You Only Live Twice
AlphaOmegaSin
EnglandPosts: 10,926MI6 Agent
Currently reading through You Only Live Twice, it strikes me as being more of a Tourist Guide to Japan and its Customs then a straight up Spy Thriller. With Tanaka taking Bond on a Trip through the Country, telling him how to fit in and what to do once they reach Blofelds Castle.
Does anyone think the same when they read through the Book?
Does anyone think the same when they read through the Book?
1.On Her Majesties Secret Service 2.The Living Daylights 3.license To Kill 4.The Spy Who Loved Me 5.Goldfinger
Comments
Partly this is explained by Fleming taking the details of his own earlier trip to Japan, where he was accompanied by Richard "Dikko" Hughes and Tiger Saito- both of whom found their way into the novel under thin disguises- and dramatising them Bond-style.
countries and customes etc. Untill I found out That much of it
was just made up by him, or at least not researched fully.
It's among my least favorites along with TSWLM and DAF. But it breaks my heart more than those two because it deserved to be better.
I'm on Chapter Nine I think?
Anyway, I'm really enjoying it. I think because I've been away from Fleming for quite a while I forgot his writing style which I adore! I love how he writes stuff so straight forward like he was telling you the story to you in person. It's a little slow, but I can see the huge themes that Fleming decides to start tackling in this novel. He's a very different man I feel since Casino Royale.
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
This amazing coincidence was also repeated in the film version of The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) where Bond's mission to recover the Solar energy cell expert Gibson and his stolen MacGuffin the Solex Agitator just so happened to link with his mission to uncover the truth about the assassin who apparently sent him a carved bullet with 'OO7' on it - Francisco "Pistols" Scaramanga. Strange coincidence that strains all credibility to breaking point, but at least it seems to have a Flemingian precedent in the YOLT novel. Interesting.
As I've mentioned, I'm again in the middle of DAF and each reading (or listening this time around) brings a fresh appreciation for the work. I forgot how the meeting with Felix Leiter was actually a coincidence and not pre-arranged for the mission, with the two men after the same fish but from entirely different angles with Bond acting in his country's economic interests and Leiter, via a private agency, on behalf of a client's business interests (which is actually the same thing!) Like you said, one needs to suspend disbelief with these coincidences and with DAF, it actually worked out to further open up the story to better explore the extent of the villains' operations that would have otherwise been limited to the diamond pipeline. The Spang Brothers' network provides Bond with a rich travelogue into 50's Americana that I only took for granted in previous readings, thinking that even the movie version was more interesting "visually," but now I feel the opposite is true.
Yes, despite what I said elsewhere, I do think that DAF has really got some of Ian Fleming's finest writing and his finest observations on American life, gambling and culture in the veritable Sin City that was Las Vegas of the 1950s. The film is very poor - a comedy Bond moreso than many of the Roger Moore entries and not worth considering in the same breath as the original novel.
You Only Live Twice (1964) is one of Ian Fleming’s most brilliantly bizarre and offbeat pieces of work from a Bond oeuvre which was by that stage already rich with originality (cf. The Spy Who Loved Me and 'Quantum of Solace'). It incorporates travelogue, references to Japanese culture, lists of deadly flora and fauna, a revenge tale, the beginnings of serial killer fiction and fine Gothic horror as well as being the unfolding story of a dystopia on a Huxleyesque scale. Fleming was sadly literally dying from “having lived too much” at the time he was writing this novel and so the fascination with the theme of death throughout really rings true from a man already all too aware of his own mortality. No world domination plot here (cf. the film version) but instead a private estate run by a veritable mad hatter called Dr Guntram Shatterhand who of course turns out to be none other than Bond’s arch-enemy and the murderer of his bride Tracy Bond in OHMSS. The Ernst Stavro Blofeld of You Only Live Twice is a different animal to what went before and here he can be seen as a veritable mad king (called King Ernst I most likely) and a lunatic ready for the asylum. Blofeld shouts in German much like the ranting and raving Adolf Hitler in the Führerbunker near the end of World War II when the war was all but lost and he seems equally as much out of touch with reality. We are told of "that lunatic Hitlerian scream" from Blofeld in the Garden of Death at one point in the novel for instance. One reads of Nazis escaping to Argentina and Spain at the war’s end but perhaps a few escaped to Japan too? It may be that that was what Fleming was pointing at – that there was diverse Nazi evil being spread throughout other third countries as a result of such post-war Nazi SS resettlement organisations as Odessa or Spinne.
It is notable that Blofeld’s plan here is not to hijack a Vulcan bomber and its deadly nuclear cargo for a grand ransom (Thunderball) or to use biological weapons against the UK (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but merely to induce the notoriously suicide-prone native Japanese population to kill themselves in ever more eccentric fashion in a “garden of delights” populated by highly poisonous flora and fauna, snakes and fumaroles. This garden is the locale where Blofeld goes utterly insane and indeed it is a veritable anti-Eden where the Fall of Man is all too evident. It is as if the imaginative horrors of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale or a novel by the Marquis de Sade have somehow come to life in the early 1960s with a little Swinging Sixties hocus-pocus thrown in for good measure. Blofeld does his rounds of the garden in a full suit of armour as does his companion Bunt and Fleming seems to be making the point that Blofeld is trying to be a legitimate samurai warrior with all of the code of honour that implies though we the reader see he is woefully inadequate in this role and that he is a mere gaijin and definite bounder. Blofeld and Bunt even plan to eventually sell up from Japan and then take their “death show” on the road in other locations around the world such is their ultimate depravity and inhumanity.
In You Only Live Twice there is no world domination master plan but in its stead there was just the mad king Blofeld lobbing off people's heads with a samurai sword, years before the serial killer fiction craze of the 1990s that Blofeld's plan to maximise Japanese suicides in his Garden of Death is akin to. In this sense Blofeld can be seen as a forerunner to that other madman in a Castle of Death, John Gardner’s creation the serial killer ex-actor David Dragonpol in John Gardner's Never Send Flowers (1993). Indeed, there are many interesting connections between both Bond novels. Like Dragonpol with his assassination targets, Blofeld attracts the suicidal Japanese seemingly for his own sick enjoyment and the delectation of the squat and grotesque Irma Bunt also. Bunt has the type of wardress face often associated with a Nazi death camp guard and as she is German and of the right age that could well have been her occupation. Of course, Fleming’s novel is as far away from the dire Roald Dahl-scripted 1967 film version as it is possible to get, but one can only hope that it will someday be filmed as a new chapter in Bond villainy where evil is seen to have had no point than glorying in evil itself. That seems a good theme for a Bond film that could sit along with the Bond film villains Karl Stromberg and Hugo Drax (of the films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker respectively) who were not interested in money or extortion but rather in creating new worlds in their own inherently evil image, just as it could be said Blofeld did originally in his Garden of Death in Japan. Ian Fleming's other villainous creation Dr Julius No was of course also an influence on Stromberg and Drax. Blofeld has seemingly single-handedly turned the Godly garden and the Englishman’s dwelling place of a summer day into a dark and grotesque “Disneyland of Death”. In opposition to this perversion of the sacredness of the garden is the fact that the English county of Kent is known as "The Garden of England" (cf. The Garden of Eden?) and this was of course on the side of the angels and was a haunt of Ian Fleming's and was where the majority of his third novel Moonraker (1955) was set with a duplicitous Nazi called Sir Hugo Drax is based with his answer to Britain's defence, the Moonraker rocket. This was done in much the same way as Stromberg wanted his underwater civilisation at the expense of the rest of the world or Drax wanted his new Super Race of perfect physical specimens to repopulate the Earth after its annihilation in a Hitlerian holocaust of his own creation.
One can easily see the seeds of these barking-mad characters in some of the villains of the Roger Moore era Bonds in the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice. In this sense, perhaps a bit of the You Only Live Twice Blofeld has rubbed off on some of the cinematic Bond villains that came in the years after Ian Fleming’s death. One also thinks of Richard Maibaum’s original plot suggestion for The Spy Who Loved Me film to have real-world terrorists blow up the world’s oil fields with stolen nuclear submarines and watch the world burn just for the sheer hell of it. That would have been close to the Blofeld of You Only Live Twice it seems and it was sad that Maibaum’s vision for something “completely different” never made it onto the screen. The producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli ruled it out as being too overtly political for the James Bond film series, although he did like the idea. Of course sections of the recent Skyfall was based at least in part on events near the end of You Only Live Twice where Bond is shot in the head and loses his memory, and for the Fleming enthusiast that was surely a great thing to behold and it gives one hope that more of this criminally neglected novel will make its way on to the cinema screen.
Very late reply on this, but I disagree. The more I look into Fleming's references and observations, I'm astounded at how much "real" stuff he put into the novels.
Can you give me some examples?
Twitter: @FlemingsBond
His facts like,.....
Homosexual men can't whistle, and Sumo Wrestlers can retract their testicles
Back up into their bodies for protection.
As a younger reader I believed Sumos could do that.
Well, to be fair, he wasn't the only one who thought those things. Kind of "old wives tales" sort of things. Again, we're more enlightened 60 years down the line.
-{
Twitter: @FlemingsBond
thought it amazing.
Since these last stories were about Bond trying to recover from the death of Tracy and then his resurrection after his "death" in YOLT, it seemed to me that Fleming was tiring of his paper hero and only wrote these because the films had become so successful, so he felt the need to maintain the celebrity of being the creator of Bond as well as to keep the money rolling in for his estate.
I always wondered had he not been so ill and near death if he would have continued Bond, or he would have just wanted to contribute to the films screenplays, or if he would have just dropped Bond and kept writing newspaper columns.
Well my Biology teacher told us that in the 1990s! Surprising I can still string a sentence together with that type of education!
Great review, Silhouette Man, most especially with the comparisons with similar works and across literary genres. I think that the strength of the Fleming books is the characterization and it’s interesting how you point out the differences in the villains’ motives, e.g., political, financial vs. delusional and grandiose sense of purpose. I consider YOLT “slow” in the action narrative, though to me it is one of the richest reading experiences of the lot, very atmospheric and emotionally satisfying. Also, I have say that the YOLT theme of Bond at middle-age appeals to me the most.
What you point out about Blofeld is interesting in that this last scheme, he was not after anything material, nor was he out for revenge, but wanted to fully feed his deranged sense of greatness and nobility. Typically, the Bond villain is some maladjusted person with ego issues whom Fleming patterned after real personalities, some whom he personally knew, but with these last stories, he seems to be giving full vent on the types of a**holes that truly irked him.
Of course, there’s some self-loathing mixed in, hinted by bestowing Blofeld with his own birthday and how Dexter Smythe’s war experiences and retirement life reflected his own (I couldn’t help but imagine Goldeneye when reading about Smythe’s Jamaican bungalow in Octopussy). Maybe Fleming nurtured a lot of self-doubt and regret as he anticipated his demise?
Rounding out the rest of the a**holes in his last stories, Scaramanga (TMWTGG) and Captain Sender (TLD) seem like full blown narcissist-egomaniacs though operating from not-so grand perches. I really think that stage-of-life perspective on Fleming’s part dominated his writing and wonder if the real life inspirations for these characters where people that he encountered during that latter part of his life or if he drew from long-ago recollections of people he hated. To contrast, Dexter Smythe (assuming Fleming was portraying himself) was vain, pretentious and one who maintained a facade, but who wasn’t an anal martinet like Captain Sender. Similarly, Scaramanga was an uncultured, politically empowered thug-killer, in contrast to the mad Blofeld, who nonetheless had a reinvented grand and epic vision of purpose in YOLT.
Finally, what can we say about the relationship between Bond and Blofeld? I think that Fleming fleshed out the conflict by envisioning himself in these opposite characters and heavily drew from his angst in private life. Like George Costanza from Seinfeld, was he a reluctant groom? After all, biographers say that his then upcoming marriage was the catalyst of his long-planned 1st novel. Fleming’s escapist fantasy was the most telling symptom of the strains of his marriage which he mirrored in the conflict of YOLT; it starts with a damaged Bond, a “walking wounded” with horrible, but invisible psychological and emotional scars. His redemption was dependent on destroying this arch-representation of malice and evil, an irrational manifestation of ego fueled by madness (as a self-styled samurai warrior and dispenser of honorable death), but more importantly, Blofeld was the singular source of Bond’s pain. With him likely taking on both roles, I read this to represent Fleming’s way of reconciling his own inner conflict. Then, there’s the event of transcendence, when Bond starts his 2nd life after looking at death in the face and is practically reborn, with his memory rebooted, freed from the trappings and any trace of his old life and begins to live a new simple life in a kind of paradise with a beautiful woman who loves him.
and Blofeld as Fleming wrote it. The brutality of the fight with Bond
Choking the life out of him.
Hopefully someday they'll film something similar, great chance for some
Dramatic acting from both actors., giving it an emotional connection. -{
Watching the poor victim meet his end. -{ probably a bit too strong
for a pg movie, but it would look great on screen.
but nice and creepy.
Of Bond's car having a drone, which could work on its own or be controlled
By Bond. -{ , think this would make a great car chase ! -{