2011 Reading: Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die

I found a pile of James Bonds in a charity shop in Faversham at 50p each, and read Casino Royale back in August. Wanting to rad the books in order, there was a pause until I found Live and Let Die - which I did in a second hand shop in Wakefield where I picked up a few more (averaging £2, thus maintaining the sanctity of the £2 rule).

I've recently watched the film - Roger Moore and Yaphet Kotto and inter!racial!sex (although not between Moore and Kotto) - and both the book and film have issues in their representations of race. To complain that the film exploits blaxploitation tropes might seem a little wrongheaded since blaxploitation was all about the exploitation, but at least they had a degree of agency.

The book makes more liberal use of the five letter n-word, occasional use of the six letter n-word, and the only black characters - aside from the gangsters - are porters, chauffeurs, shoe shiners, barmen, as if there is a secret society of spies through American society. This is not the place for nuance in early to mid 1950s American racial politics. There's a repeated line about after black doctors and scientists, it was time there were black supercriminals. There's a large chunk from Patrick Leigh Fermor about voodoo. Research is not worn lightly.

The plot has Bond sent to America and then the Caribbean to smash a gold coin smuggling ring, but that largely an excuse to have him travel down the east coast of North America. It's loosely connected to SMERSH and the Soviets, but that's largely off stage.

I'm looking forward to Moonraker, which I believe is next, with its space shuttle.

The movie theme song (by Paul McCartney and Wings) is on my local's juke box and a friend, recognising the tune, wondered which film it was from.

When You Were Young And Your Heart Was An Open Book
You Used To Say "Live And Let Live"
(You Know You Did, You Know You Did, You Know You Did)
But If This Ever Changing World In Which We're Livin'
Makes You Give In And Cry
Say "Live And Let Die"
"Live And Let Die"
"Live And Let Die"
"Live And Let Die"


Goldfinger, I said.

Almost Inevitably...

... I went back to a charity shop and bought Henry Green's Loving (1945) / Living (1929) / Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1950) / Doting (1952) / Blindness (1926), even though under the strict application of the two pound rule I don't have to. Together they come to £5.50, but as this is six novels that's actually about 90p a book...

Rather like Patrick Hamilton, he seems to be one of those literary blindspots - too late to be modernist, too early to be angry young man, a contemporary with Grahame Greene, who must surely have reviewed his near namesake (and don't forget Harry Lime). Both Green and his wife were descended from the first Baron Leconfield, the current title holder I recently heard speak about East Prussia (and I hope the merely Hon Henry Vincent Yorke is much more interesting).


My gut would be to start with Blindness, although it appears the omnibi have eschewed chronological ordering. I ought to be reading sf, of course. And Moonraker. But I need to wash the taste of a book I will not name out of my head.