Thunderball–the word itself conjures James Bond–the meaning of the word as an atomic bomb mushroom cloud has taken a backseat to Ian Fleming’s ninth spy novel from 1961, and the fourth Bond movie that filled theaters for Christmas 1965. The novel is primarily Fleming’s own detailed, descriptive Bond character study, but with a twist: The story ideas are a combination of scenes created and introduced in screenplay drafts by two other writers. Thunderball was eyed initially among the first nine novels as the one worthy of becoming the first movie adaptation. But conflicts among who created what in a writers room before Fleming wrote the novel would be the source of a lawsuit that sidelined the movie and ultimately resulted in five writers (including Richard Maibaum, John Hopkins, Jack Whittingham, and Kevin McClory) named in the movie credits. It also resulted in the quirky, additional film adaptation, Never Say Never Again, in 1983. The novel, with its external inputs, is still among Fleming’s best–it’s a combination of all the best elements of Fleming’s adventure and action man writing, a one-stop shop of sorts for anyone looking for a single Bond story that has it all.
As much as it is adventurous to travel the world by yourself, living place to place and job to job, it is also dangerous. Horror movies like Saw, Vacancy, and Psycho illustrate that worst of scenarios—traveling in unfamiliar territory and making a wrong turn—that single bad decision that could end it all. In Ian Fleming’s novel The Spy Who Loved Me, Vivienne Michel is moving along life’s course but taking a meandering route that leaves her in a desolate hotel in the Adirondacks. She’s made a ton of bad decisions, not the least of which is accepting a job from a strange couple which leads to her wrapping up the hotel’s operations for the season by herself. On a dark and stormy night someone knocks on the door and her life changes forever as she makes that wrong turn.
Not to be confused with the novelization of the film The Spy Who Loved Me, which was titled James Bond: The Spy Who Love Me, the original Fleming novel is completely different from the film that took its name. It also may be not only the worst Bond novel, but one of the worst novels from the 1960s. It manages to include everything that is bad about pulp novels of the past and should make modern readers question Fleming’s legacy. From past Bond books reviewed here at borg.com, we already have encountered Fleming’s questionable coverage of race in his day. Should he be singled out for his failings or just it chalk it up to the day? And his villains are typically the only physically deformed characters in his books. Why is that?
More than any other Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me wrestles with the latter part of that iconic phrase that defines Bond: “every man wants to be him and every woman wants to be with him.” Told entirely in first person by a woman named Vivienne, the protagonist in the story, most of the novel never sees James Bond at all and he only appears in the last third of the book. In fact, with no explanation in the first 100+ pages, the modern reader will find himself or herself wondering how many readers came before who were as frustrated with this long and wandering diary-like account of a woman and her past? She is a likeable enough character, and certainly sympathetic, but why should a Bond reader care about her? Ultimately, only a chance encounter with James Bond, and preposterous one at that, makes her relevant to the Bond universe.
