n  ***2018 Summer of Spies***n

”At 7:30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12th, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead.”

Having just recently finished Lycett’s biography of Ian Fleming, the above passage sent me flipping through my notes about that author, where I found this quotation that I had noted:

”After his death his widow Ann put it in much the same way. “You must realize that Ian was entirely egocentric. His aim as long as I knew him was to avoid the dull, the humdrum, the everyday demands of life that afflict ordinary people. He stood for working out a way of life that was not boring and he went where that led him. It ended with Bond.”

The conjunction of the two books made me smile. I’ve also recently finished reading Somerset Maugham’s spy novel, Ashenden. It also features a beautiful Russian woman—the protagonist spends a week with her to confirm their compatibility and instead finds her boring and demanding.

”But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness that did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.”

A wildly different response to the care and attention that Bond expends on Tatiana Romanova.

And wow, the first cliff hanger ending of the Bond series, showing how uncertain Fleming was about whether he would continue to write these adventures. Partly because of the criticism of conservative reviewers and the sniping of his wife’s circle of friends (which included Maugham). Ian became quite testy about his wife’s friends for this very reason. I think he would be pleased to know that Bond is still “a thing” even now in the 21st century.

4.5 stars- I really enjoyed this instalment in the James Bond collection. The initial focus on Russia had me gripped from the start. As with every Bond book, there are parts that have really not aged well (e.g. hitting a woman if she eats too much). But with that aside, this was an excellent thriller, involving fight scenes with intriguing gadgets. The novel made me experience various emotions and many of the characters are very interesting!

Best in the series?

This is the best Bond novel by Ian Fleming (possibly followed by Moonraker). It has high stakes, an intricate plot and the back story of the villains is fantastic. Fleming offers it all here, truly fantastic...

Fun read and I can only imagine how influential this was during the time of its release. Pulling back the iron curtain and giving the West a glimpse of the world of Soviet spies, the story is enjoyable and memorable.

5/10

To date this and “Live and Let Die” are on par for the worst James Bond book I’ve read to date. This book was basically split into 3 parts over 350 pages of which none were interesting and only the final part offering anything in the way of action or tension.

The first part involved nothing but Russian diplomats scheming. It was 130 pages of filler, just a lot of backdrop into the Russian secret departments and some of the characters who will be popping up later. Bond wasn’t in this part at all and only mentioned when the Russians were plotting to murder a jolly good gent from the British Secret Service with them plumping with Bond because, well why not?!

The second part involved Bond (finally introduced nearly half way through) and M suspecting there is a trap set for them to retrieve a woman damsel in distress from the Russian side as she is in love with Bond, even though the two have never met, and wants to bring across lots of secrets. Only a slight eyebrow is raised at this and they think they will go ahead with the mission to save her. This leads Bond to Turkey to meet one of their contacts over there and to suss out whether it really is a trap or if Bond’s sex appeal can really travel that far and woo women with just his picture (it’s a trap you egotistical idiot!!). After some toing and froing Bond decides this isn’t a trap, the woman is madly in love with him and they will take her back to England to be debriefed (in more ways than one!). And there is also some gypsy women fighting in-between because, well why not?!
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This leads to the final act where Bond and damsel try to go back to England on the Orient Express. What can go wrong? Well, a lot as it turns out. People are dying left right and centre but the train steams on without a care for the dead bodies piling up all over the place. Bond gets in a fight for his life and that of his new love (it’s still a trap you idiot! Oh wait, you know that now). Bond wins as he always does because the idiot bad guy tells him his plan instead of just killing him. Henchmen just ain’t what they used to be. The story does end quite surprisingly with a bit of a cliffhanger and something that would be stolen for the finale of the TV show “24”, series 2. It worked well but as there are another 9 Bond stories to go at we know he’s ok.

After the disappointment of this book I’m taking a short hiatus away from reading this series. I was planning on reading one a month after receiving the set for Christmas but that has to change otherwise I will forever tarnish my memory of Bond’s good name.

If you like this try: The film, as that is actually decent.

If this is love then I’d hate to see the Russian idea of hate.

The Soviets have suffered several espionage losses so they decide to run an elaborate operation in which they’ll kill British agent James Bond in such a way that will embarrass all of English intelligence. The two big pieces of cheese in this mousetrap are a code machine used by the Russians and a beautiful code clerk named Tatiana Romanova who doesn’t realize what kind of pawn she actually is. Will Bond take the bait? Well, he is James Bond, and did I mention that that Tatiana is a beautiful woman? Yeah, take a guess how this goes.

I’m a big fan of Bond on film and generally like those a lot more than the Fleming novels I’ve tried. With this one being the basis for one of the best Bond movies I didn’t find anything to change my mind about that. Bond is usually a bastard in both forms, but there’s something even worse and apt to make me roll my eyes in the way that he’s even more of a privileged sexist bigot on the page then any time on screen.

Plus, the structure of this novel is just weird. It’s only 191 pages, but Bond doesn’t show up until halfway through it. Instead we spend a lot of time getting all the details about how the Soviets came up with this plan. Even when Bond finally appears we get a long segment about how he’s been bored at the office and what his domestic life is like when he's not killing people or having sex. Another problem is that since we’ve been told in detail exactly what trap awaits Bond there’s not a lot of mystery for the reader even when 007 is trying to figure it out.

Although to be fair, the movie also lays out the plan, but there it’s done much more quickly so that Bond gets involved much sooner. In fact, the basic plot beats from the book are used in the film, but the film did a better job of pacing and adding action to the mix. Since I do like the movie a lot I guess that means the basic plot works as long as it moves briskly.

Still, it is one of the classic Bond stories, and there is some charm to this including some spy vs. spy games in Turkey. It also has a top notch thug in the form of Red Grant, a psychopath from the United Kingdom who defected to Russia and became their chief executioner. If there was more of him in here I think I would have liked it more.

Ian Fleming încearcă un pic de proză mai literară, încearcă să fie mai șmecher decât în celelalte cărți, și nu prea îi reușește. Rezultatul e o poveste care se desfășoară pe jumătate fără Bond, destul de subțirică și cu foarte puțină logică. În fine, îi dăm două stele pentru că se putea și mai rău.

My second (and quite possibly final) Bond book. 

On the heels of reading 'Dr. No', this follow-up experience is basically an all-too-similar one. On the one hand, it could be that I'm just not the audience for this (at least, as is). On the other, it shares a number of deficiencies found in 'Dr. No' (i.e., maniacal killers giving long-winded, nonchalant backstory speeches just as they're about to kill?!; seriously?!) and, frankly, the writing is largely flaccid. 

There's one rather notable exception: the way Fleming opens this novel. The first several chapters (esp. Chapter One) are surprisingly good; they seemed the work of a different (and better) writer. Fleming's opening attack is not a mere gambit. It reads as a conscious and immensely clever maneuver, to give us a textured deep-dive into the mind of the novel's principal liquidator. It's riveting stuff. 

~ with its massage setting for a large portion, it's even sexy, in a disquieting way. (~ and largely thrown away in the film version, though there wouldn't be a way to duplicate it properly; there's too much that's internal.):n  

By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swimming pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her. But that wasn't what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man's back. It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen.
None of this horror showed in the flat, impassive face of the masseuse... but inside her the animal whimpered and cringed and her pulse-rate, if it had occurred to her to take it, would have been high.

nSpeaking of the film... many seem to think it's one of the best in the series simply because it remains rather faithful to the book. But it does more than that; it improves on it by shaping / sharpening / helping potential become realized. It still could have been better but it has a commercial slickness that sells it.

For the sake of his place in this genre's history, I'm glad to have finally spent a little time with Fleming. But, as a writer, I can't say his work engages me much.

Fascinante y malísima a la vez. No sé que decir con esta novela, una de las novelas más aclamadas de James Bond. No hay duda de que la fuerza del personaje es tremenda, casi un mito moderno, pero la trama es tan absurda que hay pocos asideros a que agarrarse. Pero alguno hay, y el final resulta trepidante y emocionante.

Spoilers: De entrada James Bond no aparece por la novela hasta el primer tercio. Antes, los soviéticos, mega malos, más rígidos que un palo, todos en un estado de terror estalinista y de odio al enemigo que parece una caricatura. Conocemos a Donovan Grant, un asesino irlandés y peludo a sueldo de los rusos, tan cachas como asexuado, un tipo que en las noches de luna llena sufre una transformación psíquica y siente deseos de matar a alguien. El tipo es llamado a una reunión con los jefes soviéticos, unos malos idiotas que piensan que para aterrorizar a occidente lo mejor es cargarse a su agente secreto estrella. También pululan por ahí un maestro de ajedrez, un campeón ruso que es llamado al Kremlin en mitad de una partida por el campeonato de Moscú... el tipo es un valiente y decide acabar la partida, y casi es enviado a Siberia por ello. Y una joven bellísima, Tatiana Romanova (toma nombre ruso donde los haya) y designada a seducir y enamorar a Bond siguiendo las técnicas de la escuela rusa de seducción, entrenada por una tipa que disfruta haciendo torturar a la gente. Más adelante, asistiremos también a una asombrosa lucha de dos hermosísimas gitanas peleando a muerte por el favor de un macho turco. Y conocemos a un agente británico en Estambul, Karim, un tipo con una historia familiar curiosa, y que dice cosas como que la única forma de tratar a los turcos locales es a patadas, está en su sangre, es lo que entienden, quieren sultanes, guerra, violaciones y diversión... Al final viajamos en el Orient Express, donde Poirot hubiera tenido mucho trabajo.

Me entretuvo pensar en las diferencias del Bond del cine con el de Ian Fleming. Este Bond original es más un soldado obediente y respetuoso con su jefe M que en las películas. Un caballero, por supuesto. Un Bond también más humano, enamoradizo incluso, confiado, que comete errores de bulto, que se preocupa y que sin duda tiene mucha suerte que los rusos sean tan merluzos. Sin duda también sorprende el final, un genuino WTF que te deja boquiabierto.

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/201...

Reading these in order, this is the best so far. Firstly because Fleming is starting to play with the format: we have roughly a third of the book pass before Bond even appears. Secondly, Bond is fallible - he makes a serious mistake in judgement towards the end. Finally, we even end the novel on a cliffhanger.

I do however, wish that Fleming would stop referring to Bond's fringe as being "a comma of black hair" - this has occured at least a couple of times in every book so far and is very lazy writing: at least he's stopped referring to him as looking like Hoagy Carmichael.

The other irritant was the use of odd Russian words - Tatiana keeps saying that people are or aren't "kulturny" - which is never translated for the reader. As she never uses any other Russian words, it's a little annoying as it crops up so damned often.

Those are the only quibbles with this novel. I'm hoping that this increase in quality continues when we move on to Dr No.

I am glad to be a man in 2011, because it sounds so exhausting to hear about what life was like in the 1950s. I mean, imagine you are Ian Fleming's James Bond, sexy 1950s super spy: Every time a woman mouthed off to you, you had to take her over your knee and spank her. That sounds awkward! (My lap isn't that big.) And if you were in a relationship and she started to get fat, you'd have to beat her until she lost weight. I don't want to get home from a long day of international espionage only to go to work again, physically abusing my significant other! I need some rest too!

I've seen all of the Bond films, but this is the first of the books I've read. I picked From Russia with Love because it forms the basis for my favorite of the films (it was also famously one of JFK's favorite books, if you take "famously" to mean "constantly touted in documentaries about the Bond series and mentioned about six times on Wikipedia"). Reading it both increases my appreciation for the early cinematic adaptations (the first four or five films), which were fairly low-key in terms of Bond's methods and abilities and very much in keeping with, at least, this book's tone, and makes me roll my eyes even more at the gadget porn and lame quip farce the series became once Roger Moore took over. On film and in print, however, just about every iteration of the character already seems about as sociologically and politically outdated as a minstrel show.

Certainly the books are just as casually misogynist as the movies: both on the page and on the screen, Bond is constantly falling into bed with pliant, idiotic women, at least when he's not patting their bottoms and telling them to run along and let the men talk. FRWL has one of the dumber Bond girls -- Tatiana Romanova, a Soviet "spy" who sounds like little more than an office drone, easily manipulated by her superiors into participating in a mission that will require her to literally whore herself out for her country in an attempt to seduce 007. It's part of a larger plot to discredit Her Majesty's Secret Service, but Tatiana is daft enough to assume Bond will come to no harm, even though she is manipulated into participating by Rosa Klebb, the KGB's own sadistic S&M bisexual sex torturing grandma (for a classic example of "deviant" sexuality as an indication of evil, look no further than the ugly old lady who puts on a sexy negligee and tries to fondle an unsuspecting and helpless young girl).

So yeah, you pretty much have to take this entire book, and the mythos of the Bond character, with a whole shaker of salt. I like to pretend I'm watching Mad Men, and this is all sly commentary on gender roles in an unenlightened era, even though I know that's not the case: then and, probably, now, James Bond represented a paragon of masculinity to a lot of men (and maybe some women). The notion that the KGB is able to trick HMSS into getting involved in the plot sounds asinine -- Tatiana is supposed to have fallen in love with Bond from reading his file and looking at a picture; no one from M on down questions this story because women are just that brainless. Bond gets lots of advice on how to complete the seduction -- don't be too nice, women want to be put in their place. And of course, despite knowing she's just on the job, Tatiana instantly falls for James, practically bursting into genuine tears when he starts questioning the motives of her defection (and within a few days is, yes, asking him to beat her if she gets too fat because she is happy in their relationship. Bond: "Certainly, I will beat you."). Writing women: not Ian Fleming's strong suit.

All the series' tropes are on display, including the villain who prefers to monologue about his evil plan before pulling the trigger (though at least there's a somewhat plausible reason for it). Tense action, including a brutal fight to the death in the close confines of a train berth. Mild gadgetry (a nifty trick suitcase) and gratuitous sex (Gypsy catfight! Clothes ripped off! Bosoms bared!).

If you can laugh at the sexism instead of fuming about it, this is still a fun little potboiler with an interesting structure -- the first third is entirely from the Russian point of view, setting up the motivations for the villainous plot and developing interesting antagonists like Red Grant, a sociopathic brute who for some reason only kills during a full moon (hey, at least he doesn't, say, only shoot people with gold bullets or bite them to death with his metal teeth). Bond doesn't even appear until nearly 100 pages in, sulking in a hotel, depressed and bored after the fallout from his prior Case (oh, hidden series pun!). Interestingly, Bond is allowed to be much more human in the books; even in the Connery films, he's a bit of a cartoon, and only the new ones with Daniel Craig have given him an interior life beyond what is happening in his pants (which, of course, prompted a bunch of criticism that the character was being "feminized," which means maybe that the sexism isn't as outdated as I'd like to pretend).