Damn You, Ian Fleming

So, I'm on this kick to finish reading all the James Bond books by Ian Fleming before the 22 of this month.

(20 days, 4 books left. I CAN DO THIS!)

On Sunday, I read The Spy Who Loved Me. The whole thing, because it's rather short. While I'll blog about ALL of them after I've finished reading - I have to make one quick comment.

There's a lot of sexist, misogynistic thoughts and rough treatment of women that come from Bond's character. Literally, rough sex and he doesn't like marriage. I'm pretty all right with all of that, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this:

ALL WOMEN LOVE SEMI-RAPE. 

This coming from a female narrator. Written by a man. 

The horror. I can joke about Bond's treatment of women only so much. Then Fleming creates a character like this. A character who thinks rape is sexy and desirable, even thought she's got a past that directly contradicts her statement. I'm disgusted. 

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

I downloaded Jane Austen's Lady Susan for audiobook. It's one that I don't own, and one that I knew nothing about, so I was excited to check it out. It is a short, epistolary novel, early in Austen's life. 

     The story focuses on the shenanigans surrounding one Lady Susan Vernon: a scandalously flirtatious recent widow who spends her time conniving men (married and single) into thinking her a good woman and mother (of which she is neither). She is older, beautiful, witty, and charming. The women see through her lies and deceits and flattery, while the men in her presence fall prey to it.  

     It's an interesting set up. As a female character in that time period she must be despised for her immoral nature, but yet she is a very commanding persona that triumphs over typically-considered-stronger males. She is both the namesake and the "villain" of the story--she truthfully has no redeeming qualities. But Lady Susan is not the one strong female, however, since the other women see through her character. It is a novel where female characters are more intelligent and sensible than males. For me, it's the dominance of female characters that is most interesting, particularly for the period. Or perhaps it's just an apparent dominance; are there men who, upon closer examination, are better characters? 

     While I don't dislike the epistolary format, for this novel I find it hard to get a true sense of the character I want to know best: Frederica, her daughter. I also don't like that I cannot see the moments of Lady Susan's seduction (however, I enjoy her recounts in letters to her dear friend). 

     The tale is dark for Austen--terrible parenting and a somewhat rushed conclusion to the work. It's a very different read than any of her other works I have encountered. Yet it shows her range and it does not feel out of place within her works. 

As a final note, if I had my way: Kim Cattrall would be playing Lady Susan in some adaptation of the book. She's divinely perfect for the role. Jane Seymour would be a far second. 

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence (1928)

Gearing up for Banned Books Week, I thought I'd better get to this overdue post on a now-favorite banned book of mine, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

My sorority alumnae book club selected this title--okay, drew it out of a hat (who would have honestly picked this) because I suggested it for the mix--as an alternative to 50 Shades of Grey. It was one of the best book clubs we've had! The conversations were honest and more uninhibited than I would have expected for a group of four women all at very different stages of their lives. 

I wish I had written this post sooner (we met back in May) because we did a great job of discussing the similarities and differences between Lady Chatterley and a lot of other books. Two of us who did read 50 Shades talked at length (ad nauseam, really) about how damned similar we found the title's namesake, Lady Constance Chatterley and the other horrible character, Anastasia. Sadly, I don't remember the legitimate conversations we had other than that. 

There was a lot of talk about social and class commentary, and the differing and frequently changing view points of each character. The book had many characters at various class points--the Lord and Lady, the nurse, the townspeople, the gamekeeper--which created a complex presentation of persons, complicated even further by their altering beliefs. For instance, Connie goes on a tirade about the miners, but then can be very sympathetic and supportive of the little people who work on her estate. Many characters in the book show the same inconsistencies, regardless of their place in the world. I marked page 171, where a deep display of lower-class hatred appeared. The miners are less human and more "creature,"being referred to as "men not men, but animals of coal and iron and clay," the "fauna of the elements" and "weird inhuman beauty of minerals."

Mostly, we talked about how interesting the whole concept of the book is: a novel about sex, 

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming (1953)

It was this book that made me want to start this blog again. And it seemed like a fitting first post, combining two of my passions: James Bond and literature. I've always been into Bond films, but the books are a new to me. Something I really want to read, so I can more intellectually and adequately talk about the movies.

Casino Royale is the introduction of James Bond. Although I am interested in discovering more of the textual history of this and Ian Fleming's other Bond works, I know little about how the characters and plots came to exists. What I do know is that Fleming supposedly based the series off of his wartime naval adventures and people/spies he worked with at that time.

Of the many accolades regarding the new/current big-screen Bond, Daniel Craig, one of the biggest arguments I hear in his favor is that he is a "more human" Bond. I don't know about that cinematically, I do feel that the Bond written by Ian Fleming in Casino Royale is more human than any of the film portrayals. Because the films are presented in the third person the viewer is immediately less connected to the character of Bond (not that his womanizing, sexism, racism, and lifestyle don't do that on their own). I'm sure some kind of deeper depiction of Bond could have been considered, but for the first 20 movies, it wasn't. The medium of the book, however, allows the reader to know what the character is thinking through the omniscient narrator's descriptions. It's an extremely effective method without creating what would be an off-putting first-person story.

I've flagged some of the passages that struck me as particularly humanizing, or indicative of Bond's character, or that simply showcased brilliant and enticing writing on Fleming's part. In the films we see Bond's actions as a manifestation of his thoughts on women and work, but here we actually find what's driving those actions. It's fascinating. In some instances, he thinks everything as we would expect--and actually more so--while in others, we find the iconically confident, strong character has doubts we would never have imagined. Reading Bond gives us the opportunity to experience his character in a more emotional and contextual way, from knowing his exact thoughts to gleaning them from the words of the surrounding text.

Unfortunately, I did not track page numbers when I saved these quotes--the English student in me is furious. There will be more of these, I'm sure, as I look back through my saved notes from the last two years.