On I go with reading the James Bond books. I had planned to read them in order, what with being a bloke and everything, but I was going on holiday and Waterstone’s in Camden didn’t have Live and Let Die that day, so I picked another one at random. Thunderball it was.
It’s a yarn about a couple of nuclear bombs going missing and Bond only having a week to find them. There’s a lot of underwater swimming which can drag a bit – the penultimate chapter is a minutely detailed description of a swim to a boat, a slow fight and a swim back – and several descriptive passages of the Bahamas, the scenery, the weather and customs.
It’s fine, but feels as though it was written at arm’s length rather than in the close-up direct style of Casino Royale. It’s a later book, written from a film treatment by Fleming and two other people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the films were beginning to be Fleming’s focus more than the books, which is a shame.
The obsession with food remains in place. The first half of the action is set in a health farm called Shrublands, where Bond has been sent to recover his flagging physical fitness. No martinis, no balkan tobacco, no sole meuniere or caviar, he’s on a strict diet of vegetables and hot water with lemon juice in it.
A chance encounter with one of the more important goons in Spectre at Shrublands is the starting point for a lot of the story later on but it could have been dealt with in a few pages. Instead we have an 84-page from unhealthy happiness to low-calorie vigour and vitality and back. Real men, in Fleming’s world, have more to worry about than feeling good. They need an edge that can only be obtained through fatty food and strong drink to get anything really gripping done.
As I enjoyed this book as a holiday read but it did rather pass me by in a fairly uneventful stream of words, I look back on it wishing he’d steeled himself with a few more cocktails and cigarettes before sitting down to write.
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