It’s as if he’s a tool to them, not valued or supported, so if the tool is lost or broken you just send for another one and use that until it breaks too.
I don’t think his employers value him, even though they let him act with minimal supervision. If he stops dealing with problems in a military way, he’ll only have the addictions left and will die soon, without a purpose. The violence is cathartic for him, but not attractive for us unless we be ghouls. The conflicting ideology between Bond and the Bulgarian bombers is just an excuse for violence because he isn’t the type to care about industrial philosophies. It’s more like some thug numbing his mind before he goes and thumps someone new tomorrow. These aren’t stimulant dependencies the reader can be at all sympathetic about as you’d have to be very generous to think of Bond as a victim. If he dies, so what? - that’s the subterranean level he has been lost to and a crocodile only knows a crocodilian life and ways of dying. Soldiers only need to survive until the end of the war because they are a liability after that. Possibly not Milton because an angel becoming lost is different to someone who was never angelic. I see the original Bond from the books as closer to the film Apocalypse Now (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Milton’s Paradise Lost) than the Bond films, where he’s “gone up river” and diverged from the civilised human race. It doesn’t say he has nightmares and wets the bed but it’s that kind of aggraded build-up of issues that must eventually over-flow the river bank.īond achieves things by having a high mental tolerance for running his body into the ground (not by superhuman talents or knowledge). He’s visceral, dehumanised by war trauma (because switching off emotion is how to get through) and has formed those repetitive dependencies and addictions to cope. The character in Casino Royale (novel) is different to what’s supposed to be the same man in films, possibly because that’s not what Gilgamesh-style heroes in movies are supposed to be like.
If you wanted to write the perfect book in the gritty thriller genre though, this is the novel to study.
being able to tell if his hotel room has been searched by sticking a human hair between the split in the drawers using saliva. The technology Bond uses is Stone-Age stuff, e.g. Bond gets tortured, showing he is mortal, and there’s gritty violence. The bad characters are stereotypical Cold War Bulgarians who plant bombs that destroy boulevards of trees in the south of France (who, I might ask, is going to clear this mess up?). Fleming must have met these people through the previous seven years.
James Bond is a sixty cigarette a day, alcohol and risk addict - which really seems to be the portrayal of someone who has very recently lived through a war and will take a long time to bring back to civilisation. This has to be the best Fleming novel, but it is a book for boys.
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