© Penguin Books
As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films. However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966). I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).
And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)… Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland. My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age. To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself. “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.
Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century. Starting with Moonraker.
It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise. The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint. It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly… And we know that they know… So, let’s have a ball!” The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.
Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest. But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take. I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”
© Eon Films
But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier. Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast. From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union. Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards. This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be. Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un. In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.
During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base. After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course. Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union. The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however. Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms. So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”
In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles. (Goodhead… Get it? Good… head…?) In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name. I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”
© Eon Films
Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot. It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict. And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it. I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time. I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it. And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else. Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.
And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s. Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity. I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946. Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war. From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it. Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white. Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.
But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain. Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget. He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods. Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about. Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time. It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.
Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves. My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean. ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’” Fleming took note of the complaints. None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.
© Hammer Films
I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi. The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie. They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out. For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.
On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology. I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.
Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role. You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions. Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45. Yikes, I thought. If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.
So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women. Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.