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THUNDERBALL
August 04, 2009
August 22, 2013
Recommended by Peter Coffin of
alt.gothic. This was one of the
few Flemings I didn't own.
Maybe not an accident? Maybe
it's the one everyone keeps.
Certainly this had the most
faithful movie adaptation.
The plot of the novel can hold
very few surprises for us now.
The interesting things
are in the details.
The frogman battle, for example,
shows the good guys distinctly
under-armed: they're the crew of And Bond has no
an American nuclear submarine, superpowered
they're not intended to be any underwater drive
kind of infantry, certainly not at his disposal.
underwater infantry. They fight
with improvised spears: knives
mounted on broom sticks.
Fleming continues his
obsession with
torture: in this SPOILERS
version of the story
Domino has to stand-up She escapes and
to a hot cigar scene. ultimately takes her
tormentor out with a So Bond is once
Note though that spear gun... again saved by
while the scenario someone else, in
here is essentially Felix Leiter comments violation of
the ticking atomic "I 'll never call a Lester Dent's
time-bomb scenario girl a 'frail' again". dictum.
beloved of the
likes of Fox and The sexism index Possibly, this
Dershowitz, neither here is much lower works because
Bond or his CIA than for "Casino the main job
co-hort consider Royale". was really
resorting to completed
torture themselves. And the stuff through his
said about efforts...
And Bond keeps gambling is survival is not
reiterating that much less nutty: really the goal
their hands are of the game.
tied until they "And, after all,
get hard evidence. the table has no
memory. Luck, he
told himself, is
Though in the early strictly for the
stages, Bond has a birds."
good reason for
worrying about the Far saner than
weakness of the evidence: "Casino Royale":
if he gets everyone's
hopes up too soon, ODDS_ARE
they're never going to
forgive him if he's
gotten it wrong. Realistically, if
he says the wrong
word in his
nightly reports,
the operation
could turn into a A nice touch: the
mess, as a dozen reason Bond and
cooks try to get Leiter are on
their hand in at their own despite
the last moment. the importance of
the mission: no
one really
believes that
Bermuda is the hot
spot. This is a
long-shot, just a
hunch on M's part.
Everyone keeps
forgetting the
urgency of the
present situation.
they go rambling Felix Leiter rants
on about almost about being ripped
anything: off by hotel
martinis that are
all olive.
Leiter and Bond
lament their horrible
hotel food service.
Some of the more interesting material
is at the beginning, where Bond is
ordered into a health spa by M. The That's "Never Say Never",
film has Bond refusing to take it the later version, not
seriously, smuggling in a case of the original named
cheese and caviar. "Thunderball".
The novel has Bond, despite initial
skepticism, emerging as a complete
convert -- he feels twice as Moneypenny on the new Bond:
energetic, he's much more sensitive
to his surroundings and so on. The "The Old Man was like that for a
women in his life *hate* the new couple of weeks after he had got
Bond. Moneypenny philosophizes that back from that damned nature-cure
it's better for men to constantly be place. Itt was like working for
drunk or hung-over, and when the Gandhi or Schweitzer or someone.
"Thunderball" operation kicks in, Then a couple of bad cases came up
Bond immediately concludes "I can't and rattled him and one evening he
do my work on carrot-juice." (p.76) went to Blades-- to take his mind
off things I suppose-- and the next
It's better for super-spies to be day he felt awful, and looked it,
lethargic and unobservant? and from then on he's been all right
again. I suppose he got back on the
The idea seems to be that the champagne cure or something. It's
Bonds of the world need to be really the best for men. It makes
all male, all yang. them awful, but at least they're
human like that. It's when they get
Bond then orders a godlike one can't stand them."
four egg breakfast,
with mashers and -- p.58, "Fasten Your Lap-Strap"
bacon. For some
reason, he prefers
white bread toast to
whole grain.
I wondered if the idea might be
that you can't be no goody-two-shoes
and get this tough job done, but
it doesn't seem like that's it.
The bad guys are bad, and the good
guys good-- there is no "Badness Gap",
we don't need to keep up with the
badness to compete: that's more of
a modern disease.
When Bond gets the news about
the stolen nukes he goes
from "trying to cut down" to
chain-smoking in the space of
a few minutes. (p.62)
And in contrast, we have
the opposition:
"He reached into his overalls and
took out a packet of Camels. He
offered one to the killer, who
took it, broke it carefully in
half, put one behind his ear, and
lit the other half. The killer Why doesn't
was a man who rigidly controlled Fleming ever
his weaknesses." call Bond
"The Killer"?
-- p.85, "Multiple Requiem" That's what
the 00 is
about, yes?
Maybe:
The bad guys are
fanatics, the good
are more "human".
The bad guys here also have a tendency
to kill their own at the drop of a hat.
One is killed for failure, having gotten
distracted by a vendetta against Bond
which you could argue was-- at the
outset at least-- just good, ruthless
business: plugging a possible leak.
The air force pilot they corrupt
(yes, Domino's brother, though
how that coincidence works out
is never explained) is simply
killed after he does the job.
At least in this story, one of
the bad guys starts worrying
that the boss may be planning on
shafting them once the payoff
has been made... but this is
treated as an example of crazy
Russian paranoia.
This strikes me as an obvious,
prudent worry, and one of the
reasons that in the real world
you can't run an operation the
way these ruthless bad guys
run theirs.
Being ruthless is
often not practical. Caveat: I can't explain why
Microsoft and Intel are as
succesful as they are.
(Intel is a meat-grinder
for it's employees, and a
business partnership with
Microsoft is a guarantee of
expensive litigation and
little else.)
Felix Lighter lays out the case for
nuclear submarines as missle platforms
in "When the Kissing Stopped" (p. 190):
"Good deterrent when you come to
think of it. You don't know where
they are or when. Not like the
bomber bases and firing pads and so
on you can track down and put out of
action with your first rocket wave."
Bond commented drily, "They'll find
some way of spotting them. And
presumably an atomic depth charge
set deep would send a shock wave
though hundreds of miles of water
and blow anything to pieces over a
large area."
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