And it immediately becomes apparent that only two of the men listed (the young aristocrat and the coldly calculating European) were lovers of hers.
The first section of the book is all about Vivienne’s past–what had brought her up to the place and time she would encounter James Bond. There had been a smiling sadist, who got his pleasure from her pain.īut now there was a new lover in her life–and as far as this seductive sexpert was concerned, 007 was definitely #1… There had been a brutal American, who used her like an animal. There had been a coldly calculating European, who scientifically roused her to exquisite ecstasy. There had been a romantic young aristocrat, bursting with youthful passion. Vivienne had known many different kinds of men. Here’s how the plot is presented on the inside page of my copy:
My first issue with The Spy Who Loved Me actually began with the packaging. Taking an opportunity to speak in a woman’s voice only exacerbated the problem. The thing is, Fleming is an asshole to women.
This could have been a fascinating turnabout, but in the end it was the novel’s downfall. As such, this is a Bond adventure told from the perspective of the Bond Girl. So he presents The Spy Who Loved Me as a manuscript that was sent to him to reflect a personal story about an interaction with 007, which he then presented to his publisher (breaking the fourth wall to pretend to the reader that he merely edits James Bond’s actual adventures instead of creating them outright). Admittedly, one of those ( For Your Eyes Only) was a short story collection, but it’s perhaps easy to see why Ian Fleming would have been eager to change things up a bit. The Spy Who Loved Me was published in 1962, so that’s nine years of churning out 007 adventures. That’s gotten me by, although I have frequently questioned whether or not I’m giving them a little too much slack.Īt this point in time, Ian Fleming had produced a book a year since 1953. It does make me uncomfortable but so far I’ve been able to roll my eyes and tell myself that these books are a kind of adolescent wish fulfillment that reflect the time they were written. If you’re going to read the James Bond books by Ian Fleming you have to brace yourself for a certain level of misogyny and racism. In fact, the only reason this didn’t become the third book in history to hold that dubious distinction is that my husband was asleep in bed next to me and I didn’t want to wake him up. This book is lucky I didn’t throw it across the room in frustration. “Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.”
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