Tags

,

I managed to get ahead of myself.

You might recall that I left off reading through the James Bond series (in chronological order, mind you) with the release of the book of short stories titled For Your Eyes Only. This book was printed in 1960 but projected backward into the fictional timeline of the prior full length novels. More specifically, the short Quantum of Solace took place before the events of Goldfinger while For Your Eyes Only (the story, rather than the book) took place immediately after. The Hildebrand Rarity and Risico, included in the book in reverse chronological order, take place in 1958, the year between Goldfinger‘s story and the events of the follow-on novel Thunderball.

Having read the four short stories over the better part of a year, I got a little confused. I came across Octopussy and, familiar with the Roger Moore film, assumed I was back into novel territory. I made it all the way through before realizing that I was reading the entire work, not just an introductory chapter to a novel.

I did finished the story – it is very short – before moving on to what I really wanted to read next, which is the full novel Thunderball.

Octopussy is interesting as a James Bond story because it features James Bond in only the most tangential manner. He approaches a fellow British officer, a man who once committed a crime, causing him to remember the details of that crime, which he ultimately confesses to Bond. The octopus of the title comes from the story’s present day. Bond finds his man, naturally, in Jamaica where he whiles away his retirement years exploring the ocean.

In Thunderball, it is Mr. Bond through whom we vicariously enjoy a fascination with underwater activities. The story has him deployed to the Bahamas on a long-shot hunch from M. While even Bond figures he’s been sidelined, he gradually comes to realize that he’s actually at the center of the crisis, not on another semi-furlough. Despite the introduction of a new Caribbean locale, Thunderball is less the travelogue of previous novels. Rather, the exotica is focused on the reef diving – for recreation, for special operations, and for combat.

The first of Bond’s two underwater missions is based, at least partly, on a 1956 incident where a Royal Navy frogman disappeared while surreptitiously inspecting a Soviet cruiser’s underside while it was on a diplomatic mission in Portsmouth harbor. Unlike Bond, the British officer did not return from his mission. Fleming offers one possible, albeit highly speculative, reason for that disappearance.

In addition to the link to this then-current-event, the decade following WWII was seeing the patented technology for Fleming’s “aqualung” becoming commercialized. By the mid-1950s, programs for organized recreation in scuba-diving had started to proliferate. It can be little coincidence that the British Sub-Aqua Club opened it’s first overseas branch in Kingston Jamaica in 1957 – approximately one year before Fleming began work on this Thunderball concept.

Aquatic activities aside, I am once again struck by the contrast between the low-key novel and the over-the-top films. Most of Bond’s efforts are those of the classic detective thriller. He knows whodunnit but, unless he can prove it, he is afraid that he (and everyone else – this isn’t supposed to be personal) will be foiled by a plan with built-in plausible deniability. The “good guys” must catch the “bad guys” in the act but, if the act goes too far, some very expensive real estate will be nuked. The mano-a-mano confrontations between Bond and the SPECTRE leader are mostly psychological rather than physical. There also isn’t a single gadget, unless you count the nukes and the aqualungs themselves, which would have been a novelty to the readers of 1961.

Another novelty is the opening of the book. Bond is sent away to a health spa to be treated with a series of new-agey therapies that, frankly, strike me as remarkably current. Abstanance and a paleo diet really do have a remarkable healing effect upon Mr. Bond but, in the end, all agree that giving up steak and whiskey rob him of much of his “toxic masculinity.” Healthy or no, this is the secret sauce that keeps him alive. I am also impressed by the measure of literary restraint involving this tangential first sequence. For the film Bond, having clashed with SPECTRE operative Count Lippe in the opening pages, we would expect the novel’s ending to ultimately turn on that chance encounter. Not only does Count Lippe’s thread get cut short but even the fact that CIA man Felix Leiter makes the connection between Lippe and SPECTRE seems to have no bearing on the actual outcome. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll dwell on it again. Thunderball was originally conceived as a project for the big screen. It was also the last novel to be released before James Bond became the screen icon that we now know.

Well, more or less.

The Thunderball film project was targeted for a 1961 release but got held up by legal disputes. Fleming managed to get another novel (The Spy Who Loved Me) out in 1962 before the release later that year of Dr. No, the first of the Bond movie series. From here on out, though, Fleming surely was aware of how big-screen-Bond was peeling away from page-Bond. Will that feed back into the written word?

Per the fictional chronology, Octopussy follows the events of Thunderball by about a year, so I’m not too twisted up with my reading. Octopussy is itself followed* by the other short stories, along with which it was published, despite the fact that the Octopussy compilation was Fleming’s final work in the James Bond saga.

Photo by Pia on Pexels.com

*Well, maybe. The exact chronology of the James Bond literary fiction is not explicit in the writing. Deducing the dates is hardly an exact science and I have been looking at multiple sources for the Bond timeline and they do not necessary agree. Are The Spy Who Loved Me and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service sequential or are their timelines interleaved, as Wikipedia suggests? Is the short story 007 in New York chronological as written or a flashback? I’m not sure it matters to me.