A review by okcryptid
Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
3.0
Hooo boy. I have no idea where to start with this bad boy.
So with modern context and standards for language, the first 45% or so of this book is sooo difficult to get through. Cringe city. It's stuffed with archaic language that would read insensitive at best and deeply racist at worst to modern audiences (and reviews, I think, reflect that). If you're in it for the long haul, like I for whatever reason decided I am, you kind of just have to grit your teeth and bear it.
If you got through the first Bond novel, I'd reason that you've probably prepped yourself for the kind of ideas and representation that are par for the course in a spy thriller written in the 1950's. My read was that Fleming painstakingly tries to counteract the assumption that he made his villains black because he's racist: Felix Leiter, Bond's good-guy ally in the CIA, waxes on about how he likes black folks, how he loves Harlem because it's the birthplace of jazz, how Mr. Big is bad because he's using organized crime to take advantage of innocent marginalized people, how it's a shame that white people don't visit and bring money to Harlem anymore. There's a sentiment repeated I think about three times that's to the effect of "you have X million people in any race--some of them are bound to be rotten to the core." And at the core of it, and to Fleming's credit, this is how he tries to set up Mr. Big. It's clumsily done, but he could have just as easily discarded these sentiments and people still would have read his stuff. The result is that Bond fears Mr. Big because of his intellect, and because he's in possession of a kind of power that he has no idea how to rationalize, stop, or understand. Bond and M don't spend any breath laughing at Voodoo religion--they treat intel on it as real and factual as anything else, and some of what he reads actually gets Bond pretty rattled. Unfortunately, it's hard appreciate this complexity and maybe even progressive representation for the time when you also have to deal with a phonetically-written and nigh incomprehensible conversation in AAVE because Bond doesn't know how black Americans talk.
So does the rest of the book make this earlier stuff worthwhile? Ehhh...
Like Casino Royale, the second Bond novel has some arrestingly beautiful passages. In particular, Bond's long internal monologue while flying through a tropical storm is entrancing and beautifully fatalistic, reading like something from Welcome to Night Vale. Mr. Big has a chilling villain monologue about the nature of people as either sheep or wolves that has been shamelessly ripped off by countless other works that came after. And the section detailing Bond's scuba mission is just *chef's kiss* perfectly detailed and arranged to facilitate the hero toward the story's thrilling and inevitable climax.
But there's other weird shit that just left me feeling like too much was left with loose ends and resulted in my comparatively low rating. Solitaire, though treated in writing much better than her film counterpart, is only clairvoyant when it's useful to the plot, and doesn't forsee her own kidnapping that makes her silent and missing for the second half of the book. Quarrel, an absolute delight of a character who is crucial to the climax, doesn't get introduced until the 75% mark. And Ian, come on man--why'd you have to do my man Felix like that? :(
Overall, I passively recommend this middling Bond experience. But I caution that with a modern lens, it's not easy to get through.
So with modern context and standards for language, the first 45% or so of this book is sooo difficult to get through. Cringe city. It's stuffed with archaic language that would read insensitive at best and deeply racist at worst to modern audiences (and reviews, I think, reflect that). If you're in it for the long haul, like I for whatever reason decided I am, you kind of just have to grit your teeth and bear it.
If you got through the first Bond novel, I'd reason that you've probably prepped yourself for the kind of ideas and representation that are par for the course in a spy thriller written in the 1950's. My read was that Fleming painstakingly tries to counteract the assumption that he made his villains black because he's racist: Felix Leiter, Bond's good-guy ally in the CIA, waxes on about how he likes black folks, how he loves Harlem because it's the birthplace of jazz, how Mr. Big is bad because he's using organized crime to take advantage of innocent marginalized people, how it's a shame that white people don't visit and bring money to Harlem anymore. There's a sentiment repeated I think about three times that's to the effect of "you have X million people in any race--some of them are bound to be rotten to the core." And at the core of it, and to Fleming's credit, this is how he tries to set up Mr. Big. It's clumsily done, but he could have just as easily discarded these sentiments and people still would have read his stuff. The result is that Bond fears Mr. Big because of his intellect, and because he's in possession of a kind of power that he has no idea how to rationalize, stop, or understand. Bond and M don't spend any breath laughing at Voodoo religion--they treat intel on it as real and factual as anything else, and some of what he reads actually gets Bond pretty rattled. Unfortunately, it's hard appreciate this complexity and maybe even progressive representation for the time when you also have to deal with a phonetically-written and nigh incomprehensible conversation in AAVE because Bond doesn't know how black Americans talk.
So does the rest of the book make this earlier stuff worthwhile? Ehhh...
Like Casino Royale, the second Bond novel has some arrestingly beautiful passages. In particular, Bond's long internal monologue while flying through a tropical storm is entrancing and beautifully fatalistic, reading like something from Welcome to Night Vale. Mr. Big has a chilling villain monologue about the nature of people as either sheep or wolves that has been shamelessly ripped off by countless other works that came after. And the section detailing Bond's scuba mission is just *chef's kiss* perfectly detailed and arranged to facilitate the hero toward the story's thrilling and inevitable climax.
But there's other weird shit that just left me feeling like too much was left with loose ends and resulted in my comparatively low rating. Solitaire, though treated in writing much better than her film counterpart, is only clairvoyant when it's useful to the plot, and doesn't forsee her own kidnapping that makes her silent and missing for the second half of the book. Quarrel, an absolute delight of a character who is crucial to the climax, doesn't get introduced until the 75% mark. And Ian, come on man--why'd you have to do my man Felix like that? :(
Overall, I passively recommend this middling Bond experience. But I caution that with a modern lens, it's not easy to get through.