“Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.
Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger.“
Plagued by the ongoing legal battle over Thunderball, and an increasingly dark view of the world, while also inking a movie deal for the first James Bond movie (Dr. No), Ian Fleming returned to his Goldeneye Jamaican estate to draft one of the shortest James Bond manuscripts he ever wrote –The Spy Who Loved Me— a book he later discarded and lamented for its excessive sleaziness and violence. At the time, Fleming was growing concerned that young readers were actually celebrating James Bond as a hero, and he wanted to reveal James Bond to actually be a wild, dangerous man –not a hero. Fleming sought to try something completely different with The Spy Who Loved Me, thus he crafted a uniquely experimental novel told entirely from the perspective of a woman (the book shares almost nothing in common with its cinematic counterpart, at Fleming’s request). The resulting novel is a brutal, raw, traumatizing story. And despite being undeniably well-written and gripping at points, Fleming nevertheless quite evidently had no real business writing female characters in this way. His efforts to reach for literary success with this installment in the Bond series had “obviously gone very much awry” he later reflected. After receiving a swift and harsh critical backlash to the book, Fleming requested that no paperback edition of The Spy Who Loved Me ever be published, a request that was only honored until his death in 1964. After he passed, the book returned to publication once again. Fleming also requested that Eon never convert the book’s plot into a James Bond movie and so Eon merely used the title “The Spy Who Loved Me” and some vague inspiration for the character Jaws from one of the henchman in the book named “Horror.” In my view, the 1977 film ranks among the best of my favorite Bond movies, whereas the novel ranks near the bottom of the Fleming novels.
The Spy Who Loved Me is told in three chief sections: “Me,” “Them,” and “Him.” In “Me,” we are given the first-person reflections and memories of Vivienne “Viv” Michel –a blue-eyed, five foot six, brunette woman who has lived a harsh and unforgiving life. Her parents were killed in a wartime air crash flying to Montreal en route to a wedding, and she became a ward of her aunt Florence Toussaint. At first, she was educated by Catholic Ursulines in Quebec (where being “Les Americains” was considered a term of “contempt” –a predictable Fleming jab at Americans). Then, she was sent to England for a proper education where she lived in Miss Threadgold Astor’s house –a place where other girls pitied her for having a “foreigner” Lebanese millionairess for a roommate with “huge tufts of mouse-coloured hair in her armpits” and who was so “dreadful, petulant, smelly and obsessed with her money” (15). She then spent an “endless summer” five years ago in London with a young, handsy man named Derek Mallaby who forced her to sneak around and perform graphic sexual acts before essentially raping her in a back-alley cinema, and despite being caught in the act, he compeled her to continue the deed in a public park, where he was, as she says, “manhandling me almost brutally, treating me as if I was a big clumsy doll” (32). While Viv wondered if she had fallen in love, she received a letter from Derek stating that he is already engaged to another woman and that he cannot continue dating Viv mainly because she is a “foreigner” from Canada.
This is all absolutely vile stuff –but Fleming doesn’t stop there. While working for a magazine as a journalist, Viv was constantly sexually harassed by depraved, aggressive men, and she meets a clinical, orderly character named Kurt Rainer who was working for Verband Westdeutscher Zeitungen (V.W.Z.) which was financed by a co-operative of German newspapers along the lines of Reuters. He went through a breakup, and promptly engaged in a stolid, surgeon-like affair with Viv. In some ways, Viv’s flashbacks mirror Hitchcock’s world in Psycho. But when she accidentally got pregnant, Kurt revealed that he was unwilling to entertain a “mixed-race” marriage (as a German, he exclusively prefered to be with “Teutonic blood”) so he sent Viv to Zurich for an abortion before she was asked to hand in her notice at work.
Lonely, melancholic, and adrift, Viv fled from Europe and headed westward, purchasing a vespa, and she decided to embark on an American road trip (even though her aunt feared the dangerous, lawless culture of the United States, a country rife with gangs and crime). Interestingly enough, Viv mentions a couple times in the story that she places her future political hopes in Jack Kennedy. Regardless, she hits the road and eventually winds up at a remote motel in the Adirondacks called “Dreamy Pines Motor Court,” situated ten miles west of Lake George. It is billed as a famous American tourist resort in the Adirondacks, though it is really more of an ordinary motel –and for Fleming, American motels are dens of “prostitution, gangsters, and murderers.” Fleming based the setting for this motel on his visits to his friend Ivar Bryce at Black Hollow Farm located near the New York-Vermont border.
As far as Bond girls go, Viv is given a much more vivid backstory than either Tiffany Case (in Diamonds Are Forever) or Honey Rider (in Dr. No), however she is a constantly faltering, flailing, and ultimately she is a pitiable character who is repeatedly fainting and making poor decisions while also serving as the harrowing victim of hideous, unspeakable cruelty. Fleming seems to have a predilection for this kind of woman –one who is broken, traumatized, and in need of James Bond’s rescue.
In the next section of the novel entitled “Them,” Viv is hired as the motel’s receptionist by the Phanceys, a shady couple who are currently running the place on behalf of its owner, Mr. Sanguinetti, who resides in Troy, a “gangster” suburb of Albany, New York. Naturally, Mr. Phancey is a dirty old man who is incessantly groping Viv despite her protestations –every man in The Spy Who Loved Me is essentially portrayed as a slack-jawed sleaze-bag. The Phanceys decide to depart for a few days leaving the motel in Viv’s hands –they notify her that the furniture is all nailed down due to the prevalence of thieves, and Viv is reminded that she may need to stay up all night with a shotgun because prostitutes sometimes set up shop, murderers leave corpses in the showers, and there are occasional robberies.
Almost immediately after the Phanceys leave, a storm arrives along with two slimy thugs claiming to be insurance agents acting on behalf of Mr. Sanguinetti. One is a short, pale, moon-faced man with alopecia named Sluggsy Morant and his companion is Sol “Horror” Horowitz, who is a tall and thin skeletal lizard-like man with steel-capped teeth (they are both villainous parodies of her former “lovers” and they are reminiscent of Wint and Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever). Predictably, Viv is violently assaulted by these goons while they repeatedly degrade her and call her a “bimbo.” And even though she tries to fight back and escape into the woods, it is all to no avail. She wonders why these men have not simply killed her.
“The true jungle of the world, with its real monsters, only rarely shows itself in the life of a man, a girl, in the street. But it is always there. You take a wrong step, play the wrong card in Fate’s game, and you are in it and lost – lost in a world you had never imagined, against which you have no knowledge and no weapons. No compass” (83).
In the third and final section of the book entitled “Him,” a mysterious British hero suddenly arrives claiming he has a “puncture” (or a flat tire). He is the pulp fiction version of St. George slaying the dragon —“He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek… He was about six feet tall, slim and fit-looking. The eyes in the lean, slightly tanned were a very clear grey-blue and as they observed the men they were cold and watchful. The narrowed, watchful eyes gave his good looks the dangerous, almost cruel quality that had frightened me when I had first set eyes on him, but now that I knew how he could smile, I thought his face only exciting, in a way that no man’s face had ever excited me before” (99-100).
“Hey, limey. Wha’s your name?”
“Bond. James Bond.”
Interestingly enough, James Bond only arrives in the final act of this novel (about two-thirds of the way through the book). Bond enters the dingy motel and quickly realizes the situation. He eats some food and drinks a cup of coffee (while consuming benzedrines to keep himself awake all night) and he explains to Viv that he is a police officer of sorts who has been sent as a result of a man named “Boris,” who defected to the West. Boris was a top naval constructor from Kronstadt who was high up in the nuclear submarine team but has since defected to England. However, the notorious international criminal organization called SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Espionage, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) has been trying to eliminate Boris. Bond mentions that less than a year ago, an atomic bomb was stolen causing a crisis culminating in “Operation Thunderball” (as featured in the previous novel Thunderball) which sent Bond to the Bahamas, and now the KGB has activated an ex-Gestapo agent in Toronto called Horst Uhlmann who is getting in touch with a local gang known as “The Mechanics,” the toughest gang in Toronto, to put a hit on Boris. Bond was sent to investigate the situation with the Canadian Mounties. With Bond posing as Boris, a shootout occurred with Horst Uhlmann and he died the following morning, refusing to reveal any secret information. Now, Bond has been sent to Washington DC to file a report.
Later in the evening, Viv is jumped by Sluggsy and she awakens in the woods with a shirtless, Benzedrine-fueled James Bond who has rescued her from the motel which has been set on fire, behind them are burning swirls of flames. As it turns out, Sluggsy and Horror have been sent by Mr. Sanguinetti to burn down the motel and blame it on Viv as part of an insurance fraud scheme. The two thugs have detonated several thermite bombs. This leads to a vast shootout before Sluggsy and Horror drive their van off a cliff.
With danger seemingly out of the way, Bond and Viv take a romantic shower and then head to the bedroom together as Fleming offers readers a lengthy, descriptive, cringeworthy scene in which Viv notoriously states that “All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken” (139), this statement comes among a string of other outrageous, shocking claims that really degrade the quality of the novel. But soon Viv spots a ghostly smiling face peaking in through the window. As it turns out, Sluggsy had survived the car crash and so Bond quickly shoots and kills him this time. In the morning, Viv awakens to find Bond missing, but he has left a note assuring her that she will receive a reward from the insurance company that was nearly defrauded, and Bond promises that Mr. Sanguinetti will be tracked down even if he attempts to escape to Mexico (the Phanceys will also be charged). Viv speaks with a pair of state troopers, one of whom cautions her against involvement with men like James Bond who dwell in a “private jungle.”
“The scars of my terror had been healed, wiped away, by this stranger who slept with a gun under is pillow, this secret agent who was only known by a number… A secret agent? I didn’t care what he did. A number? I had already forgotten it. I knew exactly who he was and what he was. And everything, every smallest detail, would be written on my heart for ever” (156).
Thus ends this odd, miserable, gratuitous novel.
Fleming, Ian. The Spy Who Loves Me. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1962 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.
Click here to return to my survey of the James Bond saga.
Click here to read my review of the film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).