The Spy Who Loved Me

As I have been reading through all the Bond books on my Kindle, I wondered if there was an error… that Amazon put the wrong book under this title, author and book cover. It started that different from all the previous Bond books. It is all from the perspective of the Bond girl. Not that it wasnt interesting, but it takes awhile to get to James. And since it is set in upper state New York, this made it also all the more unusual. Not my favorite, but good nonetheless. Ive watched Flemings style and writing ability improve since Casino Royale. This was well written, just a bit different.

The Spy Who Loved Me is a big leap for Ian Fleming. Not only is he writing from the viewpoint of a new character, he is writing from the viewpoint of a woman. He had experimented with this a bit in From Russia With Love, and the results there were vaguely similar. In the end, the novel is technically well done. The prose is evocative, the plot is gripping, and a Fleming employs his trademark breadcrumbs to pull the reader chapter to chapter.
The problem is a matter of perspective. Flemings view of a womans internal monologue is self serving and informs the wider misogyny that underlies his works. Vivian Michel confesses to the reader that all women prefer semi-rape. She deems it proper that a man she met a few moments prior should feel free to kiss her as they are being threatened by gangsters. After a horrifying trauma, she deems it appropriate to reward the knight for slaying the dragon with her body. The sum of this women is that she is a sexualized object whose value is measured by how much pleasure she can convey. Denial of these charms to the villains of the novel fires their anger. On the other hand, bestowing those charms to James Bond is seen as the climax of the story. Further, she is the ultimate sport as she decides to love our jetsetting spy with little chance of ever building a relationship.
As with most of the women in Bond novels, Michel is unreasonably beautiful. This beauty appears to be a license for sexual exploitation. I would be intrigued to see how hard Bond would fight if Michel looked like Rosa Kleb.

While this certainly wasn’t my favorite Bond novel, I came away from reading it with renewed respect for Ian Fleming as an artist. Once an author–and perhaps more importantly, a character–becomes well-established, it can become very easy to fall into the rut of familiar patterns. Play it safe, always give the readers exactly what they want. Don’t take risks.

That wasn’t Fleming. And in “The Spy Who Loved Me”, he gives readers his most unusual take on the Bond mythos ever. I can respect that, even if I might prefer the more traditional stakes.

Well done.

Note: This review discloses some details about how the book ends (as usual the good guys win and the bad guys lose).

After just finishing rereading “Dr. No” and “From Russia with Love” I was ready for something different from Fleming, and this book certainly is that. The story is told with flashbacks from the perspective of the young French-Canadian woman Vivienne Michel. During the first part of the book Vivienne’s character is well developed, with much more detail and nuance than for female characters in the other Bond books that I have read. I don’t know whether a woman would find Vivienne’s character credible, but I certainly did. In the middle of the book two gangsters show up at the deserted motel where Vivienne acts as temporary caretaker, and I found their characters to be completely credible and genuinely creepy. Up to this point the book is an excellent mystery of the “damsel-in-distress” type.

When James Bond shows up and the “action/adventure” portion of the book begins, I started to fell a little disappointed. The gunfight at the burning motel is stereotypic, and after the “bad guys” are suitably dispatched Bond and Vivienne head for the sack. Vivienne doesn’t get the role of heroine here, but she does pretty well for someone who has been coshed earlier in the evening. Bond on the other hand is not at his best: why did he not think to have Sluggsy and Horror kneel before asking Vivienne to disarm them? Why did he ask her to move between him and the gangsters?

The contrast between how Vivienne and the other characters are handled highlighted a feature of the Bond books that I hadn’t thought about when caught up in the action: Fleming’s bad guys are a little cartoonish, sometimes resembling the villains that Dick Tracy had to contend with (e.g., Coffyhead, Flyface, Wormy Marron). Sluggsy and Horror are a little like that, but people like them still might plausibly jump out at you from a dark alley.

I was left wondering what would become of Vivienne. Was Bond really an improvement over Derek and Kurt? Is it her tragic flaw that she is doomed to a series of relationships with guys like that? The ending makes me wonder whether she will ever break out of this pattern.

This is very unlike the other Bond books. It’s written from a woman’s perspective and told in the first person, from the main character’s point of view. Viviene Michel is a young Canadian who encounters bruising relationships with men and ends up working in a motel in America, where she is set upon by gangsters out to murder her as part of an insurance scam. Miraculously, 007 turns up and saves the day.
This story simply, sadly, just reinforces Fleming’s view of both the world and women. Through very small comments, the Germans are still the enemy, can’t be trusted, and the main character suffers at the hands of men, develops independence, only to fall into James Bond’s arms and surrender to him. Certain questionable lines, like the ‘all women like semi-rape,’ and the narrative about Viviene relaxing after her beating leave a disturbing insight into Ian Fleming’s mind. He may well have been an influence on GRR Martin in this respect.

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