is a humorous, winning character, one of Fleming’s best.

Turns out a renegade OAS General Salan has a helicopter at his remote chateau near Strasbourg and owes Marc-Ange a few favours. So he, his top men and Bond drive there, clamber into the helicopter (recently repainted with innocuous civilian markings) and fly south to Blofeld’s alpine headquarters.

Blofeld’s HQ issues various radio warnings but the chopper lands anyway and Marc-Ange’s men emerge to a stand-off with Blofeld’s tough goons. Two things happen: Bond notices a figure making a break from the back of the building and running towards the ski and bobsleigh shed – must be Blofeld – so Bond himself breaks into a sprint towards him. This sudden movement, plus some of the goons recognising Bond, prompts them to draw their weapons, Marc-Ange’s men to do ditto, and a massive firefight breaks out.

Bond sees Blofeld pull out a ‘skeleton’ one-man bobsleigh and throw himself into the run. He dashes into the shed, ransacking equipment out of the way till he finds another single bobsleigh, also throws it into the run, and there follows a typically detailed and hair-raising description of Bond hurtling down the run at terrifying speed, vainly trying to slow himself with the tips of his boots, finding himself thrown against the icy walls on curves which instantly rip off his protecting coat and flay the skin of his elbows. Still he is gaining on Blofeld and risks a few experimental shots from his pistol when he notices Blofeld throw a small object into the run. With horror he realises it’s a hand grenade, tries and fails to slow the sleigh, then the grenade explodes and throws him and sleigh out of the groove and into the adjacent snow.

Slowly he comes round, realises he has a cut head and a few other bruises but is basically OK. Back onto the badly mangled sleigh he climbs, which limps, grinding its bent runners on the ice, down the run to the bottom. As he descends Bond hears explosions from the mountain top and, as he finally arrives at the ski lift station at the bottom of the mountain, looks up to see Blofeld’s HQ on fire, and then Marc-Ange’s helicopter flying over him and away to safety. Mission accomplished.

Fire engines and police start to arrive and Bond pretends to be an innocent bystander who’s been injured by the broken cable of the chairlift whiplashing across him. The engine gives him a lift to the nearest station and he catches a train north into Germany.

Marriage in Munich

There are numerous pages of the kind of comfy domestic scene which Fleming does unexpectedly well. There are, for example, humorous scenes with Bond pretending to be exasperated at the amount of fuss Tracy is making about getting married; and then a comedy cruise with a Munich taxi driver to choose a wedding and engagement ring, during which spy and taxi driver become good friends (the latter admitting he was a Luftwaffe pilot in the war, and proud of it!) before they repair to a bar for Bond’s last drinking session of singledom.

The wedding itself is described with similar good humour, the British consul enthusiastically throwing confetti at the newly-wed couple which completely misses and goes all over the stocky, swarthy mafia father-in-law, Marc-Ange Draco.

They jump into Tracy’s Lancia, festooned with ribbons and balloons and motor off down Germany’s excellent Autobahns towards the village they’ve selected for their honeymoon. A few pages describing the scenery and their pleasant motoring lull the reader into a false sense of security – but when Bond waves past the flashy, red Maserati that’s been following them from a distance, when there is a sudden hail of bullets, the windscreen explodes and the car goes careering off the road into trees, crashing and Bond just has time to realise the Maserati contained Blofeld and Bunt – before he blacks out.

When he comes to, Bond sees Tracy dead, slumped forward against the steering wheel, the blood beginning to spread down her shoulders, shot by the occupants of the Maserati. A German motorcycle cop appears by the car, looking appalled at the scene of bloodshed. ‘What happened?’ he asks. It’s alright Bond replies, cuddling his murdered wife in his arms. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

I read these lines on a south-bound train on the Victoria line and confess they brought a tear to my eye. The contrast between the ten or 15 pages of whimsy and humour leading up to the wedding are smashed so brutally, and so quickly. And the poignancy of the ending, and Bond’s final stoic despairing phrase… The pacing and control which produce the emotional punch show what a very good writer Fleming was.

Biological warfare

It is interesting that this is a new enough idea for the scene in M’s office on Christmas Day to feature a detailed explanation by the man from the Ministry of Agriculture – explaining the nature and impact of Biological Warfare (chapter 22).

Marriage / all the time in the world

Bond intended to marry Vesper Lynd in the very first book of the series, until she revealed herself as a Russian double agent and killed herself. The thought has occurred to him with respect to several other girls, but this is the only time he goes through with it.

In the last few books I’d begun to notice that the phrase ‘all the time in the world’ seems to crop up at least once, like a slender thread or leitmotif. Now, here at the end of OHMSS, it is used no fewer than three times – the first two times reflecting humorous confidence:

‘Drinks,’ said Bond firmly. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world to talk about love.’ (p.314)

‘No,’ said Bond. ‘Let him go. We’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.324)

– which makes its repetition as the book’s final, bleak, tear-filled line all the more affecting.

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see – ‘ Bond’s head sank against hers and he whispered into her hair – ‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.325)

Male bonding

No sign of Felix Leiter for once. Instead Bond has a ‘bromance’ with Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange. Just like Darko Kerim in From Russia With Love, Bond warms to the older man’s vitality, the spirit of life which is in him – his capableness, his confidence, his honesty and frankness, his dry sense of humour, his vibrant animal spirits.

[Bond] had developed much love, and total respect, for this man. He couldn’t say why. It was partly animal magnetism and partly that Marc-Ange had opened his heart to Bond, so completely trusted him with his own innermost secrets. (p.279)

Bond lost his father when he was young (as did Fleming). The sense of attraction to an older, mature and confident man after his own heart, the depth of the bond Bond makes with these men, convinces because it taps into something deep in Fleming’s own psyche, and inspires writing which conveys real feeling.

Bond biographical details

We learn that Bond’s mother was Swiss, his father Scottish, from the Highlands, near Glencoe (p.71). Loelia Ponsonby, Bond’s secretary for all the preceding books, has finally moved on, marrying a boring conventional man who works at the Baltic Exchange. She’s been replaced by ex-WREN Mary Goodnight, ‘a honey’ with the vital statistics 37-22-35. A £5 sweepstake has been organised by the male members of the office on who will bed her first with Bond equal favourite with 006, an ex-Royal Marine (p.68). (We’d heard of a 008 and 011 as long ago as the first book; this is the first mention of 006.)

He is driving his favourite car, not the DB III of Goldfinger, but a Continental Bentley, ‘the R type chassis with the big 6 engine and a 13:40 back-axle ratio’ (p.12).

Bond dislikes, in fact ‘abhors’, shoelaces (p.21). He has a new piece of equipment, a Syncraphone, an early version of the bleeper, which works within a ten-mile radius of the office (p.67).

At the Royal College of Heralds Bond is told he may be very remotely descended from a Baronet in the 17th century and remotely connected to the founder of Bond Street. The old family motto was ‘The world is not enough’ which, of course, was used as the title of the 19th Bond movie, starring Pierce Brosnan.

Credit

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming was published in April 1963 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2002 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers published in 1963

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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2016

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Thunderball by Ian Fleming (1961)

Bond laughed, partly in admiration. ‘You’ve been taking mescalin or something. It’s a damned good sequence for a comic strip, but these things don’t happen in real life.’
(Dr No, page 168)

Shrublands

The tremendous battering Fleming has submitted Bond to over the previous seven novels begins to show, as M – a recent convert to healthy living and wholefood diets – insists he takes a rest cure at a sanatorium in Sussex named ‘Shrublands’. Fleming’s description is amusingly sardonic throughout, from the brylcreemed youth who drives him in a taxi to the spa, through the old health food ‘doctor’ who prescribes his rest cure treatments, to the repellent, fat, old men and women who populate the place.

Bond submits with bad grace to the round of massages, hot baths, and the starvation diet of nut cutlets and dandelion tea, though there are several highlights: 1. He flirts with the unusually pretty, firm-bodied and ‘strict’ health therapist Patricia Fearing until, with dumb inevitability, while she’s massaging him he reaches up and kisses her. For all her flurried objections, Bond knows it is a done deal, and (rather callously) describes bonking her in her little bubble car up on the Sussex Downs.

2. More importantly, someone tries to kill him. He notices a tiny tattoo on the wrist of another ‘guest’, the handsome six-foot Count Lippe, then makes a bad mistake by phoning the Cipher Section of the Service to ask about the tattoo, from a public payphone in the sanatorium’s corridor. Turns out the tattoo is the sign of the Tongs, a secret society based in Macau.

Later the delectable Ms Fearing straps Bond into a complicated spine-stretching apparatus as part of his treatment and leaves the room – only for Lippe to sneak in and turn the machine way up past the danger zone, so that Bond’s body is literally being torn apart. It is only the accidental return of Ms Fearing a bit earlier than scheduled that saves his life. Bond laughs it off as a mishap but plans his revenge and, on the last day of his stay, ambushes Lippe who is sitting in a ‘sweat box’. Bond turns its thermostat up to a scalding 180 degrees.

Bond leaves Shrublands feeling lighter, toned up, fitter and more focused than for years, having bonked a pretty nurse and scored a petty act of revenge.

What he doesn’t realise is that he has impinged on a conspiracy to shake the governments of the world! Chapter five introduces us to Ernst Stavro Blofeld – the most notorious Bond baddie – giving his full backstory as a gifted Polish engineer who set up a bogus spy ring in pre-war Poland and screwed money out of various buyers, before setting up another ring in Turkey during the war itself, then clearing out to South America. Now he is back and he has invented SPECTRE, SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, as a clearing house for all kinds of criminal activities.

Meeting of SPECTRE

In the next scene we are introduced to a meeting of the top men in SPECTRE at a non-descript house in Paris. They are all allotted numbers, and comprise cells of men recruited from the French and Italian Mafia, SMERSH, American underworld gangs etc. Their undisputed leader is Blofeld. Blofeld reads out the monthly summary of profits from their various criminal activities – then melodramatically moves on to punish one of the members seated round the big table. This man is accused of violating a young girl who had been kidnapped, and SPECTRE had promised to return unharmed. Blofeld announces that SPECTRE returned half the kidnap ransom and now the guilty man is punished by the activation of electric pads in his chair which electrocute and virtually cook him. His smoking body slumps onto the table. The other members take this as due justice. This is SPECTRE. Blofeld’s word is law. They then proceed to discuss ‘the Omega Plan’.

This scene feels every bit as overblown and teenage as the movies.

The letter

Next thing Bond knows he’s called in by M who gives him a letter claiming SPECTRE has hijacked an RAF bomber (the fictional Vindicator) carrying two atomic bombs. The governments of the West have one week to hand over £100,000,000 or they’ll explode one of the bombs at a site worth exactly that amount. Then, a day later, if no money is delivered, they’ll explode the other bomb at a major world city.

Frankly, this threat made me nervous and edgy in light of our current geopolitical situation, and I didn’t enjoy thinking about it. Bond is told that the intelligence forces of the Western world have gone into overdrive, everyone and everything is being thrown at the problem. But M has a hunch: before it disappeared off the radar the hijacked Vindicator descended into the main East-West Atlantic traffic (to conceal itself). A few hours later the American DEW radar system detected a plane making a sharp turn south, just off the US coast. M has a hunch it was the baddy plane, and goes to investigate maps of the region. As a result, M thinks the Bahamas might be a perfect hiding place for the crooks, out of the way but not far from the US mainland, no real military or radar presence – good place to ditch a plane. So he is dispatching Bond to the Bahamas to see what he can see. Bond is disgruntled because he thinks he’s being sent on a wild goose chase.

Capturing the plane

There is then a long sequence which describes, in retrospect, how the Italian ‘observer’ on the hijacked plane, Giuseppe Petacchi a) poisoned the five man crew by opening a cyanide capsule in the cockpit, then b) pulled the bodies out of the way and flew the plane single-handedly down into the busy East-West Atlantic commercial plane traffic, then veered south towards the Caribbean, exactly as M hypothesised. Here, overcoming nerves, he locks onto the radio signal then onto the landing lights put out by SPECTRE and skillfully crash lands the plane on the surface of the sea. Proud and happy he walks along the wing of the slowly settling plane towards the motorboat of SPECTRE men who have come to meet him and the first one aboard casually slips a stiletto up under his jaw and into his brain which kills him immediately. Not very nice people.

We are introduced to Number 1 (SPECTRE numbers rotate on a monthly basis) Emilio Largo, a superbly fit figure of a man, Olympic swimmer, fencer etc (p.126), scion of a noble Roman family, with a hooked nose, the mouth of a satyr and enormous hands. He supervises the concealment of the sunken plane and the retrieval of the two atom bombs – using the facilities of his superb, purpose-built, luxury catamaran, the Disco Volante (Italian for ‘flying saucer’, p.134).

There is a tame nuclear physicist on board the ship and on the payroll, Kotze, who is given a speech explaining how you defuse an atomic bomb, then arm it with a timed fuse so you can drop it somewhere and make your getaway. As he explains all this to Largo (and the reader), Largo is wondering when the moment will be right to ‘eliminate’ him. Not very nice people. The bombs are stashed in a remote coral island, and this phase of the mission is complete.

Bond in the Bahamas

Once again Bond is in the sunny Caribbean – in this, as in many other respects, Thunderball feels like a rehash of themes and settings. Bond has quickly latched onto Largo’s mistress, Dominetta ‘Domino’ Vitali, an independent-spirited, beautiful young woman. (The way she is named after a game is reminiscent of Solitaire.) He accidentally on purpose bumps into her in a general store in Nassau and invites himself for a drive in her sporty MG then a drink and get-to-know-you. (We see Bond through her eyes, six foot, black hair, scar on right jaw, cruel smile, confident, p.145).

There is then another flashback, taking us how through Bond got to this point (exactly as the letter from the terrorists was followed by the account of the hijack of the plane which preceded it).

So we learn that Bond arrived in Nassau and went straight to a High Priority meeting with the Governor, Police Commissioner etc. He said he’s looking for a group of 10 or 20 or 30 men, decent and respectable, engaged on a completely innocent purpose, who probably arrived in the fairly recent past. The Police Commissioner mentions the annual Treasure Hunt crew: every year a yacht goes looking for legendary sunken treasure. This year it’s the Disco Volante owned by Emilio Largo, who has been joined by about twenty shareholders in the venture. Bingo!

—This is a really glaring example of the general rule that there is no detection in James Bond. Mr Big, Hugo Drax, Goldfinger, they are all identified very early on as the bad guys – the narrative interest comes not from slowly unveiling the truth, but from the elaborate skirting round each other, which leads to the torture scenes and then the final showdown. a) M had a hunch the hijacked plane flew to the Bahamas and, guess what, he’s dead right b) the police suggest the Largo’s treasure hunters are the only group that fit Bond’s bill and, guess what, they’re dead right.

Bond has identified the baddies by page 180 of this 350-page novel, though admittedly he isn’t absolutely certain they are the ones and, as his snooping makes him more and more certain, he still doesn’t know where the bombs are hidden. 170 pages remain of, well, snooping round, getting caught, getting beaten up, chatting up the girl, escaping, probably a climactic shoot-out of some kind…

Felix Leiter

Bond had asked for help from the CIA and goes to the airport to meet the agent who’s flying in with a state-of-the-art Geiger counter. It is – with heavy inevitability – Felix Leiter, his old bosom buddy with the metal hook instead of a hand (the result of being half-eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die). Leiter allows Fleming to really let his hair down and write loads of American pulp dialogue, with Bond joining in; their buddy conversations are always fun to read. But this is all very familiar territory.

Bond tells Leiter everything and invites him to go with him out to the Disco Volante, Bond posing as a rich Londoner who wants to buy the house Largo is currently renting. Largo is hospitality itself and shows them all over the impressive catamaran and promises to get his ‘niece’ (Domino) to show him the beach-front house. Leiter and Bond depart in their rented motorboat debating whether Mr Largo is really as squeaky clean as he seems – he didn’t show them about half the volume of the boat but then it is on a secret treasure hunt so why should he? And they didn’t see any of the ‘shareholders’ but then it was siesta time, maybe they were all napping…

There may be suspense for Bond, but there is none for the reader.

Confirmations

In quick succession:

1. Bond goes to the Nassau casino that evening where he meets Largo and Domino. First – in a scene which echoes the intense card game scenes in Casino Royale or Moonraker, Bond takes on Largo at baccarat and just about wins. He deliberately spooks Largo by mentioning the word ‘spectre’ several times to see what affect it has. Then Largo encourages him to go have a drink with Domino. She tells him her extended fantasy about the man portrayed on the front of packs of Players cigarettes, an entertaining piece of whimsy which reminds us that Fleming was also the author of the smash hit children’s story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For the purposes of the plot, she lets slip that her real family name is Petacchi and that she has a beloved brother who is something in the air force. Like the Italian observer flying in the Vindicator. What a coincidence.

2. Bond borrows a scuba diving kit and swims underwater out to the Disco Volante. He confirms that there is a great seam in the hull which probably opens to allow ingress and egress of possibly naughty machinery. Barely has he done so than he is clobbered by the butt of a compressed gas harpoon and has a vividly described fight with an underwater guard, presumably from the boat which ends when the guard is attacked by a six foot barracuda. Dazed, Bond just about makes it back to shore and the waiting policeman who has accompanied him.

3. Bond and Leiter rent an amphibious plane and go scouting low over the sea, looking for the sunken plane. The odd circling of three sharks prompts Bond to go back to a particular area, land and again scuba dive to the ocean bed where, sure enough, he finds the plane hidden under a large tarpaulin. Fleming again gives a vivid description of the foulness of the water, polluted with the five corpses, and of their wrecked appearance, half eaten by sea creatures. He is particularly memorable on the interior of the plane which is absolutely stuffed with small octopuses which are eating the dead air crew. For the purposes of the plot he discovers a) the atom bombs are not on board – they have been removed, b) the body of Giuseppe Petacchi, and snaps off his identity tag, along with the rest of the crews, before finally escaping the nightmare scene and resurfacing by the flying boat.

While flying around and scouring maps, Leiter and Bond had discussed possible targets for SPECTRE’s attacks. They speculate that the first one might be against the NATO missile-firing base ‘at a place called North-West Cay at the eastern end of the Grand Bahamas’ (p.199). They fly near it, observing the rocket gantries, missile launchers, radar beacons and the rest of the paraphernalia.

Bond and Leiter had been keeping their respective services informed of developments and now are told that senior military men are flying in and Washington has dispatched a nuclear submarine, no less, to Nassau. Bond and Leiter must obey these orders, but have still not located the exact location of the bombs.

Snogging Domino

Back from the flight, and having assimilated the responses of their services, it is still daytime and Bond phones Domino at the house she and Largo are renting and casually asks if she’d like to go swimming. She gives directions to the beach where she’ll be and Bond races there in a Land Rover borrowed from the Governor’s staff. There follows a strange interlude which is meant to be moving: for Bond is affectionate and kind to her, all the time knowing he is about to break the news to her that her brother is dead, and that he was more than likely involved in a massive conspiracy to blackmail the world’s governments.

She emerges from the sea with some bits of black sea urchin in her foot and Bond very gently, very sensuously, sucks them out for her. Then carries her up to the primitive changing rooms and there they make love. And only then, does he tell her the truth. Tears. Recriminations. I hate you. Slowly she recovers as he presses on her the importance of the situation. Eventually he recruits her: will she agree to go on board the Disco Volante with the Geiger counter-disguised-as-a-camera which he will give her and snoop about: if she finds something come on deck; if nothing, remain in her cabin.

Bond leaves her to be collected by the Disco Volante and motors back to the docks to join the police who are now keeping it under surveillance. There is a message to join Leiter for the arrival of the nuclear submarine.

Nuclear submarine

The USS Manta arrives and Leiter and Bond go onboard to be greeted by the cheerful, confident commander P. Pedersen. They brief him on the whole situation including the crux that they don’t know where the bombs are. At this point they are all informed the Disco Volante has weighed anchor and steamed off north-west. The girl didn’t come up on deck, the pre-arranged signal that there were no bombs aboard, if she managed to carry out her search and not get caught, that is…

But Bond is still concerned: a) If the sub intercepts the Volante, they still won’t have the bombs and it’s just possible some other team is gathering and deploying them; b) Captain Pedersen informs Bond and Leiter the catamaran can skate easily over the countless reefs and shallows in the area, whereas the Manta can only follow guaranteed deep water channels, so they can’t give close chase to the baddies.

Aboard the Disco Volante

Cut to the interior of the Disco Volante, where Largo has called an emergency meeting of the ‘shareholders’ ie the other SPECTRE crooks. He announces to the shocked meeting that Domino was found snooping round with a camera which, on closer inspection, turned out to a Geiger counter: looks like someone put her up to it, so someone is on to them.

Domino has been detained and will be tortured to find out who commissioned her snooping. Meanwhile, the Omega plan goes ahead. The meeting is disrupted by one of the Russian delegates who sows seeds of doubt, saying while some of them are being frogmen accompanying the bomb to its destination, who’s to say the boat won’t weight anchor and scarper, leaving them in the lurch. Largo replies by shooting the complainer three times. We get the picture: SPECTRE are ruthless people.

Then Largo goes down to the cabin where Domino is tied spread-eagled to a bed, rips off her clothes and leans over her naked vulnerable body with a lighted cigar and a bucket of ice cubes, and starts to torture her. [This feels like it steps over a line: Fleming torturing Bond is one thing, as happens in the earlier novels – Bond is the hero and at least part of the mind of the male reader is experiencing the physical ordeals vicariously and wondering how he would fare. I think this is the first time we’ve seen a woman be tortured, really sadistically, cold-bloodedly tortured, and it’s not only not entertaining, but it feels wrong for Bond’s persona, for the feel of the books.]

Underwater fight

Bond and Leiter are aboard the American sub. The commander is under orders to take their orders, so Bond gives out a plan of battle to the best ten hand-picked men. They will wear skin-diving outfits, use makeshift spears, and attack Largo’s men wherever they find them.

Hours later the sub makes contact with the Wavekrest anchored off North-West Cay, the missile testing base, just as Bond and Leiter had speculated. Bond, Leiter and the ten best men suit up and exit the submarine with their makeshift weapons. They approach in a flanking movement the SPECTRE crew, but Bond immediately realises the odds are against them, as there are many more of the baddies, who have also got little propeller packs on their backs giving them greater mobility. In the middle of his posse sits Largo, riding an underwater sub which is towing the bomb.

A massive fight breaks out, Bond skewers several bad guys, before himself getting cut, cuffed, then saves Leiter’s life as a bad guy is about to shoot him, then escapes the melee to hunt down Largo. Largo is still riding the mini-sub and Bond throws himself onto it, they have a desperate cat-fight, but Bond manages to slip back onto the rudder and twist it so the machine rears up and breaks the surface, throwing them both off.

Exhausted Bond sinks to the bottom, only for Largo, still fighting fit, to approach him spear-gun at the ready. In a typically Flemingesque ghoulish detail, Largo clamps a baby octopus over Bond’s mask then puts his enormous hands round his throat to strangle him (ah, those enormous hands which have been continually referred to) and Bond is passing out, everything is going black, when….

The pressure has gone, Bond wipes the octopus away, Largo is on the ocean bed flailing with a big spear through his neck, and the girl Domino is behind him, harpoon gun in hand, her body covered in ugly red burn marks from the torture. Together, the wounded hero and heroine struggle to the surface.

Bond has been cut by a harpoon, clubbed in the head, exhausted himself fighting the rudder of the min-sub and then nearly strangled to death, all but blacking out before Domino saved him – but this, like many of the other scenes, felt to me rather like going through the motions: Bond has to be beaten to within an inch of his life because this is what happens in all Bond novels – it doesn’t necessarily follow from the actual action.

Certainly it was a tough fight, but doesn’t compare to being nearly incinerated at the climax of Moonraker, tortured to a bloody pulp in Casino Royale, or subjected to the degrading punishment in Dr No. His suffering, like so much else in the novel, feels willed in order to fit a formula.

Epilogue

Bond in hospital, as at the end of so many other adventures. Leiter visits and tells him what happened: CIA, MI6 et al now know all about SPECTRE, have identified Blofeld (who got away), their plan had been to bomb the missile launching base, then make Miami the second target. 10 men from the yacht including Largo were killed, six of the 10 volunteers from the submarine ditto, both bombs were successfully recovered. And, wow! that girl – she escaped by squeezing through a porthole with a diving suit and a harpoon gun, and saved Bond’s life. Totally believable.

Then Leiter’s gone – but all Bond wants to know about is Domino: Is she alive? How is she? Bond’s doctor comes in next and Bond feverishly asks after the girl. After hesitation, the doc tells Bond she’s next door, still in great pain from having been cruelly burned and tortured. Bond staggers into the next room, holds Domino’s hand as she regains consciousness and weakly murmurs to him, then collapses to the floor and passes out. She moves her pillow so she can lie and watch him.

The book may be manipulative, sentimental slop concocted from preposterous escapades and ridiculous escapes, but something in the desperation of their commitment, the fierceness of their ‘love’, made me burst into tears. Maybe all really fierce, heart-breaking loves are emblems of all others.

Co-authorship

By 1960 Fleming was deeply involved in various schemes for turning his creation into TV series or movies. Thunderball the novel itself originated as the screenplay for a movie which was a collaborative effort between Fleming and four others – Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo. After he published the novel, Fleming was sued by two of the collaborators who claimed part authorship of the plot, and the part ownership of the copyright explains why two movie adaptations were subsequently made, by different production companies (Thunderball 1965 and Never Say Never Again 1983 both, rather confusingly, starring Sean Connery.)

I may be influenced by this knowledge, but I think you can feel this troubled origin in the book: in certain turns of phrase which are unusual for Fleming, and in the way the plot – although just as garish and grandiose as other Bond novels – is somehow also very heavy and lumpy. Nuclear weapon threatens major city was the plot of Moonraker; the Caribbean was the setting of Live and Let Die, Dr No, the opening of For Your Eyes Only and tropical diving was the theme of The Hildebrand Rarity.

By this, the ninth book, it feels like the building blocks of a Bond novel have become so well-defined that they are transforming into clichés in front of the reader’s eyes.

Credit

‘Thunderball’ by Ian Fleming was published in 1961 by Jonathan Cape. Page references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers published in 1961

James Bond reviews

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by Simon on May 18, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Novel, Sex, Spy novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on May 18, 2016

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