11/25/007

Thanksgiving has come and gone. Ben is back from Japan bearing Lupin and Godzilla toys and and looking for work. Things are generally good here. I'm spending the weekend arranging to have most of my telecom needs bundled through AT&T--already my phone and Internet provider. T-mobile has been a bad choice for us as my home sits in a hole in their service area, so I can't use the phone when I'm here. I also will be billing my Directv through AT&T. This will all save me a nice chunk of change each month, get everyone in the family much needed new phones, and offset the cost of upgrading my satellite TV to HD. Yay!






I've been passing my time reading some old James Bond paperbacks. Flemming seems to represent boundary of writing I enjoyed as a teenager but can still enjoy as an adult. I can pick up The Spy Who Loved Me and The Man with the Golden Gun and still enjoy them, where Doc Savage and other favorites from younger days just don't hold my attention anymore.



This all started because I had discovered a copy of Silverfin on my shelf, a gift from Ben from awhile back, and decided to finally give it a read. This is the first of a new series of Bond adventures from his days at Eton before the war. The concept is contrived and treads a bit of the same ground the J.K. Rowling covered in the Harry Potter books, and the plot is a bit too science fictionish to stand with the original Ian Flemming books, but Charlie Higson, nonetheless turns in a better Bond pastiche than most of his predecessors. The prequel nature of the story gives it some freedom from the conventions of the book and movie series--although Higson slavishly ties so many future elements of Bond mythology into the few months covered in the novel that it seems no other part of Bond's life could hold any significance at all. Still, I really felt I was reading the same character that Flemming had introduced me to many years ago. I don't think Gardner or Benson ever achieved that for me.



Gardner's Bond plots never held much interest for me and his take on the character never rang true. I recall one of the books has Bond hiding out in a safe house and being disappointed by the polyester socks which are provided for him there. Given the fact that the agent is fighting for his life, instead of coming across as style conscious Bond just seems vapid and shallow. He should just grow a pair and put on the damn socks!



Benson never struck me as a great writer, but his early efforts did capture some of Flemming's style for me. His stories didn't hold up over the course of the series, however. By the end, he was mixing movie gadgets into the stories, instilling his plots with all of the illogic and none of the visual excitement that Q section brought to the films. There was also a lack of internal logic to the stories; one featured a race to recover a macguffin from a high altitude plain crash in the Himalayas. Bond and his team must train for weeks getting acclimated to the rigorous conditions of the altitude and terrain and then must beat other international teams up the mountain. Sadly, the height mentioned in the story is well within the range of high altitude helicopters, which routinely perform rescue mission in that part of the world, so the item would have been recovered within 24 hours of the crash. Oh well.



Strangely, one of the best pastiches I've read of Flemming's Bond is credited to one of my least favorite Bond screenwriters, Christopher Wood. Wood wrote the screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me, taking Flemming's tile only and creating a story about a megalomaniac who is stealing nuclear submarines as part of his scheme destroy all life on the surface of the earth and build a new order from his base on the ocean floor. Bond and a beautiful Soviet confederate must defeat his plan and his giant, steel-toothed henchmen, Jaws. Wood also wrote the screenplay to Moonraker, this time using both Flemming's title and the name of his villain, Hugo Drax and creating a story about a megalomaniac who is stealing space shuttles as part of his scheme destroy all life on the surface of the earth and build a new order from his base in outer space. Bond and a beautiful American confederate must defeat his plan and his giant, steel toothed-henchmen, Jaws. The man was an idea factory, folks.



These films represent the shift in the Roger Moore era away from anything vaguely resembling the Flemming tone and the growing over the top, silly atmosphere of the series during the seventies. I was very surprised to discover how close to the Flemming style Wood was able to steer when creating the novelization of The Spy Who Loved Me. I remember seeing this in stores at the time the movie came out and thinking it was the death knell of the series that we had to have novelizations of movies that were allegedly based on novels. I found it years later at a used book store and picked it up for completeness sake. I was surprised how gritty and unfunny he managed to make the story, even introducing a brutal torture scene that would have been right at home in any of Flemming's books. Wood also wrote a novel based on his Moonraker screenplay, but the outer space element of that story makes it difficult to bring into the Flemming style. He did try, though.



After I reread a few more Flemming books, I hope to revisit Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsly Amis), which I haven't read in decades. Amis' Bond story is a bit more brutal than most of Flemming's, but I remember enjoying it when I first read it.



As for myself, I had planned a Last Chance Club/Bond pastiche called Dreamcatcher, which would have taken place in Cuba just after Flemming's death. The plan was to team Lanny, Charles and I with an aging Bond who was losing his edge, in the vein of The Man with the Golden Gun. I never wrote more than a synopsis, however, as it was an idea that would have run too long...



...much like this blog...so I'll close the dossier on Mr. Bond. Unless I find the second book from Higson...