It might be the worst film. But it's the best book. Third in the James Bond collection by Ian Fleming, This is Moonraker. Hugo Drax is England's greatest hero. Survivor of a viscous German sneak attack during the War with no memory of his past, no family, he quickly amassed a fortune in the commodities market related to raw materials for rocket engines, and offered to donate his resources to the Crown to fund a state-of-the-art rocket which will protect England from any and all threats from Europe. They call it Moonraker. There's only one problem, according to the head of MI6, who knows him from their mutual social club. He cheats at cards. Enter James Bond, the service's most skilled card shark. Bond's boss, who you remember from the movies always goes by M, knows Drax from the local high-stakes gentlemen's club called Blades, which features literal gentlemen and not strippers. Rich people gamble lots of money there at stylish games like bridge, which wasn't always a retirement-home game, I guess. Hey, your grandparents were young once, too! The problem is that if they expose the national hero for a cheat, it could interfere with the missile's top-secret test launch coming up at the end of the week. Cheating at cards is still a scandal in those circles, and so Bond must uncover his cheat before people start to take notice and teach him a lesson. Ian Fleming sticks close to familiar territory, rehashing another high stakes game of cards a la Casino Royale. Except like Hemingway writing about fishing, it never gets old. Right off the bat, we have fine cuisine, expensive taste, and bold men competing with their wits and their confidence. Bond handily detects Drax's highly polished silver lighter used as a "shiner" or mirror to see the cards he's dealing, and using a a rigged deck of his own, lures him into an expensive trap, winning more than ten years salary off the millionaire and as everyone hopes, signalling a warning to him to knock it off. The story is broken up into days leading to launch. A simple structure that organizes the story into neat little episodes (Monday the card game, Tuesday touring the missile silo, etc) but all the while building tension as you realize the story is coming to a head with the launch itself, and there's already suspicion of a saboteur. The morning after the game, M informs Bond that while they were playing cards, there was a murder-suicide at the launch site. The victim had been working for the government and he had a warning about something fishy. What it was, no one knows. Then he was killed. His killer commits suicide. Coincidence? A replacement must be sent, one who can get to the bottom of this before the launch and suss out any sabotage, if indeed there is any (of course there will be!). Enter, once again, James Bond. Let's hope Drax doesn't carry a grudge over that card game! Everyone working the launch are German engineers except the dead man who tried to send the warning, and the secretary, secretly assigned by Special Branch (police), a gal named Gala Brand. Wouldn't ya know it, beneath her workaholic severity, and desperate patriotism, Bond senses a pretty young girl with a sensuous side. Who'd a thought?! Of course they must work together in secret without blowing each other's cover but that doesn't mean there isn't time to walk the beach and go for a swim in their underwear. Until they're blown up. Fleming throws all the clues in our faces right from the start, but his brilliance is that none of them add up to anything. Of course we suspect Drax because he already looks and acts like a larger-than-life Bond villain. And he makes all his German engineers wear mustaches, which along with their identically short hair and jumpsuits makes them seem like cartoon henchmen. There's also the smarmy Krebbs who is literally caught snooping in their rooms and now the "natural" explosion at the beach meant to silence them (it fails). All these clues are enough to convince Bond and Gala their lives are on the line and they need to uncover the true plot, but it's not enough to convince Home Office that it's anything more than circumstantial paranoia. The launch is too important to cancel. And the truth is, even as the reader, it's hard to put your finger on exactly how it all fits together. What did Bond's predecessor uncover? What was the warning? Everywhere he looks, security is sufficient and the rocket is unaffected. Gala Brand has been there from the start and she's seen no funny business. Not with the rocket anyway. It's a quite a trick Fleming plays on us, to deliver all the clues to us on a silver platter while still only worsening the mystery. No, they don't got to space, and there are no lasers. The movie version is a complete farce, a parody of its own franchise, using nothing more than the title and the name of the villain. The plot and the premise are entirely fabricated to capitalize on the sci-fi trends of the seventies. The irony is that Moonraker was in fact written with the intent of making a movie, featuring exotic and beautiful locations around England and a climax inside the missile silo itself. There's even a pretty good car chase that makes me salivate for a retro 1940's period-accurate film version of Bond racing around in his suped up Bentley, chasing down Drax's Mercedes to rescue the girl. It's not bombastic or flamboyant like so many of the films later became, but it's gritty and pulpy and visceral. And far more entertaining, in my opinion. More than a damsel. I wish I could say the novels were also immune to all the sexism and objectification so well known in the films, but Fleming had already crossed that bridge with Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. I won't try to excuse it, but I will say that unlike the movies, there is at least a layer of nuance in the books. If you allow a little leeway for the time period and post-war cultural norms, there's only one or two real egregious offenses in the series so far, and Moonraker deliberately steps away from them, if only to subvert your expectations in the plot. It might've even seemed progressive in its day. Sure Bond oogles over this sexy secretary whom he must work with, complete with her tight hairdo, patriotic dedication and police training, but she oogles a little over him too, during a handful of scenes in which she is allowed to take over the story. She has her own agency and makes her own choices to serve her own values. It's her years of work on this project that effectively saves the day, when Bond impotently fails to rescue her. He gets her free, sure, but only to remain trapped beneath the rocket when it goes off. It's her refusal to surrender to a suicide run that changes their course to victory. And when the Prime Minister, in a massive cover-up after their success, orders both of them out of the country, all expenses paid, in order to both recover and hide them from the press, Bond meets with her one last time hoping to whisk her off for a romantic lovers' "honeymoon" -- that's when Fleming pulls his greatest reversal yet. She shows up with her fiancé, someone we suddenly remember we had heard about on numerous occasions, but like Bond, took it for granted that her was just part of her cover story, not a real person. In this way Gala Brand once again defies objectification, proving she has her own life and identity outside of James Bond and she isn't just there for his pleasure. Feminism aside, it's the kind of silly twist that I just get a big kick out of, that James Bond of all people would get shot down by "the girl" in his own novel. Conclusion: Moonraker is hands down the best Bond book (so far), full of everything that works about the previous installments and masterfully sidestepping any of their problems. It's a tad longer, more fully developed, and more rounded. The plot to uncover a cheat, then a saboteur and inevitably prevent a national disaster builds naturally with a certain groundedness the movies would've been wise to stick closer to. This is not my first time reading Moonraker, actually, and I can honestly say that when I finally finish my full survey of the Fleming Bond series, this is one I'll inevitably want to come back to and read again. Other Bond Novels
Casino Royale Live and Let Die Diamonds Are Forever Raymond Chandler Detective Novels The Big Sleep Farewell, My Lovely
2 Comments
Right there with you. The first half of the series, six books, were largely down-to-earth spy novels. Then, possibly affected by the movie treatments of his own books, Fleming steps out into somewhat wilder territory. As a rule, though, we sort of got two different products; the books are gripping reads while the movies are rollicking good shoot-em-ups. While <i>Moonraker</i> was not my favorite, it was high on the list, being a story high in suspense, and making the reader work to follow the bread crumbs. I won't mention my fave, as this is your series, but I'm looking forward to reading your views on it, and all of them. Excellent job!
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C
11/5/2018 01:06:14 pm
Thanks, Jack! I'm due to read the next one, I think, as soon as NaNoWriMo is outa the way...
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