Still, although it's not something you'd expect in a Bond book, it does get you to know who this person is and you realize how emotionally vulnerable she is when the violence starts. The first third deals with her past, particularly her unhappy love affairs, and it's pretty familiar "True Confessions" stuff, dated quite a bit but readable. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is told in the first person by a young French-Canadian woman named Vivienne Michel, in three neat segments. (THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was published in the American magazine STAG under the charming title "Motel Nymph".) To make matters worse, a new reader interested in Bond is as likely to pick up Christpher Wood's novelization of the Roger Moore movie with the same title. I imagine many casual 007 fans have never read this book straight through, which is a shame. There's no giant threat to world peace, no stolen H-bombs or plan to rob Fort Knox - just a girl threatened by two gangsters. From 1962, this is probably the most overlooked and underrated of the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |