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3.27 AVERAGE
3.27 AVERAGE
“In my job ... when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s 'live and let die.'”
Now that we've been introduced to the world of James Bond, 007, Ian Fleming gets right to the point in the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die. The events of Casino Royale don't seem to have had much of an impact on Bond aside from having a skin graft on his hand to cover the scar a SMERSH agent deliberately carved into place. He's all healed up from his wounds and ready to go and fulfill his new goal of beating down SMERSH wherever possible.
Good thing, because M has a new mission for him and it indirectly involves SMERSH. Mr. Big, head of a vast underground criminal empire based in Harlem, New York City, has been laundering gold coins from a pirate treasure in Jamaica to help finance Soviet espionage (which means SMERSH). If Bond can find out what Mr. Big is up to and put an end to his money laundering, it will kill off one of SMERSH's main sources of funding.
Bond eagerly heads to NYC, where he's greeted with the royal treatment thanks to his CIA buddy Felix Leiter. But while investigating Mr. Big in Harlem, it becomes very clear that Bond and Leiter got more than they bargained for---even with an assist from Mr. Big's gorgeous psychic Solitaire, who turns to them for protection. They end up hightailing it for Florida to check out Mr. Big's distribution center. Except things don't go much better in the Sunshine state: Solitaire is kidnapped and Leiter is brutally maimed and left clinging to life after Mr. Big's goons try to feed him to sharks. So it's up to Bond himself to get to Mr. Big's base of operations in Jamaica, stop his fiendish plot, and rescue the girl.
Live and Let Die is essentially just as fun as Casino Royale, but it definitely feels more dated from a cultural perspective. Ian Fleming makes some positive, forward thinking comments about black people in the course of the book but damn if most of the book isn't accidentally terribly racist. Mr. Big is African American and all of his agents are as well, but Fleming makes a curious assumption that all black people are impressionable enough to fall under Mr. Big's spell because they all must believe in voodoo. According to this book literally every black person must be treated with suspicion because they could become an agent of Mr. Big at the drop of a hat. Fleming is trying to let you know that Mr. Big is scary and powerful enough to force people to bend to his will just by dropping his name, but the implications are troubling.
Solitaire is spared the indignity of Bond's misogynist belief that women are useless in the field from Casino Royale, but she's essentially reduced to a sex object at every turn.
If you can get passed those aspects, Live and Let Die is a fun ride, particularly as an espionage/noir action adventure. In that regard it has a lot to offer: an all-seeing, all-knowing bad guy; exotic locations; dangerous stakes; pirate treasure; and a dash of sex. It's just a little harder to swallow than the first outing.
Grade: B+
For more on 007’s adventures, or for more reviews, check out my blog's James Bond page. Up next: Moonraker.
Now that we've been introduced to the world of James Bond, 007, Ian Fleming gets right to the point in the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die. The events of Casino Royale don't seem to have had much of an impact on Bond aside from having a skin graft on his hand to cover the scar a SMERSH agent deliberately carved into place. He's all healed up from his wounds and ready to go and fulfill his new goal of beating down SMERSH wherever possible.
Good thing, because M has a new mission for him and it indirectly involves SMERSH. Mr. Big, head of a vast underground criminal empire based in Harlem, New York City, has been laundering gold coins from a pirate treasure in Jamaica to help finance Soviet espionage (which means SMERSH). If Bond can find out what Mr. Big is up to and put an end to his money laundering, it will kill off one of SMERSH's main sources of funding.
Bond eagerly heads to NYC, where he's greeted with the royal treatment thanks to his CIA buddy Felix Leiter. But while investigating Mr. Big in Harlem, it becomes very clear that Bond and Leiter got more than they bargained for---even with an assist from Mr. Big's gorgeous psychic Solitaire, who turns to them for protection. They end up hightailing it for Florida to check out Mr. Big's distribution center. Except things don't go much better in the Sunshine state: Solitaire is kidnapped and Leiter is brutally maimed and left clinging to life after Mr. Big's goons try to feed him to sharks. So it's up to Bond himself to get to Mr. Big's base of operations in Jamaica, stop his fiendish plot, and rescue the girl.
Live and Let Die is essentially just as fun as Casino Royale, but it definitely feels more dated from a cultural perspective. Ian Fleming makes some positive, forward thinking comments about black people in the course of the book but damn if most of the book isn't accidentally terribly racist. Mr. Big is African American and all of his agents are as well, but Fleming makes a curious assumption that all black people are impressionable enough to fall under Mr. Big's spell because they all must believe in voodoo. According to this book literally every black person must be treated with suspicion because they could become an agent of Mr. Big at the drop of a hat. Fleming is trying to let you know that Mr. Big is scary and powerful enough to force people to bend to his will just by dropping his name, but the implications are troubling.
Solitaire is spared the indignity of Bond's misogynist belief that women are useless in the field from Casino Royale, but she's essentially reduced to a sex object at every turn.
If you can get passed those aspects, Live and Let Die is a fun ride, particularly as an espionage/noir action adventure. In that regard it has a lot to offer: an all-seeing, all-knowing bad guy; exotic locations; dangerous stakes; pirate treasure; and a dash of sex. It's just a little harder to swallow than the first outing.
Grade: B+
For more on 007’s adventures, or for more reviews, check out my blog's James Bond page. Up next: Moonraker.
Casually racist, casually sexist, casually anti-American and surprisingly violent.
Apparently a glutton for punishment (and far too committed to The Seasonal Reading Challenge) I pressed on to Bond #2 after the unpleasant experience that was Casino Royale.
Imagine the joy that came from discovering that wild misogyny wasn't the only treat in store; this time we get the thrill of casual racism too! Win!
All the issues with Casino Royale still stand - descriptive passages that are more technical than anything else (aka, DULL); James Bond being a massive douche etc. Having a second book to compare it to has made me realise that Fleming is incredibly poor at opening novels in any kind of engaging way. Bear in mind these books are 200-250 pages long - this is the kind of thing I can usually inhale in a day or two, and I struggled over the first half of both Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. They do start to improve as the action picks up, and the situations in which Bond finds himself are not without their creativity, but overall they are incredibly boring.
I was briefly hopeful that Solitaire might have held her own as she was presented as some kind of powerful telepath, but that quickly evaporated into a pathetic damsel making a nuisance of herself while James saves her so that he can have his way with her (he at least possesses enough morals to be above necrophilia).
The characters (villains and heroes) are completely two-dimensional; and as with any series (not at all unique to Bond), the tension is greatly reduced by the knowledge that Bond will live to utter another derogatory remark for many books to come!
Imagine the joy that came from discovering that wild misogyny wasn't the only treat in store; this time we get the thrill of casual racism too! Win!
All the issues with Casino Royale still stand - descriptive passages that are more technical than anything else (aka, DULL); James Bond being a massive douche etc. Having a second book to compare it to has made me realise that Fleming is incredibly poor at opening novels in any kind of engaging way. Bear in mind these books are 200-250 pages long - this is the kind of thing I can usually inhale in a day or two, and I struggled over the first half of both Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. They do start to improve as the action picks up, and the situations in which Bond finds himself are not without their creativity, but overall they are incredibly boring.
I was briefly hopeful that Solitaire might have held her own as she was presented as some kind of powerful telepath, but that quickly evaporated into a pathetic damsel making a nuisance of herself while James saves her so that he can have his way with her (he at least possesses enough morals to be above necrophilia).
The characters (villains and heroes) are completely two-dimensional; and as with any series (not at all unique to Bond), the tension is greatly reduced by the knowledge that Bond will live to utter another derogatory remark for many books to come!
I quit this book earlier this year because I was tired of Ian Fleming's African-American dialect and a pretty predictable storyline.
I came back to it because, hey, it's James Bond, how bad can it be? Well, it wasn't very good.
The story is actually okay until they get to Jamaica, then it's a pretty boring account of Bond scuba-diving followed by a very fortunately-timed explosion. It was a pretty big let down from "Casino Royale."
I came back to it because, hey, it's James Bond, how bad can it be? Well, it wasn't very good.
The story is actually okay until they get to Jamaica, then it's a pretty boring account of Bond scuba-diving followed by a very fortunately-timed explosion. It was a pretty big let down from "Casino Royale."
This is a significant improvement over [b:Casino Royale|3758|Casino Royale (James Bond, #1)|Ian Fleming|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1413708915s/3758.jpg|2503304], except in one major respect which nobody reading the book is likely to miss. Bond is much less unpleasant this time round - without ever being someone you'd actually want to spend time with - and the prose is much improved, though rarely rising above the functional. The adventure sequences have the requisite modicum of tension, and when the action reaches Jamaica, Fleming's love for the place leads him to render it vividly.
(Bond remains a ludicrous character, of course. There's a particularly hilarious sequence where his psychic girlfriend tells him she has a feeling something terrible's going to happen to her if he leaves her alone, and he pats her arm and tells her not to worry her pretty head, and leaves... then wonders, privately, whether there might be something in it after all, but is immediately distracted by seeing an EXCITING CAR! and thinks no more of it until he discovers she's been kidnapped.)
The elephant in the room - in that he's huge and grey and has a long memory - is Fleming's villain Mr Big, and his African-American crime syndicate. Aside from stray remarks about the stupidity of Bulgarians,Casino Royale was mercifully short on opportunities for racism, but Fleming's presentation of black people in this book is frankly eye-watering. They're consistently portrayed as backward, superstitious and undeveloped: several characters express surprise that "the negro race" is now "producing" gifted doctors, writers and the like, and Mr Big's criminal genius is seen as part of this process of development whereby exceptional black people gradually start attaining equality with white people. Fleming portrays Big himself and Bond's manservant in Jamaica, Quarrel, as admirable in various ways, but also as undeniably inferior - Big morally, and Quarrel in social terms which Fleming presents as an immutable law of nature. He's also at pains to stress the European ancestry of these particular black men, and the fact that they don't look very black at all.
It's clear that Fleming was very proud of his observations of African-American speech patterns - which he presents to us at truly excruciating length - yet he had also somehow convinced himself that it was plausible to claim that the entire black population of the USA lived in superstitious fear of voodoo, making them willing dupes of any gangster willing to exploit this racial blind spot.
This kind of thinking isn't "a product of its time". It's racism so toxic it very nearly succeeds in obscuring the novel's egregious sexism, which is indeed routine for this kind of narrative in this era.
All of which said... this is a more entertaining novel than Casino Royale, and I have the luxury of being a man, and white, so don't experience its ideological flaws as a constant attack on my personhood. If you start from this position of privilege, then Fleming's rather like a drunk great-uncle at a wedding: if you can keep him off certain topics - like black people, and women, and gambling, and cars, and politics - his tall stories can be moderately entertaining.
(Bond remains a ludicrous character, of course. There's a particularly hilarious sequence where his psychic girlfriend tells him she has a feeling something terrible's going to happen to her if he leaves her alone, and he pats her arm and tells her not to worry her pretty head, and leaves... then wonders, privately, whether there might be something in it after all, but is immediately distracted by seeing an EXCITING CAR! and thinks no more of it until he discovers she's been kidnapped.)
The elephant in the room - in that he's huge and grey and has a long memory - is Fleming's villain Mr Big, and his African-American crime syndicate. Aside from stray remarks about the stupidity of Bulgarians,Casino Royale was mercifully short on opportunities for racism, but Fleming's presentation of black people in this book is frankly eye-watering. They're consistently portrayed as backward, superstitious and undeveloped: several characters express surprise that "the negro race" is now "producing" gifted doctors, writers and the like, and Mr Big's criminal genius is seen as part of this process of development whereby exceptional black people gradually start attaining equality with white people. Fleming portrays Big himself and Bond's manservant in Jamaica, Quarrel, as admirable in various ways, but also as undeniably inferior - Big morally, and Quarrel in social terms which Fleming presents as an immutable law of nature. He's also at pains to stress the European ancestry of these particular black men, and the fact that they don't look very black at all.
It's clear that Fleming was very proud of his observations of African-American speech patterns - which he presents to us at truly excruciating length - yet he had also somehow convinced himself that it was plausible to claim that the entire black population of the USA lived in superstitious fear of voodoo, making them willing dupes of any gangster willing to exploit this racial blind spot.
This kind of thinking isn't "a product of its time". It's racism so toxic it very nearly succeeds in obscuring the novel's egregious sexism, which is indeed routine for this kind of narrative in this era.
All of which said... this is a more entertaining novel than Casino Royale, and I have the luxury of being a man, and white, so don't experience its ideological flaws as a constant attack on my personhood. If you start from this position of privilege, then Fleming's rather like a drunk great-uncle at a wedding: if you can keep him off certain topics - like black people, and women, and gambling, and cars, and politics - his tall stories can be moderately entertaining.
I've given up on this as I really wasn't comfortable with the blatant racism.
Casino Royale was pretty sexist, and Live and Let Die was remarkably racist, although not bad by the standards of the times.
Fiuhh..akhirnya buku ini selesai juga saya bacaaa...entah kenapa beda sekali saat saya membaca buku ini dengan buku pertama Ian Fleming - Casino Royale, di buku ini rasanya agak membosankan ritmenya. Selain karena terpotong aktivitas lainnya juga, maka buku ini kadang kala jadi nomor sekian bagi saya untuk dibaca.
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I chose this book to tick off a challenge to read a book from a genre usually avoided. Espionage isn't my cup of tea and I've never seen a Bond film but I thought a Bond novel would be a gentle gateway into spy novels.
Live and Let Die initially appealed to me because of the mention of voodoo and occult in its blurb. As a horror/thriller/crime fan it seemed a good compromise. However, these were mere plot themes and when I say plot I mean a rough guide to shunt the story from one 'action scene' to another.
Characters are two dimensional, emotions are rare and underdeveloped, motive and backstory are established with a few early sentences and the racism is shockingly rife.
It's good points - the fast pace is exciting, there is plenty of jeopardy and suspense despite our prior knowledge that Bond always survives and gets the girl. There's a good dose of gore and violence in imaginative, enjoyable, wide ranging scenarios. They require a serious suspension of disbelief but they are fun.
I won't be rushing to read another but I might watch a movie sometime.
Live and Let Die initially appealed to me because of the mention of voodoo and occult in its blurb. As a horror/thriller/crime fan it seemed a good compromise. However, these were mere plot themes and when I say plot I mean a rough guide to shunt the story from one 'action scene' to another.
Characters are two dimensional, emotions are rare and underdeveloped, motive and backstory are established with a few early sentences and the racism is shockingly rife.
It's good points - the fast pace is exciting, there is plenty of jeopardy and suspense despite our prior knowledge that Bond always survives and gets the girl. There's a good dose of gore and violence in imaginative, enjoyable, wide ranging scenarios. They require a serious suspension of disbelief but they are fun.
I won't be rushing to read another but I might watch a movie sometime.