This is the first in a series of reviews. Next: Second Form At Malory Towers.
Contains spoilers.

I was given this book as a child by a well-meaning relative of limited means and still more limited grasp of traditional gender roles. But good on her: it proved to be a gripping read. Along with a copy of Bunty, an equally misguided donation, it provided an early and formative insight into media “meant” for the opposite sex. Hampered by boyish diffidence, I never read the other books in the series, despite my considerable curiosity to find out what what happened to Darrell, Sally, Alicia and all the rest. Well, now the child has become a man, and I no longer have any shame, so I have acquired the series — well, nearly: I actually borrowed most of them from the library. The fear of cooties dies hard.

Anyway, the book. First Term is superb propaganda for the institution of the British boarding school. Everyone nice loves it at Malory Towers; the only girls who don’t have a good time are hopelessly spoilt or mentally disturbed. Even though they’re forced to wear an all-brown outfit with an orange belt. Even if they’re left in the hands of people who think appendicitis is best handled by confining the patient to the school sanitorium and hoping that a surgeon will pass by (which, wonder of wonders, he does), rather than, say, going to a hospital or anything. Even if their idea of recreation is sending a bunch of kids to swim in a tidal pool without adult supervision while the life-belt is “being mended”. HELLO? Duty of care, people?

Mind you, you have to wonder about the calibre of parents who, upon having a new baby, pack their older child off to boarding school and decline to so much as visit her at half-term. Poor old Sally. If only goth had been invented. Then she could have had a niche to fit into rather than just refusing to join in with the japery. As it is, everyone just thinks she’s a bit “queer” (actually, I don’t think Blyton uses that word in this book, as she notoriously did elsewhere) and refuses to be her friend. Which is bad news because the girls’ approach to friendship has an unsettling Prisoner Cell Block H flavour about it. Friendship, in First Term, is a precious commodity — perhaps the only one the girls have left — and is to be bartered for protection, favours and status.

Everyone’s looking for a special friend. You can only have one: if you’re already taken, and someone else makes overtures, explain carefully that you already have a friend. (Perhaps Blyton was “trying” to plant a suggestion about marital fidelity here … but the sapphic undertones make it seem unlikely that she was doing so consciously.) And if you don’t get one, then well, play elaborate games of psychological manipulation on a more vulnerable inmate schoolmate until she caves. Even then, you can expect her to cast moon-eyes at her real friend. So then the best course of action is probably to hatch a pea-brained revenge scheme involving minor property damage and rely on the kangaroo court to do its work.

Which, of course, it doesn’t, since a combination of pluck and luck wins the day, as it usually does at Malory Towers. By the end of the book, all is well. The school has worked its magic on the girls, who have become happily institutionalised. Darrell has learnt some valuable lessons about her temper, without any need for any of that unpleasant discipline stuff; Mary Lou has learnt that true courage stems from endangering yourself and others; even the incorrigible Gwendoline has learnt the value of hard work and is beginning to realise how immature and foolish she was to, er, miss her parents and have long hair. And Blyton switches, for no readily apparent reason, into the first person for the very last paragraph of the book. Good-bye till next time! We’ll meet you again soon. Good luck till then!

You’ll need it.

This is the fourth in a series of reviews. Previously: Live and Let Die. Next: Diamonds Are Forever

This review contains spoilers

I tried to read Moonraker as a kid, and it put me off Bond novels for life — at least, until Silverfin revived my interest in the series earlier this year. Enthused by the movie, I checked the book out of the library, only to be sorely disappointed. Where were the lasers? The shuttles? The scary man with big steel teeth? Why was so much space given to an interminable description of a bridge match? Or to details of what the characters ate?

With hindsight, I have to say: I wasn’t as smart a kid as I thought. And actually, this is perhaps the most immediately accessible of the three Bond novels I’ve read so far, even if no-one destroys a cable car during the second act.

Moonraker, like previous instalments of the series, is an intriguing mixture of period detail and oddly contemporary motifs. The central threat — a small but determined cell of terrorists working to gain maximum publicity for their basically ideological cause by wreaking devastation on London — is oddly prescient in some ways, though not in others; and its disguise as a kind of proto-”Star Wars” missile defence initiative speaks to another anxiety that has continued to fester over the next fifty years.

But these modern-sounding concerns are set against the backdrop of Fleming’s version of the post-War British Establishment. Who knows what resemblance, if any, it bears to reality, but it certainly played to this reader’s expectations. My guess is that Fleming intended it to be a flattering peek into the rarefied world of the justly privileged elite. Today, though, it leaves distinctly mixed impressions: at once repugnant and seductive.

Rich, powerful men gorge themselves on delicacies that were presumably beyond the proles’ wildest dreams in the austerity of 1950s Britain; and they gamble vast sums in petty games of one-upmanship. On the other hand, they are clearly held to higher standards of conduct than their equivalents today: the novel’s opening revolves around the assumption that being caught cheating at cards would be enough to disgrace a national hero. Fleming presents a convincing picture of aristocratic nobility and decency, one almost strong enough to make the reader accept the implicit social contract. Almost.

Into this milieu walks Bond, who is less of a cipher in this outing than in previous volumes. We get a glimpse of his day-to-day existence, and learn that most of his time is spent on civil service mundanities; and we get a broader perspective on Bond the man — a more sympathetic character, this time, than in either of the previous two books. (We also learn the answer to one of my longstanding questions: how much does Bond earn? GBP1500 a year, before tax, plus a thousand of private income and all necessary expenses while on assignment).

Bond also cuts a more impressive figure in Moonraker. He beats the villainous Hugo Drax more or less fair and square, by virtue of intuition, cunning and grit, although he still falls head-first into a couple of obvious pitfalls, including a near re-run of the car-chase in Casino Royale and a bit of misplaced hero-worship that blinds him to Drax’s real intentions. He doesn’t make much of a mark with the lady, either …

Much of the book consists of coincidence, accident and farce that occasionally becomes almost cartoonish, in sharp contrast to the serious tone and grave consequences of Live and Let Die. In fact, I found myself strongly reminded of Tintin in places: the cheating millionaire, the army of eccentrically-coiffed Teutons and most of all the scene in which Bond deals with the villainous henchman by delivering him a swift kick up the arse. That makes it somewhat startling when Moonraker turns grittily sadistic in its final chapters, with Bond winning the day more through endurance than by his wits.

Moonraker the book may have very little to do with Moonraker the film; but it’s a thrilling romp nonetheless. I wish I had realised that twenty years ago.

This is the third part of series of reviews. Previously: Casino Royale; next: Moonraker.

Live and Let Die is one of my favourite Bond movies, so I was naturally curious about the source material. I was not sure, though, that I wanted to read another novel as dated as Casino Royale. Fortunately, Live and Let Die turned out to be a considerably more accessible and accomplished book, even though it was written only a year later. It’s longer, the writing is more polished; the descriptions are more detailed and the story is more complex. In places, Fleming waxes lyrical (to good effect), in contrast to the mostly functional prose of Casino Royale.

Bond has also evolved: he’s tougher and more resourceful, and driven as much by a personal desire for revenge as by his ostensible mission, to break a Caribbean smuggling racket which is financing Soviet espionage. The other characters are also drawn more clearly: Mr Big and Solitaire present a suitably charismatic baddie and love interest respectively. [spoiler] Felix Leiter’s reappearance is handled skillfully enough for his unpleasant fate to come as a genuine shock – all the more so to a reader brought up with a franchise mentality that admits little change to major characters [end spoiler].

The milieus are handled well, too: there’s relatively little of the period-novel feel that permeated Casino Royale. Much of the physical description sounds so contemporary that it’s jarring when the reader is occasionally reminded that this book is more than fifty years old. The same goes for Bond’s gadgetry and techniques: I wondered why Fleming was belabouring the working of an aqualung before realising that it would have been a considerable novelty to readers of the time.

But book’s age is most relevant when it comes to its most intriguing and controversial aspect: its setting in the African-American community and underworld. Primed by Casino Royale’s, er, “old-fashioned” attitudes to race and sex, I had expected large parts of Live and Let Die to be highly offensive by modern standards. Are they?

To some extent. Fleming’s takes on jazz and voodoo undoubtedly make for scintillating reading, but do draw on old stereotypes of black people as simple-minded, animalistic and easily-led. But my impression was more of unquestioned attitudes than overt racism, and Fleming throws out some patronising, but seemingly sincere, compliments as well. Ultimately, the extent to which this mars the book will inevitably vary from reader to reader – Live and Let Die is not so old that its racial content seems irrelevant, and not so new that it seems inexcusable. For my part, in the main, I found it to be an “ignorable” shortcoming of an otherwise entertaining book.

Second in a series of reviews. Previously: Silverfin. Next: Live and Let Die

Sometimes marketing ploys really do work. My enjoyment of Silverfin encouraged me to try out one of the original Bond novels — in fact, the original Bond novel: Casino Royale. (Although I bought Silverfin second-hand and have borrowed the first three Bond books from the library, so sales may not be sticking as closely to plan as the marketing).

Casino Royale introduces Bond, who’s recognizable, but not yet familiar, as the magnificent bastard that he later becomes. In fact, one of the surprises of this book was just how inadequate Bond is during this early stage of his career: my impression is that he spends much of this particular adventure falling into traps and being rescued by others. There’s only one scene in which Bond’s own resourcefulness is key.

It’s hard for this thriller ingénue to judge how much of this is because Casino Royale was written before the “obvious” traps became genre conventions. In fact, the whole book presents something of a historical puzzle for the under-educated reader: half the fun was trying to work out which parts were intended to be thrillingly novel back in its day.

My suspicion, without much knowledge to back it up, is that Bond’s racial stereotyping of his fellow baccarat-players would not have drawn much comment back in 1953. I have an equally unsupported suspicion that the torture scene was explicit for its day – but to this modern reader, reared with ultraviolence, it seemed tame and sketchy. (I guess we really have become desensitised over the intervening years). And then there is the extraordinary line in which Bond considers approvingly that Vesper Lynd’s private nature will afford their love-making “the sweet tang of rape” – which I assume must have been included to be intentionally provocative.

Elsewhere, the details painstakingly furnished by Fleming are more clearly antiquated: at one point Bond speculates that Le Chiffre, the villain of the piece, may be raising funds by smuggling antibiotics; at another, the author notes approvingly that Bond’s car starts first time. (By a quirk of currency revaluation, the amounts at stake in the titular casino once again sound impressive, inflation notwithstanding). These points don’t, however, render the book fusty; rather, they give it a kind of vintage charm.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Casino Royale, but it’s hard to say how much of this is down to its attractions as a period piece and in spotting the introduction of various parts of the Bond blueprint – the babe, the car, the charismatic baddie, the supervillains, and so on. If I knew nothing of the Bondage to come, I doubt I’d read the sequel to Casino Royale; as it is (and call me shallow if you will), I’m intrigued to find out where Fleming takes Bond next.

First in a series of reviews. Next: Casino Royale

I was curious about this book for two reasons. First: Bond, at least in the movies, is a man of mystery. The ultimate action hero, he’s ever-resourceful, unencumbered by friends or family and perpetually peripatetic. Perhaps there’s more backstory in the original books, but I must confess that I haven’t ventured much into Fleming since being sorely disappointed by Moonraker as a child (where were the lasers?). The making of James Bond sounded like a better pitch than a typical “authorised by the estate” cash-in.

Second, Silverfin is written by Charlie Higson, better known to Brits as “that one off the Fast Show”, lesser known as a member of of minor Norwich rockers The Higsons, and less known still as an occasional thriller writer. I read with irritation that he’d got the Young Bond gig, assuming this to be the literary equivalent of the stunt casting that’s led to comedy actors colonising half the straight roles in British drama. That suggested a Mooreish romp – and one tempered by the need to avoid disturbing “kidult” sensibilities, at that.

So it was with mixed expectations that I picked up a cheap but untarnished copy of Silverfin in a charity shop: hoping for a cultish thrill, but confident of mild schadenfreude if it failed to deliver. But in fact (and as I’d have known if I’d paid more attention to the reviews) – it does a pretty good job of delivering junior-grade thrills and a fresh (re)introduction to the character.

Once past the surprisingly chilling prologue, we join Bond as he arrives as a new bug at Eton, following him as he struggles to find his niche. Higson sidesteps another pitfall here: although he plays up to a few school-story conventions, most of the words are spent on getting to know our young hero and his between-the-wars milieu, rather than furnishing him with crowd-pleasing triumphs. James may be raw as yet – though he picks up a few tips and tricks along the way – but he’s recognizably Bond: determined, capable and decisive.

Part two sees James decamp to Scotland, where we’re introduced to maiden aunt Charmian and elderly uncle Max. Both characters – extrapolated from the minimal backstory provided by Fleming – contribute to the skills and strengths that will ultimately transform the nervy young Bond into the super-confident 007. This is perhaps the thinnest section of the book, but despite its longueurs it nonetheless solidifies our understanding of James. He’s still something of a cipher, but we do get more of a feeling for his internal life, and of rare affection for his aunt and uncle.

The pace picks up as the second section draws to a close and barrels into the more obvious Bondage of the third part, in which James confronts his would-be nemesis, Lord Randolph Hellebore, and begins acting like an indomitable hero rather than an uncertain schoolboy. Hellebore, eel-obsessed and power-mad, is a kind of proto-Blofeld; the other supporting characters are also of familiar types. Cockney sparrer Red Kelly shapes up as a handy sidekick and there’s a suitably feisty (but thankfully low-key) romantic interest in the form of Wilder Lawless.

Wilder’s name is one of the few explicit references to the adult Bond, but Higson generally steers well clear of the knowingness that has tripped up other efforts to (literally) rejuvenate popular characters. He resists the temptation to wink at the reader, with very few cutesy references to the Bond to come. Young James isn’t aided and abetted by contraptions assembled by the school geek; nor is he forced to face off against kids with deadly braces, prosthetic limbs or lethally-customised school uniforms.

Nor is Higson’s treatment anachronistic: James isn’t a cocky twenty-first century teen transplanted to the Thirties, his training is remarkably plausible and Hellebore’s plot is futuristic in a strictly retro way. But Higson does allow himself to skirt the fantastic edges of the spy genre; one understated riff suggests a point of origin for the later Bond’s superhuman strength and endurance – although apparently unintentionally.

But on the whole, this, like the rest of the book, comes across as a restrained and respectful furthering of the Bond mythos, and one that eschews flashiness in favour of solid, well-paced entertainment. This formerly skeptical reader is looking forward to reading more of the young Bond’s adventures … and returning to those of his older counterpart.