I recall reading this after finding lots of 60's and 70's paperbacks in Looe, Cornwall in the early 00's. I found it better than DAF and MR.
It would've made a terrific movie, though the locations and plot have been lifted for other movies and of course Colonel Moon in DUD.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,843MI6 Agent
I thought it would be nice to update this thread of mine after a nine year absence. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!
This subject matter is still an area of deep interest of mine and I am again working on an article partly based around this topic. The occasion for updating the thread has been the 2023 republication of Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun (fifty-five years after it was first published by Jonathan Cape) by the new publisher Ian Fleming Publications. This reissue came with a new foreword by Bond continuation author Anthony Horowitz. I will quote a few passages from this foreword (dated July 2023) below as they refer to the Colonel Sun torture scene and so they are relevant to this thread:
"[T]he Guardian newspaper marked the fiftieth anniversary of the book with an article by John Dugdale in which he described Colonel Sun Liang-tan as "the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals." Well, I can play the usual get-out clause: different times, different attitudes. There are many characters in the Bond canon that we now find contentious, But I suppose, as much as it pains me, I must issue something close to a trigger warning and admit that Dugdale may have a point. I just hope they don't put it on the cover.
Dugdale also criticises Amis for the "protracted, gruesome torture scene" at the climax of the book (in Chapter 19). Well, the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, had a memorable, very violent interrogation scene so you could argue that there's nothing out of place here. The chapter has some great dialogue and a great premise: Colonel Sun delicately explains that he will only use items "that the average kitchen provides". From his very first appearance on a Greek island ("In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed"), Sun has radiated evil and in some respects he prefigures Hannibal Lecter, another remorseless yet somehow compelling psychopath. Again, I'll be honest and say that the torture scene does not make for a pleasant read. I think Amis goes too far and the turnaround at the end is, to say the least, unexpected.
You have been warned! But historically, artistically and thematically, it's my view that Colonel Sun more than earns its place in the Bond canon."
(Foreword by Anthony Horowitz taken from Kingsley Amis, Colonel Sun, Ian Fleming Publications, 2023, p. xvii.)
Just for reference here is a link to the Guardian article on Colonel Sun by John Dugdale which Horowitz refers to in the passages above:
In that article Dugdale has the following to say about the Colonel Sun torture scene:
"Colonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like."
So what do we think about all of this? Do Horowitz and Dugdale have a point about the nastiness of the Colonel Sun torture scene? Does Amis go too far, beyond the pale so to speak? Or is the torture scene creatively extend that which was already there in the Fleming Bond works?
Personally, I take the latter view that the torture scene merely extended what was already there in Fleming and the world was getting ever more violent by the year 1968 so Amis was surely only holding up a mirror to the violent age he inhabited. It is a brilliant torture scene (and a great follow-up to the one in Casino Royale) and Sun's demise is masterfully handled with him rather pathetically even showing some remorse before Bond knifes him through the heart. So, in my view, Amis really made a novel out of Colonel Sun with these sorts of scenes. He took a little of Fleming's inherent genius and ran with it himself adding his own genius to the mix as one of the greatest post-war British novelists along with Fleming himself. There are some nice little surprises in store for the reader already familiar with Fleming's Bond works. For me, Colonel Sun still stands as the best and most authentic of the James Bond continuation novels. The partial filming of the torture scene in Spectre finally cements its place in Bond history.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
Thank you, Barbel. I hope to get some new stuff up ASAP. I've been away too long!
It would've made a terrific movie, though the locations and plot have been lifted for other movies and of course Colonel Moon in DUD.
I thought it would be nice to update this thread of mine after a nine year absence. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!
This subject matter is still an area of deep interest of mine and I am again working on an article partly based around this topic. The occasion for updating the thread has been the 2023 republication of Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun (fifty-five years after it was first published by Jonathan Cape) by the new publisher Ian Fleming Publications. This reissue came with a new foreword by Bond continuation author Anthony Horowitz. I will quote a few passages from this foreword (dated July 2023) below as they refer to the Colonel Sun torture scene and so they are relevant to this thread:
"[T]he Guardian newspaper marked the fiftieth anniversary of the book with an article by John Dugdale in which he described Colonel Sun Liang-tan as "the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals." Well, I can play the usual get-out clause: different times, different attitudes. There are many characters in the Bond canon that we now find contentious, But I suppose, as much as it pains me, I must issue something close to a trigger warning and admit that Dugdale may have a point. I just hope they don't put it on the cover.
Dugdale also criticises Amis for the "protracted, gruesome torture scene" at the climax of the book (in Chapter 19). Well, the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, had a memorable, very violent interrogation scene so you could argue that there's nothing out of place here. The chapter has some great dialogue and a great premise: Colonel Sun delicately explains that he will only use items "that the average kitchen provides". From his very first appearance on a Greek island ("In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed"), Sun has radiated evil and in some respects he prefigures Hannibal Lecter, another remorseless yet somehow compelling psychopath. Again, I'll be honest and say that the torture scene does not make for a pleasant read. I think Amis goes too far and the turnaround at the end is, to say the least, unexpected.
You have been warned! But historically, artistically and thematically, it's my view that Colonel Sun more than earns its place in the Bond canon."
(Foreword by Anthony Horowitz taken from Kingsley Amis, Colonel Sun, Ian Fleming Publications, 2023, p. xvii.)
Just for reference here is a link to the Guardian article on Colonel Sun by John Dugdale which Horowitz refers to in the passages above:
In that article Dugdale has the following to say about the Colonel Sun torture scene:
"Colonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like."
So what do we think about all of this? Do Horowitz and Dugdale have a point about the nastiness of the Colonel Sun torture scene? Does Amis go too far, beyond the pale so to speak? Or is the torture scene creatively extend that which was already there in the Fleming Bond works?
Personally, I take the latter view that the torture scene merely extended what was already there in Fleming and the world was getting ever more violent by the year 1968 so Amis was surely only holding up a mirror to the violent age he inhabited. It is a brilliant torture scene (and a great follow-up to the one in Casino Royale) and Sun's demise is masterfully handled with him rather pathetically even showing some remorse before Bond knifes him through the heart. So, in my view, Amis really made a novel out of Colonel Sun with these sorts of scenes. He took a little of Fleming's inherent genius and ran with it himself adding his own genius to the mix as one of the greatest post-war British novelists along with Fleming himself. There are some nice little surprises in store for the reader already familiar with Fleming's Bond works. For me, Colonel Sun still stands as the best and most authentic of the James Bond continuation novels. The partial filming of the torture scene in Spectre finally cements its place in Bond history.