Octopussy and The Living Daylights

Octopussy and The Living Daylights
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

In "Octopussy," the title story to this collection, Ian Felming describes a character Major Smythe, who becomes rich through a combination of luck, murder, and deviousness. His wealth doesn't bring him happiness, however; he becomes an alcoholic, has a couple heart attacks, his wife commits suicide, and he's socially ostracized and basically drinking himself to death when James Bond arrives on the scene. It's similar to some of the studies in books like Stumbling on Happiness where researchers find lottery winners and those who lose a limb are equally happy a year after their respective events. I don't think that data was present in Fleming's day, but he had an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon.

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

It's become a cliche that Bond villains, when they finally have Bond captured and at their mercy, always deliver monologues rather than the coup de grace, but in The Man with the Golden Gun we see Bond similarly self-impaired:

Jmaes Bond got into the car behind Scaramanga and wondered whether to shoot the man now, in the back of the head - the old Gestapo-K.G.B. point of puncture. A mixture of reasons prevented him - the itch of curiosity, an inbuilt dislike of cold murder, the feeling that this was not the predestined moment ...

James Bond knew he was not only disobeying orders, or at best dodging them, he was also being a bloody fool.

This sets up an interesting scenario - Scaramanga is a faster draw than Bond, so Bond can't take him in a fair gunfight, but he is reluctant to ambush him unawares. Fleming has to jump through some hoops to set up a scenario where Bond can win and keep the moral high ground.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

In You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming paints an incredible picture of Japan. Bond's mission is to work himself into the good graces of Tiger Tanaka, head of Japanese intelligence, and this involves everything from eating sashimi to getting ninjitsu training to reading haiku poetry. Tanaka and Bond frequently verbally spar about the differences between their societies, and I'm not sure anyone really gets the upper hand. I wonder if Japanese readers would find it as even-handed, or think it slightly racist.

The novel begins with the conceit that Bond is, understandably, emotionally disturbed after Tracy's death at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but we're mostly told this through an expository discussion between M and Bond's psychologist. Fleming doesn't really have the heart to take us inside Bond's trouble mind, and once the story moves to Japan it's barely mentioned.

One of Ours

One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:

All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.