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A review by jdglasgow
Thunderball by Ian Fleming
4.0
I feel like I’ve read so many James Bond books now, but I’m only through nine of fourteen—still five to go. I think I saw in some of the top reviews here that this was being considered one of the better Bond books. I guess that’s probably true, though for my money the over-the-top thrills of DR. NO and GOLDFINGER, for all their silliness, are more enjoyable. Although honestly there is a slight nod toward that kind of pulpiness in the scene where Blofeld presses a secret button at the bad-guy conference table and electrocutes a guy to death.
In this one Bond seems fairly competent, one major misstep notwithstanding (I’ll explain in a moment); there’s also some decent action. I guess what kept me from going up to four stars is that a lot of the middle section of the book, the more investigative piece of Bond’s adventure, didn’t grab me. I tend to think of this like a DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, which is to say “Fine, but kind of forgettable”.
Bond is sent to the Bahamas to try to stop SPECTRE, making its first appearance, from detonating a nuclear bomb in a major American city. He zeroes in on a rich asshole named Largo pretty quickly and there is a fun scene where he rattles him during a game of, I dunno, blackjack (?) by working the word “spectre” into his speech repeatedly. Bond is helped in his mission by his long-time lover, Felix Leiter of the CIA. Bond and Leiter spend most of the book Frenching one another in between scanning the ocean with a Geiger counter.
Bond does somehow make contact with Domino Vitalli, who coincidentally turns out to be Largo’s, uh, sex maid? Like every Bond girl she falls head over heels for him though he’s really nothing special and he does the same. In fact, it gets so bad for Bond that he tells her his secret plan to stop Largo from detonating the bombs just because he *knows in his heart* that she’s actually good. Luckily it worked out for him but this strikes me as unbelievably irresponsible on his part.
The other thing I really want to say about this book is that it’s the, what, fourth with a scuba diving scene (if you count the freakin’ giant squid battle in DR. NO, even though that was done sans scuba gear), and oddly these tend to be the best parts of the James Bond books. Bond’s underwater octopus battle was by far the best part of LIVE AND LET DIE, and I really enjoyed his observations of the people on the ocean floor in “The Hildebrand Rarity”. Here he again refers to the denizens of the sea as “people”, which I like, and has two excellent underwater scenes: first, exploring the sunken plane which delivered the bombs with barracuda watching him, then later in the climactic underwater fight sequence which is thrilling and, lifting it’s ending from “From a View to a Kill”, concludes with Domino firing the fatal shot to save Bond.
Alright, fuck it, I *am* going up to four stars. It is among the best of the books, like I said. As I’ve alluded to, it sort of takes good elements from various previous books (I didn’t mention it earlier, but the whole problem about a bomb aimed at a population center is MOONRAKER redux), making this like the Platonic ideal of a Bond story, albeit without a scene where he gets captured and tortured by the bad guy which is truly classic Bond. It’s also less racist than most Bond books are, though the word “n———head” does get frequent use in the last third. I’m just realizing the very end of the book where Bond passes out after being badly injured is reminiscent of FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE as well, though this time it’s because of medicine he’s received rather than a deadly toxin. It really is a composite of the prior books.
In this one Bond seems fairly competent, one major misstep notwithstanding (I’ll explain in a moment); there’s also some decent action. I guess what kept me from going up to four stars is that a lot of the middle section of the book, the more investigative piece of Bond’s adventure, didn’t grab me. I tend to think of this like a DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, which is to say “Fine, but kind of forgettable”.
Bond is sent to the Bahamas to try to stop SPECTRE, making its first appearance, from detonating a nuclear bomb in a major American city. He zeroes in on a rich asshole named Largo pretty quickly and there is a fun scene where he rattles him during a game of, I dunno, blackjack (?) by working the word “spectre” into his speech repeatedly. Bond is helped in his mission by his long-time lover, Felix Leiter of the CIA. Bond and Leiter spend most of the book Frenching one another in between scanning the ocean with a Geiger counter.
Bond does somehow make contact with Domino Vitalli, who coincidentally turns out to be Largo’s, uh, sex maid? Like every Bond girl she falls head over heels for him though he’s really nothing special and he does the same. In fact, it gets so bad for Bond that he tells her his secret plan to stop Largo from detonating the bombs just because he *knows in his heart* that she’s actually good. Luckily it worked out for him but this strikes me as unbelievably irresponsible on his part.
The other thing I really want to say about this book is that it’s the, what, fourth with a scuba diving scene (if you count the freakin’ giant squid battle in DR. NO, even though that was done sans scuba gear), and oddly these tend to be the best parts of the James Bond books. Bond’s underwater octopus battle was by far the best part of LIVE AND LET DIE, and I really enjoyed his observations of the people on the ocean floor in “The Hildebrand Rarity”. Here he again refers to the denizens of the sea as “people”, which I like, and has two excellent underwater scenes: first, exploring the sunken plane which delivered the bombs with barracuda watching him, then later in the climactic underwater fight sequence which is thrilling and, lifting it’s ending from “From a View to a Kill”, concludes with Domino firing the fatal shot to save Bond.
Alright, fuck it, I *am* going up to four stars. It is among the best of the books, like I said. As I’ve alluded to, it sort of takes good elements from various previous books (I didn’t mention it earlier, but the whole problem about a bomb aimed at a population center is MOONRAKER redux), making this like the Platonic ideal of a Bond story, albeit without a scene where he gets captured and tortured by the bad guy which is truly classic Bond. It’s also less racist than most Bond books are, though the word “n———head” does get frequent use in the last third. I’m just realizing the very end of the book where Bond passes out after being badly injured is reminiscent of FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE as well, though this time it’s because of medicine he’s received rather than a deadly toxin. It really is a composite of the prior books.