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Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming [review short]

These are fun throwaway novels. Occasionally a really well-turned phrase, interesting settings, good plots and memorable villains. The book Live and Let Die is so much better than the movie featuring Roger Moore that I almost feel pity for my generation who grew up thinking that was James Bond.

The allegedly racist parts of the novel (the parts that are shortly to be sanitized) aren't particularly racist, with the unfortunate exception of Chapter 5 (lamentably titled "Nigger Heaven"). This chapter is actually rather tone deaf: Fleming did not appear to know Harlem all that well, he attempts to write in a sort of dialect... He tried. It's presumably with the aim of creating what would feel like a thrilling, exotic atmosphere to his 1950s-era readers in England, but it's beyond his ability as a writer to do it convincingly. 

Notes:
* "I smoke about three packs a day." The James Bond of the novels remains far more interesting than the modern smoke-free and vice-free Bond of the movies. The modern movie Bond obviously can't smoke; he can't even womanize. 

* Funny subtle reference here to the OG of the USA's Deep State, J. Edgar Hoover: "Bond laughed. 'What an organization!' [the FBI] he said. 'I'm sure it's all beautifully covered up and alibied. What a man! He [Hoover] certainly seems to have the run of this country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven't got him on our hands in England." 

* Note Bond and Leiter's abject horror at all the old people in southern Florida. Quite a contrast with today's forever young Boomers teeming all over places like The Villages.

* Also an offhand reference to NJ before it became overrun:


* Interesting (pseudo-?) history about the pirate Captain "Bloody" Morgan, who practiced his piracy on Spanish shipping in the 1600s, and whose activity England indirectly supported, but later disavowed in order to avoid a war with Spain. It does make you think about different types of non-governmental "hard" and "soft power": where countries will use indirect instruments of power to project force, destabilize shipping lanes, etc. It's interesting to think about how piracy would actually be supported by a government if it helped that government's interests. Makes you think.

* "This was Quarrel, the Cayman Islander, and Bond liked him immediately. There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him and his face was strong and angular and his mouth was almost severe. His eyes were grey. It was only the spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands that were negroid." It's always striking to read how much English writers (and presumably English culture) used and depended on physiognomy to describe and predict behavior. You see it from Shakespeare to Austin, to Dickens and right up until the mid 20th century... where all notions of physiognomy suddenly disappear from the record. 

* The climax happens in the last ten pages and it requires an unbelievably lucky coincidence of timing.

To Read:
Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace

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