All posts tagged Gomez

Iron In The Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre (1949)

He felt himself filled with a sense of vast and pointless freedom.
(Iron in the Soul p.92)

349 pages long in the Penguin paperback edition, Iron in The Soul repeats the format of the previous two novels in The Roads To Freedom trilogy by following a set of French characters over a very specific, and short, timeframe connected with the Second World War, in this case right at the end of the Battle of France.

Part one

Part one is 200 pages long, its first chapter has the dateline ‘New York: Saturday 15 June 1940 9am’ and the final chapter is dated ‘Tuesday 18 June 5.45am’. So it covers four days towards the end of the Battle of France.

In part one there is not much of the ‘experimental’ technique Sartre used to such effect in The Reprieve. In that novel I counted some 130 named characters, and the text made a point of cross-cutting unpredictably from one character’s actions and thoughts to another’s, from one scene to another, continually introducing new characters, sometimes just for brief cameos. This made it quite a challenging read but the reward was in the quite wonderful, almost musical, sense of rhythm in the interleaving of episodes, people and their deepest thoughts.

Part one of Iron in the Soul is more traditional, establishing fixed and static scenes and then following characters within them for substantial lengths of text, before starting new chapters or chapter sections to reflect new scenes and characters. Much more clear and comprehensible.

Timeline

Maybe a recap of the historical background would be useful. In spring 1940:

May 10 Germany invades France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands
May 11 British and French forces begin a long line of strategic defenses to defend Belgium
May 12 German General Guderian with his three divisions reaches the Meuse River
May 13 the first German forces emerge from Ardennes onto the Meuse
May 14 German Panzer Corps fifteen and nineteen break through Allied defenses at Sedan allowing German forces to bypass the Maginot line
May 15 German forces push on toward Paris and the English Channel
May 20 General Weygand replaces General Gamelin as Allied commander
May 17-18 Antwerp and Brussels fall to Germany
May 21 Allied forces try to counter attack German forces but are repulsed
May 24 The Luftwaffe bombs Allied defensive positions around Dunkirk
May 25 German forces take Boulogne as more retreating Allied forces reach Dunkirk
May 26 850 British civilian ships and vessels help Allied forces evacuate Dunkirk in the largest military evacuation in history
May 28 King Leopold of Belgium orders his army to surrender to German forces
May 29 around 47,000 British forces are evacuated from Dunkirk
May 30 around 120,000 Allied forces evacuated from Dunkirk
May 31 around 150,000 Allied soldiers arrive in Britain

June 3 The German Luftwaffe bombs Paris
June 4 Allied forces continue evacuation of the coast. In all some 338,326 British and 113,000 French forces are evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain
June 5th Second part of the Battle of France begins with the German striking south from the River Somme
June 9 German forces launch an offensive on Paris
June 10 Norway surrenders to Germany and Italy joins the war by declaring war on France and Great Britain
June 13 Paris is declared an open city by the French government which flees to Bordeaux
June 14 German troops enter Paris
June 16 Marshal Petain becomes Prime Minister of France
June 17 French government asks Germany for armistice terms. Germans cross the river Loire in the west and reach the Swiss frontier in the south-east
June 18 General de Gaulle broadcasts on the BBC telling the people of France to resist
June 22 France signs an armistice with Germany
June 23 Adolf Hitler begins a tour of the captured city of Paris
June 24 The French officially surrender at Compiegne, site of the German surrender in 1918
25 June All hostilities cease. France has fallen

Part one of Iron In the Soul tracks its characters over the four days during which Parisians flee their city before it is taken by the Germans and when retreating Second Tier armed forces are abandoned by their officers and find themselves at a loss what to do. Key characters from the first novel recur:

  • Gomez is in New York scrabbling for a job in the art world.
  • His wife, Sarah, and son Pablo are caught in the huge stream of refugees fleeing Paris.
  • Daniel, the gay banker who married Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, has packed her off and roams the streets of an empty Paris like the last man in the world – until he encounters Philippe, the spoilt youth we met in The Reprieve, and sets about seducing him.
  • Boris Serguine, who we saw join the Army in The Reprieve, was wounded in the fighting but is well enough to go to the apartment of his mistress, the nightclub singer Lola Montero who, however, has been diagnosed with a stomach tumour but can’t bring herself to tell him.
  • We saw Boris’s sister, the prickly Ivich, give herself to a unnamed man in The Reprieve partly as rebellion against her bourgeois parents, partly because she thought war was about to break out and the world end. Nearly two years later, we discover she got pregnant, the man married her, she had a miscarriage, he’s off at the front fighting where, characteristically, she hopes he gets killed.
  • Mathieu’s intolerably pompous self-serving brother, Jacques, a lawyer, forces his wife to pack in a hurry and flee from Paris only to get half way across France and realise he wants to go back, and blames the whole thing on her. She is livid. She goes to sleep in the car dreaming of Mathieu.
  • And the ‘hero’ of the first book – over-sensitive, over-thinking, angst-ridden but ineffectual philosophy tutor Mathieu Delarue? We find him with a platoon of second string infantry who never saw any fighting. For 200 pages they laze around wondering what to do after their officers have treacherously abandoned them, smoking and getting drunk – until a platoon of Chasseurs arrive who are battle-hardened and disciplined. On a whim – or more accurately, as a result of the incredibly complicated and tortuous meditations about the nature of ‘freedom’ which have filled the previous 800 pages – Mathieu decides to join them, is given a rifle, sent with a squad to be sharp-shooters up a church belfry and when the Germans finally arrive, is involved in a fierce firefight which ends with the belfry being blown up by artillery and Mathieu blazing away till the last minute like a Hollywood hero.

Part two

Part two is significantly different. It took me a few pages to realise that the entire part – all 120 pages – consists of just three paragraphs. With the exception of just two small breaks, these 120 pages make up a solid block of print, with no incidental breaks or indentations. Possibly this is to reflect the subject matter.

(Craig Vasey’s introduction to The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, the unpublished fourth book in the series, tells me that in the original French there weren’t even the two small breaks: the entire 120 pages consisted of one paragraph. Moreover, all the verbs in the original were in the present tense, something the English translation here rejects.)

The ‘plot’ picks up (with savage irony / comedy  / bleak farce) at exactly the point where Mathieu is killed – because taking refuge in a cellar of a house off the very square where Mathieu keeps shooting till he’s blown up, is his friend and contemporary, the strong, manly Communist Brunet. (In The Age of Reason, there’d been a passage where Brunet tries to persuade Mathieu to become a communist, but the timid philosopher, as with everything else in his life, hesitates and puts the decision off.)

Anyway, Brunet has no idea Mathieu is up in the church tower about to be blown to smithereens. He has his own concerns. He has fought bravely but most of his platoon were killed. Now, as the Germans finally enter the village, he surrenders to the Germans. He falls in with a trail of French POWs which grows and grows till it is maybe 10,000 strong, a vast concourse of defeated and demoralised men stumbling along dusty roads in blinding heat. Finally, they arrive at a disused barracks which has become converted into a POW camp.

Here the French are easily shepherded inside and locked up. The next hundred pages give in great detail the dialogue between a cast of about a dozen peasant and proletarian infantrymen, while Brunet makes his plans to create a Communist cell among them. While they fuss about food and the weather and gossip, Brunet is planning for the future.

In this he is sort of helped by Schneider, a tough, surly man who is not exactly a Communist, but agrees to help him. The spine of the section is the wary dialogue between these two men, with Schneider proving himself both more of a man of the people, and smarter than Brunet in various situations. It is difficult to know what this section is ‘about’. Possibly it is a prolonged examination of the nature of a ‘Communist Activist’, with Brunet given Schneider as a foil to dramatise different approaches to handling men, creating a cell, combating cynicism and fatigue, and so on.

Whatever the precise intention, the overt or political purpose of the section now feels completely redundant, part of a long-lost history. It doesn’t even – as with so much Sartre – lead to any real action, for next to nothing happens to this vast concourse of freed men. After five or six days without food, trucks eventually arrive with soup and bread. One madmen runs amok screaming and the Germans shoot him. For the rest the defeated Frenchmen adopt a holiday mood, sunbathing, playing cards, establishing billets in every available building, nicking stuff, squabbling. Both Brunet and Schneider find it almost impossible to motivate anyone. No Germans of any authority appear. They don’t confront the camp commandant or organise a strike or anything really decisive or dramatic. Instead Brunet and Schneider squabble with each other, and with the dozen or so named characters around them.

In the last of the three ‘sections’, the setting jumps a bit to being aboard the massive train of cattle trucks in which thousands of POWs have been packed as it rattles north through France. A teeny tiny bit of suspense is given to this passage because the more intelligent among them (i.e. Brunet, Schneider, a few others) are pretty sure they’re being taken to Germany to become slave labour.

This section depicts the various forms of denial, fear, and panic among the POWs as they wonder which way the train will turn at the fatal set of points which will steer them either further north into France or East across the border. One character, a young printer who Brunet had recruited for his Communist cell, panics, jumps from the train when it slows at a cutting, runs away a little, then panics more and tries to return and catch up – only to be picked off by the German guards and fall dead beside the rails. That’s as dramatic as it gets.

When the train reaches the points, they are set East, confirming Brunet and Schneider’s gloomy assumptions. They are heading East to a dark future. The final words are:

Above the dead body, above the inert freight-van, the darkness wheeled. It alone was living. Tomorrow’s dawn would cover all of them with the same dew. Dead flesh and rusted steel would run with the same sweat. Tomorrow the black birds would come. (p.349)

Themes

The futility of life

As to the mood and feel of the text, we are back in bleak Sartre-land where the sunshine is futile, life is pointless, breathing is an effort, and the hyper-sensitive characters are oppressed by life, by other people, by other people looking at them, dammit – and everyone agonises about their ‘freedom’, panting after this mystical chimera without ever quite grasping what this much-abused term actually means.

Gomez, the artist has escaped to New York, where he walks around hating the heat, the sunshine, the big buildings, the streamlined cars, the adverts, the magazines and, everywhere, pictures of happy smiling people – Not to grin is a sin, he thinks bitterly – while ‘over there’ i.e. back in Europe, people are suffering, suffering I tell you! This is intercut with the plight of his wife, Sarah, a Jewess, and small son Pablo, who are caught in a vast traffic jam of refugees fleeing Paris. These are Gomez’s thoughts:

He looked at the street, at the meaningless sun, at the whole meaningless day. There would be nothing now, any more, but meaningless days. (p.9)

These are Sarah’s thoughts:

We are no more than the feet of an interminable insect. Why walk when hope is dead? Why live? (p.25)

Sartre’s novels could almost be designed to validate teenage depressives’ most suicidal thoughts and, above all, to make the depressive feel special, superior to what Gomez calls the ‘human tide’ of people in New York with their ‘bright dead eyes’, and Sarah’s description of the refugees as ‘insects’ (a favourite insult term of Sartre’s; he memorably describes Hitler as having an insect face; Mathieu looks down from the church tower on the villagers like ‘frightened ants’; Lola feels that Boris while screwing her is like an insect, when the Germans arrive in the village Mathieu feels they have ‘the eyes of supermen and insects’, p.212).

Everyone else is an insect, or an inane grinning American with dead eyes, part of the machine, part of the bourgeoisie – I, I alone, suffer – look how I suffer – look how special I am!

Suicide

Both The Age of Reason and The Reprieve contain extended sequences describing the thoughts and sensations, the hyper self-awareness, of two men on the brink of committing suicide – Daniel with a razor and Mathieu jumping into the Seine, respectively. Having tried to kill myself, I can vouch for the exquisite sense of self-pity you feel at such a moment, looking at your doomed hands, your tragic face in the mirror, afflicted by sentimental thoughts that this is the last time you’ll look at your face, the last time you’ll turn out the bedroom light (or whatever), after you slash your wrists, take an overdose etc.

So, Ivich invites her brother, Boris, to join her in a suicide pact (p.72) though she isn’t really a serious character, just a spoilt wilful girl. Daniel comes across Philippe, the spoilt son of bourgeois parents, hesitating on the brink of the Seine, trying to nerve himself to throw himself in. Various other characters – for example Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, who is secretly in love with him – think they can’t go on, life is so damn pointless. What’s the point?

In Sartre’s novels, death, and suicide, are all around us. Describing the plot to my son he said, ‘sounds like teenage angst on steroids’.

Rootless, directionless, abandoned

You can’t help feeling that what many of these people need is a sound spanking (as Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, memorably puts it). Or maybe just the support of a loving family, a job, some stability, something to focus their energy on.

But Sartre has chosen his characters carefully to be bohemian types, drifters, people without settled jobs or any real family commitments. Sartre selects a group of people with very few responsibilities and who we never see doing a single day’s work in their lives – thus allowing them all to give vent to maximum feelings of alienation and anomie, thus permitting them all to have lengthy and repetitive soliloquies about the pointlessness of life, about their feelings of abandonment.

As a married father of two, I see both marriage and especially fatherhood, as demanding, responsible roles, taking a lot of time and commitment. Significantly, none of Sartre’s characters are married or have children in the traditional manner:

  • Gomez is married but has dumped Sarah and his son to run away and fight in Spain, then flee to America.
  • Daniel only married Marcelle as an existential dare, in reality he hates her and can’t wait to get away from her.
  • Boris is going out with Lola the singer, but routinely hates her, and in fact dumps her for the army.
  • Ivich got married to Georges after he got her pregnant but, inevitably, hates him, and hopes he’s killed in the fighting (p.66). Ivich loathes her in-laws, and she ‘detests’ the French (p.68), but then she hates more or less everyone.
  • Sarah looks at her crying son and realises she hates him (p.25).
  • The villagers hate the French soldiers who’ve been billeted on them (p.97).
  • Mathieu realises he hates his drunken comrades (p.132).
  • Philippe tells Daniel that he hates his step-father, the general (p.149).
  • Pinette’s girlfriend hates Mathieu (p.157)

In fact, most of the characters hate most of the other characters most of the time. Do all French people hate all other French people? It would explain their notorious surliness.

So if you’re a drifter without a proper job, without any family ties or support, who hates everyone and despises bourgeois society, it’s highly likely this is how you will end up feeling: full of despair and anomie. It’s hardly rocket science.

Alone

It is a key axiom of existentialism that every individual is alone, completely alone, and condemned to complete freedom. We are not hemmed in or supported by social structures or traditions or morality, for we choose whether or not to accept those: to blame society or others in any way for any of our acts is bad faith, is a denial of our utter freedom.

But Sartre’s philosophy of life – or his melodramatic poetry about the horror of existence – all begins in this primal, fundamental sense of your complete solitude, the basic feeling of alienation from others, from your fellow soldiers, or your family, from everyone else in the bar or cafe or nightclub, some sudden feeling of your complete aloneness in the face of an utterly indifferent universe.

This is the moment in the characters’ lives which the text keeps returning to like a moth to a flame.

  • He shivered. He felt suddenly naked and alone, a man, I. (p.102)
  • No one needs me. he sat down on the edge of the road because there was nowhere for him to go. Night entered into him through mouth and eyes, through nose and ears. He was no one now; he was nothing – nothing any longer but misery and darkness. (p.162)
  • Mathieu saw the smile and felt utterly alone. (p178)
  • She felt lost in a world of which she could make no use. (p.191) [Odette]
  • She thought: ‘I am alone.’.. He speaks to me and kisses me, but when I come to die I shall be alone… (pp.205-6) [Lola]
  • Where are the Comrades? Brunet felt lonely. Never, in all the past ten years, had he felt so utterly alone. (p.239)
  • [When the French prisoners of war arrive in a huge fences barracks] They were going to bury their filthy old war among these high buildings, were going to stew in their own juice, unseen of the outer world, isolated and alone. (p.241)

Even sex doesn’t unify people, it merely emphasises their inescapable isolation. There are two memorable acts of sex in the book and both of them emphasise the essential loneliness of the male protagonist: first the peasant Pinette screwing the post office girl he’s picked up in a field outside the village where Mathieu and the other soldiers are mooching about; then handsome young Boris making love to Lola the ageing singer.

Lola has discovered she has a tumour of the belly and/or the menopause, both of which conspire to make sex very painful, but not as painful as the self-image she has, loathing her dry husk of a body and thinking of Boris as a repellent insect squirting her with sticky fluid. There are lots of disgusting, viscous fluids in Sartre.

It is through a wound that you will enter me. When he used to touch me in the old days, I became like velvet: now, my body is like dried earth: I crack and crumble under his fingers… He rent her to the roots of her belly, he was moving in her belly like a knife. On his face was a look of loneliness, of morbid concentration. She saw him as an insect, as a fly climbing up a window-pane climbing, falling, climbing again. She was conscious only of the pain he was causing her… (p.204)

No, not even sex is an escape from the ubiquitous sense of aloneness, of abandonment, which Sartre sees as the permanent basis of the human condition.

In the climaxes of the two parts, the male protagonist is invincibly alone. Mathieu, wounded, and the only survivor of an artillery shell which has brought the roof of the church tower down on all his comrades, struggles to continue shooting for just a few seconds more before being obliterated. In those moments:

He fired. He was cleansed. He was all-powerful. He was free. (p.225)

On the last page of part two, after the little printer has been shot dead and the train moves mechanically onwards.

Brunet was alone, rigid and uncomfortable. (p.349)

It is an oddity than a man so obsessed with the fundamental and irreducible aloneness of each human being became a communist, devoted to the idea of international solidarity. And that a man so obsessed with man’s terrifyingly absolute freedom, adopted the Marxist worldview which is characterised by the inevitability of History, that Marx had uncovered scientific laws of History which dictated that a Communist revolution was inevitable i.e that at some deep level human beings are not free. I leave this to the scholars to disentangle: it would certainly be good to reach a better understanding.

Science fiction states of mind

Not much happens in a Sartre novel. Page after page is filled either with lengthy dialogue between its ineffectual characters, or with even lengthier descriptions of their feelings of abandonment and futility. The firefight at the climax of part one, and the death of the printer at the climax of part two, are very much the exceptions which prove the rule. They are more or less the only bits of ‘action’ in the entire trilogy.

Every page features descriptions of the characters’ inner thoughts, lengthy internal monologues but these are not as they would be in a comparable English novel. The distinctive and unnerving feature of them is the extent to which they develop into often almost delirious hallucinations of the world around them, with objects coming alive, with great abstract ideas entering the sky or room or drowning them, with parts of their bodies becoming external objects (arms and particularly hands often seem to their owners to have become alien objects). Here is Mathieu in the bell tower of the village church.

Under their feet was the fragrance of spices and incense, coolness, and the stained-glass windows feebly shining in the shadows of the Faith. Under their feet was confidence and hope. He felt cold. He looked at the sky, breathed the sky, thought with the sky. He was naked on a glacier at a great height. Far below him lay his childhood. (p.200)

In a proliferating multitude of ways, the world around Sartre’s characters, including their own bodies, including their own ideas and sensations, come alive, infuse their thoughts, colour the sky, invade the world.

The effect is often bizarre, surreal or even druggy. ‘He thought with the sky.’

And very often these hallucinations go one step further by infusing these trippy states of consciousness with poetic renderings of grand abstract concepts like Death or Defeat or Despair. Characters frequently become dead men, anticipating their death (by suicide or in battle), realise that they are a dead man walking or thinking. Or death invades whole scenes, the huge vista of prisoners of war becomes a sea of the dead (to Brunet’s eye) or Paris becomes a vast tomb (in Daniel’s imagination), and so on.

Thus Daniel wandering the empty streets of Paris experiences what amount to such intense imaginative transports that they are effectively hallucinations. n a memorable simile the Boulevard St Michel becomes a vast beached whale. In fact, it was while reading the Daniel-wanders-round-empty-Paris section that it suddenly struck me that a lot of Sartre’s scenes have the feel of science fiction.

Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, was silence and emptiness, an abyss stretching horizontally away from him… The streets led nowhere. Without human life, they all looked alike. The Boulevard Saint-Michel, but yesterday a long southward spread of gold, seemed now like a stranded whale, belly upwards. He made his feet ring out upon the great, sodden, hollow carcass. (p.93)

This scene suddenly reminded me of all those science fiction novels in which a man finds himself more or less the only survivor of a disaster, a great plague or nuclear apocalypse.

Anyway, the passage quoted above could be categorised as a Level One hallucination, one which is still a metaphor of a recognisable state. But (as noted above) routinely Sartre’s characters progress to Level Two hallucinations in which the ‘reality’ around them becomes infused with great Abstract Concepts.

He looked at the empty bridge, at the padlocked bookboxes on the quay, at the clock-face that had no hands… A shadow slipped past the Prefecture of Police…Paris was not, strictly speaking, empty. It was peopled by little broken scraps of time that sprang here and there to life, to be almost immediately reabsorbed again into this radiance of eternity. (p.91)

‘Scraps of time reabsorbed into this radiance of eternity.’ This is a kind of philosophical prose poetry, in that it invokes ‘deep’ ideas, but without any systematic application, merely for effect. It is a kind of pseudo-philosophical lyricism for its own sake.

I am here. Time, with its great fanning future, collapsed. All that was left was a tiny flickering patch of local moments. (p.108)

Suddenly this visionary quality reminded me of the prose of the great psychological sci-fi writer, J.G. Ballard. In the 1960s Ballard famously rejected ‘space opera’, the whole sci-fi tradition of rockets going to outer space, aliens and death rays – in order to concentrate on weird mental states achieved here on decaying planet earth. His characters wander landscapes of entropy and decay littered with empty swimming pools, abandoned motels, are attracted to car crashes or go schizo in high-rise buildings. They explore the altered states of inner space. Like Sartre’s.

All about him was once more swallowed in a planetary silence. He must walk, walk unceasingly, over the surface of a cooling planet. (p.134)

Reading Daniel’s visions of abandoned Paris I suddenly saw the surprising similarity between Ballard’s psychological explorations and the many many passages in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels which obsessively depict mental states of hallucinatory intensity – not for any philosophic or propagandistic purpose, well, OK, partly to promote the feel of his existentialist world-view — but much more for their weirdness, to bring out the strangeness of what it’s like to be the animal who thinks, the animal with self-consciousness, the animal lost in the fever of its own compulsive hallucinations. Here’s Mathieu among his soldiers hanging round the village waiting for something to happen.

We are a vermin’s dream: our thoughts are becoming muddied, are becoming less and less human: thoughts, hairy and clawed, were scurrying around, jumping from head to head; the vermin was on the point of waking up. (p.102)

At which point it dawned on me that Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, the so-called existentialist philosophy, is maybe a rationalisation, an attempt to give a structure and a meaning to what in fact, in the fiction, on the page, comes over as an unstoppable torrent of weird hallucinations.

His mind felt completely empty. He was dead: the afternoon was bleached and dead. It was a tomb. (p.76)

Mathieu is not at all dead as he thinks this, just like none of the other characters who let thoughts of death and the dead ceaselessly invade their thoughts are actually dead. But then maybe ‘think’ is the wrong word. Maybe it would be better to say that this is a poetic description of an intense feeling which is passing through Mathieu’ consciousness. Mathieu is merely the vessel for these delirious psychological states.

All Sartre’s characters are. They are channels for Sartre’s uncontrollable gush of weird mental states. One of the soldiers hanging round with Mathieu begins to tell the others the armistice with Germany has been signed, but hesitates… and suddenly they all grasp the dreadful truth without having to be told.

A dazzle off steel, then silence. The blue, flabby flesh of the afternoon had taken eternity like the sweep of a scythe. Not a sound, not a breath of air. Time had become frozen; the war had withdrawn… (p76)

Is hallucination the right word for this kind of writing? Sometimes. Other times it’s just a peculiar, a very distinctive, way of conceiving human beings and human consciousness, in which ‘thought’ is perceived as an almost organic process and – this being Sartre – generally a revoltingly nauseating one involving slime.

At one moment he was just an emptiness filled with vague forebodings, at another, he became just like everyone else. His forebodings faded; the general mood welled sluggishly up in his mind and oozed from his mouth… (p.97)

The vermin eyes had ostracised him, were looking up at him with an air of astonished solemnity, as though they were seeing him for the first time, as though they were looking up at him through layers of slime. (p.102)

The fact that the French prisoners of war are made to trudge through the heat for hours before reaching the camp, and then aren’t fed for five days gives Sartre the opportunity to let rip with the altered states caused by starvation and dehydration. For an extended sequence Brunet passes into a delirium somewhere between dreams and hallucinations. For example, he imagines all the soldiers are chimpanzees.

There were chimpanzees in the next cage, pressing inquisitive faces to the bars. They had sad and wrinkled eyes. Monkeys have sadder eyes than any animals except man. Something had happened, he wondered what. A catastrophe. What catastrophe? Perhaps the sun had gone cold? (p.274)

Note, again, the tinge of apocalyptic science fiction.

In fact this long second part is a strange mixture of very realistic slangy chat between rough Frenchmen, arguing, crying, going mad, blaming their officers, squabbling, cadging fags etc – and passages of quite stunning prose poetry. Sartre’s philosophy I leave to the experts on Husserl and Heidegger to nail down; it belongs to the European tradition which is difficult for us Anglo-Saxons to really understand.

But for me the revelation of these books is the surprising amount of purple prose and lyricism they contain, the extent to which they are truly writerly. As a last example, imagine a huge prisoner of war camp with thousands of dusty, downcast men lying, squatting, standing, leaning about everywhere, as far as the eye can see. And then:

The airplane passed overhead with a shattering din. The crowded faces lowered, then upturned, passed from black to white, like a field suddenly bursting into flower: in place of hard, black heads, thousands of camelias broke into blossom. Spectacles glittered like scraps of glass in a garden bed. (p.243)

There are lots of passages like this. Whereas his analyses of the political situation have passed into dusty history and his existentialist philosophy may or may not still have adherents – the vibrancy, the unexpected imaginativeness and continual weirdness of Sartre’s continues to haunts with its strange power.

Credit

La mort dans l’âme by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1949. This translation is not by the translator of the first two in the trilogy, Eric Sutton, but by Gerard Hopkins. It was published as Iron In The Soul by Hamish Hamilton in 1950. Iron In The Soul was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1963. All references are to the 1967 Penguin paperback reprint, which cost the princely sum of five shillings (25p).

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

2 Comments
by Simon on August 26, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, French literature, Novel, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on August 26, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/iron-in-the-soul-jean-paul-sartre/

For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming (1960)

Bond liked cheerful, expansive people with a zest for life. (p.146)

Five short stories. Four of them started life as plots for a TV series that was never made, indicating: a) how happy Fleming was to engage in popular culture, and b) how keen to monetise his creation. The hardback editions had a sub-title which seems to have been dropped from my paperback version – Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond.

1. From a View to a Kill
2 For Your Eyes Only
3 Quantum of Solace
4 Risico
5 The Hildebrand Rarity

1. From a View to a Kill

Although he lost his virginity there on a wild night when he was 16 (p.6), Bond has cordially disliked Paris since the War. ‘One cannot drink seriously in French cafés.’ (p.5) Paris has been pawned to East Europeans, tourists, Germans. In his opinion, you can only actually see it properly for two hours between five and seven am; after that it is hidden by a thundering stream of black metal (p.8), ie monstrous traffic (and this is 1959!). Bond is feeling stale after a mission to extract a Hungarian from the East went wrong (the defector was blown up in a minefield).

Into Bond’s ennui bursts a car screeching to the pavement and a glamorous woman walking right up to his table. Turns out to be Mary Ann Russell from the service; there’s a flap on at Station F. Bond is driven there and briefed. A motorbike courier to SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) has been shot and his Top Secret documents stolen. Bond drives to the SHAPE headquarters in northern France, is greeted by the unhelpful American Colonel Schreiber in charge, and sets about interviewing everyone.

Slowly Bond puts pieces together and is particularly intrigued by the story of a group of gypsies who recently vacated a clearing along the Route Nationale where the cyclist was shot. Bond investigates and finds a suspicious-looking mound at the vacated site. He dresses in camouflage and returns to stake out the clearing. After a very long time, to his amazement, the mound divides in two and people come out of it: a motorcyclist dressed in NATO uniform, helped by two assistants. Off he drives, the assistants withdraw inside the secret hideaway, then the mound slowly closes up. Bond waits a long time then slips away.

Next day he borrows a NATO motorcyclist outfit and sets off on the morning run. He is not surprised when an identically-dressed motorbike courier cruises up behind him. Before the assassin can take a shot, Bond himself swerves his bike and shoots the baddie, who goes flying into a tree. Dead.

Bond motors to the clearing where NATO troops are waiting. When he enters with the bike, the mound opens as the assistants think it is their leader; but when he doesn’t reply to some question put in Russian, a fight breaks out. Shots are fired, Bond is jumped on by one of the baddies who pummels him to the ground and the baddie is making for his gun when a shot rings out and the baddie’s body goes flying. Bond looks up to see Mary Ann Russell striding among the soldiers, dressed in brown shirt and tight jeans, a smoking .22 pistol in her hand. Lucky, eh? And sexy.

This story is so silly it’s hard to know where to start. I sympathised with the notion of Paris ruined by traffic, and enjoyed descriptions of the cafés and geography of north Paris where Bond likes to stay. After that… nonsense.

2. For Your Eyes Only

Introducing a posh old couple, the Havelocks. Their family have owned one of the best estates in Jamaica for 300 years, given it by a grateful Oliver Cromwell to an ancestor who signed King Charles’s death warrant (just as Honeychile Riders’ ancestor was alleged to have done in Dr No, and just as falsely).

Out of the blue they are visited by three Hispanics, led by a Major Gonzales. They represent a businessman in Cuba who wishes to buy the property. Gonzales unzips airline bags which contain half a million dollars cash and offers to pay on the spot. Mr Havelock refuses and angrily tells the three to leave his property, at which Gonzales sighs, signals to his two assistants, who step forward and pump the Havelocks full of bullets. They return to their car, which is stolen, drive down to the bay and abandon it, take a dinghy out to a waiting yacht and sail away.

Cut to M briefing Bond in London. He is uncertain and shifty because he is personally involved: turns out he was best man at the Havelocks wedding in 1925. Gonzales is the hit man for an ex-Nazi, von Hammerstein, who’s made a fortune working for the Cuban dictator Batista’s Intelligence Service. Now it looks like Castro’s communists might take over, von Hammerstein, like others, is getting his money out of Cuba and investing in nearby property, ie in Jamaica. Now the same gang is intimidating the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy, into selling. What does Bond think?

Assassinate them, says Bond. M gives him the file marked ‘For Your Eyes Only’ which shows that von Hammerstein, Gonzales et al are holed up in a luxury ranch near a place called Echo Lake in Vermont, USA, up near the Canadian border.

Bond flies to Canada (he doesn’t like the new faster, bigger jets: less luxury, everything more cramped and rushed; it’s interesting that Fleming records these journeys in such detail just as luxury travel began to be degraded by the advent of mass tourism.)

Bond meets a security man from the Mounties, Colonel ‘Johns’, who humorously says this whole operation is off-the-record but they’ll give him all the help they can, before handing over maps, a hunting rifle and permits, directions, clothes, a hired car.

Bond drives off south, crosses the border into the States on foot, finds his way to the lakeside house – very nice – tests his sights, waits for sunrise except – a voice tells him not to move! A young woman dressed like an Amazon is pointing a bow and very modern steel arrow right at him. She is Judy Havelock and she has also come here to kill von Hammerstein, to avenge her parents, and if Bond gets in her way, she’ll shoot him too.

After some bickering they reach an agreement that Judy has first shot. The group of baddies come out to frolic in the morning sunshine, von Hammerstein an ugly, squat, hairy, pasty man, Gonzales a creepy Hispanic. The two goons have an impromptu competition to shoot empty champagne bottles thrown in the air, the winner gets a night with one of the two scantily-clad hookers who are fawning and simpering around them.

As von Hammerstein goes to dive off the edge of the quay into the lake a steel arrow shoots him through the heart. In a second Bond has shot dead one of the goons with his hunting rifle, then turns to the next one, misses, then hits. But all this has given Gonzales time to let off bursts of machine gun fire into the woods where Bond and the girl are hiding and then push over and hide behind a steel table on the lakeside lawn. After taking pot shots at each other, Gonzales makes a break for the house and Bond stands and nails him with one shot.

Then he finds Judy, wounded and bleeding, hit by one of the goons’ bursts of firing. Disappointingly, she has been transformed from no-nonsense Amazon into simpering girly. When they originally met and were bickering Bond said several times ‘This is man’s work’ and I was hoping she would humiliate him, somehow save him when he got into trouble and generally kick this saying back in his teeth. Alas, the narrative, Fleming and Bond all confirm the saying, as poor girly Judy now says she had no idea it would be so brutal and so horrible and, as Bond ties a tourniquet round her bleeding arm, allows him to kiss her, then kiss her again.

I enjoyed the banter and repartee with the Canadian Mountie, ‘Colonel Johns’, who sets things up for Bond, the working bond created between two professionals who know what each other are about. But the entire hit man storyline is morally dubious, and then the last minute ‘James you’re so manly!’ conversion of tough woman into fawning girl is as sick-making as the similar ‘sudden conversion’ ending of Goldfinger.

3. Quantum of Solace

This is the standout story of the collection, and in a different class from the others.

Bond has done a job in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, a place he cordially dislikes because it is so disgustingly rich. The job was throwing firebombs into two ships carrying arms to Castro’s forces in Cuba. (Historical note: Castro’s communist forces officially overthrew Batista on January 1, 1959.) Now Bond’s just had to endure a gruellingly formal and dull dinner party at the Governor’s place, but the other guests – a Canadian natural gas millionaire and his chatty wife – have left and, over drinks, after a bit of chat, the Governor settles in to tell Bond a story.

The Governor was telling it in a rather elderly narrative style which gave it a ring of truth. (p.106)

It’s about a man the Governor was at Oxford with, ‘let’s call him Philip Masters’, who won a place in the Foreign Office and was posted to Nigeria. Very shy, troubled childhood (parents divorced, brought up by an aunt) he found happiness among the kindness of Nigerians. On a flight back to the UK he is strapped in and generally fussed over by a stunningly attractive air stewardess, Rhoda Llewellyn. By the end of his flight, he invites her for a date, one thing leads to another, and they get married. Then he is posted out to the Caribbean which is where the Governor ran into him again, in Bermuda.

Briefly, the wife slowly gets bored of being the wife of a colonial official, it’s not at all as glamorous as she’d imagined. They take up golf but she far outshines her husband and enjoys flirting with the men at the club. Eventually, the inevitable happens and she takes up with one of the rich young men in the fast set, son of a millionaire with his own speedboat etc. Doesn’t bother hiding it, brazenly open, demands a separate bedroom from her meek retiring husband, walks all over Masters, humiliates him in public.

The Governor calls Masters in for a meeting, tells him he’s getting a terrible reputation, says he’s packing him off to Washington for five months to handle trade negotiations, during which he must sort out his private affairs.

During those five months, while her husband is away, the millionaire playboy gets tired of Rhoda and, prevailed on by his parents, very publicly dumps her. Chastened and suddenly shunned by posh and smart society, she decides to change her ways and is ready to be meek and obedient when her husband returns. Unfortunately, Masters has also changed and returns utterly ruthless, focused and decisive. He announces he is divorcing her in one year. His private detective has gathered all the evidence required for a quick legal action. For that year their house will be partitioned in two so their paths never cross, he will never see her and, from this point onwards, never speak to her. She pleads, she begs, she breaks down in tears – he doesn’t relent.

By now Bond, despite himself, is genuinely hooked. And this is where the Governor introduces his theory: human relationships can be repaired and made to work as long as there is a bare minimum amount of affection between the partners, just enough warmth for communication to remain open – as long as there is a quantum of solace, the tiniest particle of warmth and sympathy. That gone, everything is gone.

So none of Rhoda’s pleading made any impact, the couple put up a diplomatic facade of man and wife for the rest of his posting, but had not a shred of affection. In his final week before Masters leaves for his next appointment – not taking her – Rhoda pleaded for some money to live on after he left and he rubbed salt in the wounds by grudgingly giving her the car and the radiogram (the house had been rented for the duration of his appointment). When she goes to the car dealer, after Masters had departed, she finds both car and radiogram were themselves hired and have outstanding bill on them, which she has to pawn her belongings to pay. Masters has systematically reduced her to poverty.

Rhoda carries on for a while, eking a living hanging round with the flash set at the golf club, being passed from one man to another until she has sunk to the level of being a sort of posh courtesan. Finally, one of her patrons, a lofty Lady who disapproved of all her behaviour but still pitied her, got her a job as receptionist at a hotel in Jamaica, where she moved, relieved to flee the Bahamas at last.

Throughout the narrative Bond has occasionally commented on the story or the Governor has paused so they can top up their drinks or light a cigar. Reminiscent of the many chaps-chatting-over-port-and-cigars frame narratives of Victorian and Edwardian times, found in Sherlock Holmes stories or, most famously, in the long after-dinner narrative which makes up Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness.

By this point in the story, the Governor and Bond have left the panelled drawing room and walked through the landscaped grounds down to the security gates. The pace of the frame narrative has been beautifully timed to accompany or bring out the detail of the main story.

It is here, at the gates, that the Governor turns and adds the conclusion of his tale. It was while working as receptionist that Rhoda made an impression on a rich guest, a millionaire from Canada. They got married and have been very happy ever since, Rhoda turning out to be the most devoted and loyal of wives.

And – in the unexpected, simple and breath-taking twist – the Governor reveals that this was the very couple who Bond had shared such a dull dinner with earlier that evening, the Canadian millionaire and his twittering wife.

Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real passion – of the Comédie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments. (p.128)

The Wikipedia article on this collection says one of the stories was a conscious homage to Somerset Maugham. Surely it is this one, with its leisurely, slow-paced account of human weakness, set against a civilised after-dinner frame story, reminding me of the urbane and brilliantly persuasive stories in Maugham’s own spy novel, Ashenden.

4. ‘Risico’

It’s interesting to see that herion smuggling was enough of a topical issue/concern in 1959 to base fiction on.

Bond is sent to Rome to contact an Italian heroin smuggler-turned-CIA-informant, Kristatos. Kristatos tells him the Big Man behind the smuggling into Britain is the padrone of the very restaurant where they’re eating, one Enrico Colombo. And sure enough we see Colombo a) eating his spaghetti like a pig b) conferring with his beautiful German concubine/assistant, Lisl Baum c) using gadgets hidden in a chair to record Bond and Kristatos’s conversation, during which K says he’ll break up the smuggling ring if Bond will kill Colombo. So Colombo discovers Bond is out to kill him. It’s all written so as to make us think Colombo is a Drax-Dr No style baddie.

Colombo and Baum then play act a massive row, complete with her throwing wine in his face, just as Bond is leaving the restaurant, so that Bond steps in as the English gent and offers her a lift in a taxi back to her hotel. This is a long enough journey for her to tell Bond she’s moving onto Venice tomorrow, and she’ll be sunbathing out on the beach of the Lido, if he fancies meeting.

So Bond takes the train (and is amusingly grumpy about the rudeness and discomfort of Italian trains), checks into a hotel, then goes out to the Lido. Here he traipses across the beach to find the almost naked blonde bombshell sunbathing, as promised. But barely have they started flirting before three goons in dark suits start approaching up the beach. Bond walks fast towards the village end of the strand in a bid to escape, but two of the men cut of at an angle across the spit of sand until BOOM! one of them is blown up – it is an abandoned minefield which the Italian authorities, typically, haven’t got round to clearing. Gruesome.

Meanwhile, Bond had arrived at the concrete sea-wall and was walking along it towards a group of fishermen and safety until – he realises the fisherman are all pointing their spearguns at him and the fat one in the middle is Colombo! They have just begun to have typical good guy-bad guy banter (‘So Mr Bond…’) when the third of the goons sneaks up behind Bond and knocks him unconscious with the hilt of his Luger.

Bond comes to in a ship at sea. The door is open and he goes on deck to find Colombo tremendously happy and chatty. In the TWIST or volta in the story, Colombo tells Bond that Kristatos is the one who is running the heroin smuggling operation into Britain. Sure, Colombo is a smuggler and a crook, but he absolutely refuses to touch drugs. Bond finds himself trusting the open, smiling, hearty man before him who gives him his gun back. Somehow they have become friends.

And – in what is becoming a routine revelation – it turns out the heroin which goes through the pipeline to Britain to hook and undermine the nation’s youth is supplied by Russia, from her poppy fields in the Caucasus. No matter how remote and fantastical the plot, somehow Fleming always manages to make SMERSH at the root of it.

Colombo explains that their ship is about to enter the harbour of Santa Maria, where they will find Kristatos’s gang of hired Albanian thugs loading massive rolls of newsprint (remember the massive rolls of newsprint towards the end of Moonraker?) onto a ship moored at the quay.

Colombo’s boat comes alongside and throws grappling hooks into the Albanian ship and the shooting starts immediately. Bond saves the day by shooting out the man in the warehouse who was using a machine gun on our boys, then dodges behind the warehouse to see Kristatos a) set off a boobytrap, which blows up the warehouse b) jump into his car and speed off. Third shot lucky, Bond shoots him in the back and the car careers out of control.

Bond is taken back onto Colombo’s ship with much back-patting and Italian gratitude for shooting the machine gunner in the warehouse. Now, the Italian assures him, this massive drug peddling pipeline has been closed down. To round things off, Colombo tosses Bond a hotel key: the key to the room of Lisl Baum – she’s waiting for him.

So he saves the day for England, makes a new foreign friend, and gets to sleep with the pretty blonde. Job done!

(P.S. The title ‘Risico’ is how Kristatos pronounces ‘risk’: so there’s an irony in Kristatos’s word being taken as the title, since the whole adventure turns out to be not just risky, but fatal for him.)

5. The Hildebrand Rarity

The story opens with Bond scuba diving in the Seychelles, and shooting a massive sting ray. Apparently, Fleming himself had scuba diving lessons in Jamaica from the legendary Jacques Cousteau, so knew what he was talking about – but the ability to convey the wonder and beauty of the underwater world is entirely his own.

Bond is in the Seychelles at the order of M to investigate alleged sabotage and infiltration by communist forces. He finds nothing to report on and is left with a week in hand, hence the diving. His local contact, Fidele Barbey, member of an influential local family, picks him up on the beach and says he knows Bond is bored and so has got him a few days helping out with the diving on the luxury yacht of an American millionaire who’s visiting the islands.

Bond takes an instant dislike to the millionaire, a rude and boorish man (of German descent) named Milton Krest, who insists on calling the galley the kitchen, the luxury yacht – the Wavekrest – ‘it’ (instead of ‘she’) and generally outraging all good naval traditions and Bond’s sense of the proprieties. Krest is rude about Britain, then about Europeans generally, before going on to insult the Seychellois.

Turns out Krest commissioned his yacht as a tax fiddle: he tells the US taxman it is engaged on ‘scientific research’ expeditions. To justify this he has to find and send back specimens to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. He has already, crudely and corruptly, bought most of the specimens on the list he was given from local zoos and aquariums: all he needs now is the extremely rare Hildebrand Rarity.

Bond and Barbey are introduced to Krest’s (stunningly beautiful) English wife, Elizabeth, and the crew of hard-faced Germans, and then they set sail to remote coral islands where the Rarity was once sighted before the war.

Over dinner, Krest gets drunk, insults everyone and lets it be known that he not only verbally abuses his wife, but whips her with a dried-out stingray tail, which he calls ‘the Corrector’. Bond is fascinated by her craven ‘slave’ mentality, and the word slave recurs numerous times throughout the story, for although Krest routinely reduces her to tears, Elizabeth defends her husband to the others.

What must this woman have to put up with, this beautiful girl he had got hold of to be his slave – his English slave?… There was something painfully slavish in her attitude towards him. (pp.194-195)

The Wavekrest anchors off an isolated atoll and Bond and Barbey go snorkelling although, ironically, it is the shouting, can-do Yank, Krest, who actually spots the Rarity. He kills it – and everything else around it – by pouring a five-gallon drum of poison into the water. (Bond shows an unexpected but actually quite characteristic sensitivity about killing – murdering – all these beautiful innocent sea creatures, and describes their death throes in pitiful fashion.)

That night Krest gets more drunk than usual, abuses Bond and Barbey, tells his wife he’s going to beat her tonight, despite her tearful pleading to be ‘forgiven’ and, when he finds Bond out on the after-deck with her, for just a moment, threatens to kill Bond – or have him killed by his thuggish crew. As he walks drunkenly back into the main cabin, Krest’s silhouette looks like a baboon. Yes, he is a very bad man.

Resisting the temptation to beat the daylights out of him, Bond instead sleeps out on deck and hears Krest clamber drunkenly into his hammock several decks away. In the middle of the night he’s woken by the sound of choking and struggling. He gets to Krest’s deck to find the millionaire has been choked to death, with the Hildebrand Rarity rammed down his throat.

Bond coolly assesses this, the umpteenth scene of a violent death which he’s encountered in his career, and decides to fake the cause of death. He removes the fish and replaces it in its specimen jar in the main cabin, then carefully frays one of the ropes supporting Krest’s hammock, snaps it, and throws Krest’s body overboard. The best he can do to make it look like an accident.

Job done. Now Bond is intrigued to discover which of the other two did it: the wife has an obvious motive but Barbey is hot-blooded and was getting angry at Krest’s racist taunts over dinner. Next morning both turn out to have a lazy breakfast and sunbathe as if nothing had happened. Eventually Bond gets impatient and asks after their host, sparking a search, during which the crew discover the broken hammock, signs that the disoriented, drunk man may have fallen over the guard rail etc.

The crew are horrified and radio the authorities, but neither Mrs Krest nor Barbey are at all upset. Mrs Krest – lithe, beautiful bikini-wearing Mrs Krest – asks Bond if he will accompany her for the four-day cruise on to Mombasa. Suppressing  his suspicions that she is the murderer, Bond agrees. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do…

The story features a very exotic location and the (then) luxury pastimes of snorkelling and diving; Fleming’s dislike of the vulgar rich, and of vulgar rich Americans in particular; along with an extended, if rather shallow, treatment of the sado-masochistic master-slave relationship, some superficial pondering why women stay with men who beat and abuse them. But all reconciled in the promise of four days of sexual pleasure with the said abused wife. And so a trite, sailing into the sunset wind-up.

You can see how the four treatments for TV episodes have the quick, violent action necessary for TV, the lack of depth and the cheap resolutions. As stories they are entertaining enough, but Quantum of Solace is in a class of its own.

Credit

For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming was published in 1960 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers from 1960

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.

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