Writing popular fiction can be a dangerous art. Keep too close to a successful formula, and you risk becoming stale and predictable, and eventually less popular. Stray from what you typically do and you risk losing your audience even faster than by going stale.
In writing his ninth James Bond novel, Ian Fleming went with option #2. He soon regretted it.
Both his regular readers and many critics were put off by a Bond book where 007 himself only appears in the last third. Who is this Vivienne Michel and why the concentration on the sordid details of her love life? And where did all the globetrotting spy stuff go?
Fleming attached a brief note of explanation to the beginning of the novel, explaining it was “the first-person story of a young woman, evidently beautiful and not unskilled in the arts of love.”
Vivienne is also unlucky, both in her choice of boyfriends and in getting a job at the Dreamy Pines, a run-down motel in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. It turns out the underworld has an interest in the motel, and also in making Viv a fall girl for their destructive plans:
The true jungle of the world, with its real monsters, only rarely shows itself in the life of a man, a girl, in the street. But it is always there. You take a wrong step, play the wrong card in Fate’s game, and you are in it and lost – lost in a world you had never imagined, against which you have no knowledge and no weapons. No compass.
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| Fleming knew the Adirondacks from visiting his friend Ivar Bryce, experiences that also figured in his earlier novel, Diamonds Are Forever. Above, the Park Motel and Cabins in Tupper Lake, New York suggests what Dreamy Pines might have looked like had it been maintained responsibly. Image from https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g48745-d1484147-Reviews-Park_Motel_and_Cabins-Tupper_Lake_New_York.html |
The Spy Who Loved Me is broken up into three parts: “Me,” “Them,” and “Him.” In the first section, which is the biggest thematic departure from a typical Bond novel, Vivienne reflects at length on lowlights from her peripatetic life, including a boy who stole her virginity and another who left her after forcing her to have an abortion.
In “Them,” we return to the present. All alone at the motel, having just endured a rough storm, Vivienne is surprised by the arrival of two mysterious men, Sol “Horror” Horowitz and Sluggsy Morant.
Horror is a tall, gangly dude with a deathlike stare. “The black eyes were slow-moving, incurious, and the lips thin and purplish like an unstitched wound.” Sluggsy has no hair and metal-capped teeth which give his leering smile an even nastier aspect. “Tomorrow’s tomorrow. What you got to worry about’s tonight, baby,” he tells Vivienne.
The pair waste little time with niceties; they are here on business and Vivienne is there to supply food and entertainment until they tire of her and dump her in a lake. That’s when there is another knock on the door, and the third section begins: “Him.”
By this point, you are a hundred pages into a short novel. If you picked this up expecting another rip-roaring 007 adventure, you are no doubt disappointed. But give this one an honest chance, and you may enjoy what you get: A fully realized and interestingly normal female character who engages you with her vivid take on the mundanities of human existence and provides a rare sympathetic center for a Bond book.
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| Throughout the novel, Vivienne's choice of escape is her trusty Vespa motor scooter. "The acceleration – up to fifty in twenty seconds – was good enough to
give the ordinary American sedan quite a shock, and I soared up hills like a
bird with the exhaust purring sweetly under my tail." Image from https://br.pinterest.com/pin/712202128555615661/ |
Right from the outset, when Vivienne describes the creature comforts of the Dreamy Pines in late autumn, surrounded by thick expanses of “real, wild maples that flamed here and there like shrapnel bursts,” the reader is pulled into a world of quiet desolation and uneasy peace.
Vivienne is a victim, we soon learn, of users disguised as boyfriends and furtive attempts at independence that soon go aground. “Women should be willows, Vivienne. It is for men to be oak and ash,” she remembers being told. All that bending has left her bent out of shape:
I was just running away from the person I’d been for the past five years. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.
Vivienne’s self-loathing is misplaced, but it will take a short, sharp shock and the help of an unlikely man to pull her back from the abyss.
This theme of a second chance is well-developed and, along with a rooting interest in poor Viv, gives this novel a freshness that makes it stand out. It was just the wrong year for Fleming to go off-script.
When The Spy Who Loved Me was published in April 1962, Fleming’s Bond novels were in the public eye for the first time in the United States, thanks to the inclusion of From Russia, With Love in a list of President John F. Kennedy’s favorite books. That fall, British cinemas saw the release of Dr. No, the first-ever 007 movie featuring young Scotsman Sean Connery in the role of Bond.
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| Ian Fleming (at right) in 1962 with Dr. No co-stars Ursula Andress and Sean Connery. In the next Bond novel, 1963's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Fleming would demonstrate his approval for both actors by giving Bond Scottish ancestry like Connery and Andress a cameo at the ski resort Bond visited. |
One criticism long leveled at this novel is the quality of the villains. Fleming was justly proud of his bad guys, not only spotlighting them but often naming his novels after them. So what to do with Sol and Sluggsy? They are nasty, yes, but hardly on a par with such dastardly creations as Goldfinger and Blofeld. They are just a pair of thugs, not long enough on brains to bother disguising their vicious intentions.
Like the Las Vegas mobsters we meet in Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming has a hard time concealing his contempt for Sol and Sluggsy. They are the products of Fleming’s fascination with American crime fiction, but his was a fascination devoid of respect.
This would be more of a problem if The Spy Who Loved Me was a normal Bond adventure. Here, the story revolves around what happens when a normal person with everyday problems finds herself enmeshed in Bond’s world. This time, the villains are of secondary importance. It is Bond himself that is the other, both savior and threat:
The narrowed, watchful eyes gave his good looks the dangerous, almost cruel quality that had frightened me when I had first set eyes on him, but now that I knew how he could smile, I thought his face only exciting, in a way that no man’s face had ever excited me before.
Up until Bond’s arrival, the book sells you on the stuff of life. Fleming takes stock of Vivienne’s challenges as a young Canadian woman finding her way in London. We see her first sexual experiences with an Oxford student who pressures her into intercourse at a cinema, only to be stopped at the last moment by the manager.
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| A 1963 Signet paperback edition shows Vivienne speeding off on a Vespa while Bond lights a cigarette. Fleming actually stopped a paperback edition being published in the United Kingdom because of his dissatisfaction with the novel's reception. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jennififer/5403210049 |
Later that night she surrenders her virginity to him outside, on a clump of grass littered by the left-behinds of other couples. “At least it must be a good place for it if so many others had used it,” she remembers telling herself. After it is over, he breaks up with her, explaining his parents wouldn’t approve of her and sending her some champagne.
As bad as he is, Kurt, her other lover, is worse. He also pressures her into sex, then blames her for getting pregnant. Kurt is also her boss, and he fires her before sending her off to get an abortion, using her severance to pay for the operation. He tells her he doesn’t approve of “mixed blood,” being he’s German and she’s not.
Watching Vivienne go from that pair of stinkers to Sluggsy and Horror feels of a piece, and there is a synergy in the doughty, fatalistic way she handles herself. She doesn’t go to pieces, doing all she can to play for time. Despite all she has been through, she finds she wants to live:
Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger.
It is strange that the quality of this novel declines once Bond himself arrives, but it does, if not in too marked a way. He doesn’t quite belong in the story, and I wanted to see Vivienne accomplish more by herself. But that was not realistic. Horror and Sluggsy are armed and dangerous, and we soon realize as they manhandle her and size her up for raping that there is not much she can do to them on her own.
Regarding Bond’s usual exploits, The Spy Who Loved Me is pretty thin. At one point, during a lull in the action, Bond regales Vivienne with a story of how he came to be in New York State, after journeying up to Toronto to stop the assassination of a Soviet double agent by SPECTRE, the criminal syndicate he first tangled with in Thunderball.
Bond talks a lot in this novel. He also leaves a few loose ends. Horror and Sluggsy put up more of a fight simply because Bond can’t bring himself to shoot them outright. While the final battle with them is done right, with racing cars, flying bullets, and the motel engulfed in flames, this one is more about Vivienne’s journey than the final destination.
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| “And I can’t let them get away with it. These are killers. They’ll be
off killing someone else tomorrow.” Fleming's bad guys in The Spy Who Loved Me are based on American movie gangsters like the pair Charles McGraw and William Conrad play in 1946's The Killers. Image from https://citizenscreen.tumblr.com/post/663533138183634945/charles-mcgraw-and-william-conrad-are-the-killers |
It is no wonder Bond readers typically express dissatisfaction with The Spy Who Loved Me. Fleming himself disowned it, selling the film rights with the stipulation the story itself not be used, just the title. The only part of this novel to make it into the film version was the metal teeth, worn by Richard Kiel’s Jaws character rather than the absent Sluggsy.
As an off-brand experiment for Bond stories, The Spy Who Loved Me isn’t as out there as the short story “A Quantum Of Solace” from For Your Eyes Only. Both do showcase Fleming’s ability to deliver a different kind of fiction, though here at least there is more kiss-kiss-bang-bang for Bond lovers.
More
fascinating is Fleming’s explaining how a woman experiences 007, as both lover
and rescuer. Back then readers were shocked by the somewhat graphic depiction
of her sexual activities; today it’s Vivienne’s eyebrow-raising claim that “all
women love semi-rape.” But if you can divorce oneself from issues of moral or
formula conventions, the end result of this off-brand adventure reveals Fleming
had more to offer than missiles and martinis.
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