Members' reviews of "Trigger Mortis" (spoilers)
Number24
NorwayPosts: 22,424MI6 Agent
I have just finished Reading Trigger Mortis and I felt this thread was needed. Trigger Mortis is a good thriller, probably the best Bond novel since Colonel Sun. The plot is origional enough not to be a copy, but still very bondian. I think this is a very good use of space rockets in the story. It could very well had been too simular to DN, but I don't think it is. The F1 racing works very well, and I frankly think it was about time motor racing was used in a Bond story. They have even used tennis earlier! I think the chapter written by Fleming is a highlight in the novel, but at the same time I think a reader could get through the novel without noticing there are two authours involved. I also think the characters are good. The background of the villan is interesting. I consider myself well-read in the field of history, especially the cold war, but the No Gun Ri massacre was new to me. I also liked the female characters. Including Pussy Galore in the story worked well in my opinion, but I'm not sure about the gold paint scene. It is somewhat explained by being a revenge from the Goldfinger crew, but not fully. To me it reads a bit too much of homage/copying. Perhaps using cold water on her instead of gold paint would be fresher. Nude, tied up and sprayed with water in the cold night would have killed Pussy Galore in a horrible manner if Bond hadn't saved her.
Letting Pussy Galore end up with one of the girls is a fun and new twist in a Bond novel. I'm not so fond of the idea of making the head of Station G a gay man. Fleming was a homephobe and obviously no-one can write that way today . Fine. But to me that issue was believably updated by letting Bond have a realtionship with a bisexual woman. Giving him a male gay friend was a bridge too far. I simply don't believe Fleming's Bond would do that.
Many were sceptical about the title of this novel, including me. If the title had only been used the way it's used in the final chapter (the shooting of the Russian racing driver) it would have been horrible. Thankfully the term is mainly used referring to the abort button during a rocket launch, and I think it works fine.
Letting Pussy Galore end up with one of the girls is a fun and new twist in a Bond novel. I'm not so fond of the idea of making the head of Station G a gay man. Fleming was a homephobe and obviously no-one can write that way today . Fine. But to me that issue was believably updated by letting Bond have a realtionship with a bisexual woman. Giving him a male gay friend was a bridge too far. I simply don't believe Fleming's Bond would do that.
Many were sceptical about the title of this novel, including me. If the title had only been used the way it's used in the final chapter (the shooting of the Russian racing driver) it would have been horrible. Thankfully the term is mainly used referring to the abort button during a rocket launch, and I think it works fine.
Comments
Just finished it myself.
Pussy Galore was indeed a bit unnecessary - I think maybe he should have left the character moping around his flat and returning to US. The kidnapping and gold paint was indeed a bit OTT. We knew pussy was back a while ago since he revealed to the press. Maybe a touch of Marketing here to sell the book??
I believe the racing chapter was not written by Fleming but inspired by him and used the title (e.g Sterling Moss was changed). I think Horowitz said he used 500 words by Fleming for the "M" meeting. My waterstones copy with the Fleming story appended has not arrived yet.
Overall I maybe enjoyed it on par or slightly more then Col Sun. I think his writing style started off very Fleming but faded over the course of the book! The intro introducing the Rocket scientist and his fate was very Bond!!!
I missed some of the simple Fleming trademarks such as his drinking and descriptive eating! Horowitz Bond appears to smoke a lot but not eat and drink so much!!!
The main villain wasnt bad at all, maybe not too original but I liked his backstory and his signature / trademark method of dealing out his victims murder (deck of cards)
Overall a good effort and enjoyable read. Ive only just read DMC and Solo and this trounces both
expect to see her again, when Bond went to New York) good story well written
and exciting, in my opinion once again pointed out before. He starts of very
Fleming in style, but the later parts of the book. To me at least read more like
John Gardner. He also did ram home the meaning if the title, he must explain
The Story of what " Trigger Mortis" was at least three times.
It's definitely better than the last three efforts, and I'd love to hear Horowitz has
been commissioned to write another. -{
Indeed! I think in the story Bond also came across quite a few locked doors also that he 'dealt' with
I've only read up to Chapter 5 so far, to the conclusion of the Pussy Galore strand; I've briefly scanned the beginning of this thread for comments about her character but haven't read other remarks yet, as I want to avoid the spoilers.
I'm enjoying this novel a lot. Horowitz is doing at least as good a job as any previous imitator in serving up the Fleming effect. His real achievement with the Pussy Galore strand is that he manages to evoke both the Bond and the Pussy of old, at the same time as bringing Pussy's story to a resolution which sits with a more enlightened, more modern acceptance of differing sexualities than Fleming ever entertained. Pussy is no longer a sexually aberrant character 'converted' from lesbianism by the masculine prowess of Bond, a real man - as in Fleming. Instead, she's credited with having made her own sexual choice in being with Bond: "We had fun, didn't we? That Goldfinger thing was crazy and I'm glad that in the end we were together just so that I could find out what it was like." Pussy's identity as a lesbian is finally affirmed and she gets the girl, Logan Fairfax, that Bond has desired but not managed to sleep with. Pussy's remark about Bond's own sexuality is as perceptive as it is ironic: "You know what the big difference is between us? You can't live with a woman in your life." Horowitz's writing pleasingly delivers so many of the aesthetic qualities that fans of Fleming adore - this indeed feels like a genuine adventure of the original Bond, and it's certainly true that in the Wiltshire woodlands Pussy proves as much a pulp-fiction damsel in distress as any of Fleming's female creations - but even so Horowitz has managed to tackle Fleming's homophobia without disrupting the reader's sense of immersion in Bond's world.
No doubt including Pussy Galore is good marketing. Horowitz has nevertheless managed to do something worthwhile with her.
I would add more but will refrain since you are at Chapter 5
Dr No gets a mention, but both were subtle enough.
I think the way that Horowitz handles the gold paint idea is good, eschewing the glamour associated with it ever since the GF movie. Horowitz's down-and-dirty descriptions of the attempted murder of Pussy Galore, and how Bond rescues her from the thugs, put me in mind of the tone of Vivienne Michel's story in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' more than, say, Shirley Eaton on the cover of 'Life' magazine. (It's interesting that this literary revisiting of the gold paint idea follows a few years in the wake of the very different movie homage with Strawberry Fields in QOS.) Without wishing to seem a continuity freak, my only criticism is that it would have been interesting to have learned a little more about the identity of the two gangsters who assault Pussy, and the precise connection they'd had to the late Goldfinger's operation; they are a little obscure, as is their revenge motive.
I'm now up to Chapter 12. The fact that Charlie Duggan is not only Bond's ally and an opinionated conversationalist in the grand tradition of Rene Mathis, Kerim Bey, Felix Leiter and Dikko Henderson, but also openly gay, further bears out my earlier point that Horowitz is able at once to challenge Fleming's homophobia while faithfully revisiting his literary world. Duggan's demonstrative criticisms of Bond's old-fashioned prejudices, while written in Fleming's style, might easily have been addressed to Fleming directly: "The trouble with you, James, is you're basically a prude. ..."
Duggan's extended pontification about the significance of 'the space race' is also very clever writing. It's easy to imagine this as an opinionated piece by Fleming on a subject of developing topical interest in the late 50s - and Fleming would have given such a monologue precisely to a character like Duggan. But of course what's happening is that Horowitz is pulling off an historical take on quasi-journalistic speculation about a politico-cultural issue which at the time would have seemed very 'now'.
I enjoyed the motor race sequence - Horowitz can write action like Fleming - though I'm not sure that Fleming's more ruthless Bond would have bothered taking the risk to save Dimitrov from the crashed Krassny.
Jeopardy Lane slipping away with the photographs that Bond had gone to all the trouble of stealing from Sin's office made me think less of Fleming than of the one-upmanship (womanship) of the likes of Magda in OP, or Anya Amasova or Holly Goodhead.
Jason Sin is shaping up nicely as a sinister Flemingesque villain, though at this stage I'm missing Fleming's trademark glint of red in anyone's eye...
Perhaps the racing coarse he practices on and the place Bond and Logan Fairfax stay should be more colourful, possibly Ireland or the south of France?
Also, did you notice the complete lack of gadgets? I'm not complaining - just pointing it out.
back up or special equipment. Rather like in Col Sun
where Bond kills with only a knife at the climax of the story ?
With Sin's owning that German Castle or that Poet's villa in the States, I think it was a quirk that Horowitz was trying to establish. The quirk being that Sin only produced second rate knock-offs.
Everything appeared luxurious and capable on the outside, but within, cheap and bleak, and failing.
It could also have been a way to allow some James Bond racial feelings into the story, where Asian products are seen as cheap.
himself to have died that day under the bridge. Hence
he had no intetest in food or drink, took no enjoyment
from them ?
I've already expressed my admiration for how Horowitz manages to challenge Fleming's sexual politics at the same time as delivering 'the Fleming effect' of genre and prose style. Having completed my reading, I feel that Horowitz deals with Fleming's racism in a similarly effective way. If the villain and several of his henchmen are Korean, Sin's description of how he was brutalised in an atrocity perpetrated by the Americans during the Korean War offers an understanding of his psychological complex in historical terms. Within the constraints of the Bond genre, Horowitz is historicising the villain here, rather than doing as Fleming often did - equating 'Eastern' ethnicities with villainous characteristics as a fact of nature (witness Oddjob).
Horowitz's chapter about Bond escaping being buried alive is a real achievement. The episode is hardly original (Tarantino brilliantly explores a similar situation on film in 'Kill Bill Vol. 2'), but the author proves himself to be the only Fleming imitator really capable of following Fleming's style of writing about torturous tests of Bond's physical and psychological endurance.
It's true, as others have said, that Bond's pleasure in dining isn't as prominent in 'Trigger Mortis' as it is in Fleming. At least we get a meal of grilled sole in the Rendezvous Room of the Plaza in the penultimate chapter (albeit with no lingering descriptions of the food!) During the course of the novel Horowitz touches on the morose experience of eating in American all-night diners, and although readers looking for more instances of luxury might be disappointed, this attention to unsatisfactory American dining has a clear precedent in one of Fleming's own Bonds, 'Live and Let Die'.
Bond's decision to spare the life of the youthful, sandy-haired Danny Slater as one of 'the little people' working in Sin's organisation - a rabbit caught in the headlights - is an interesting case of revisionism. I don't think that Fleming would have thought twice about having Bond kill the man in the specific situation depicted, hardened as the author was by the lived experience of WWII, though perhaps his Bond might have wallowed in a melancholy reflection on the death after the job was done. Horowitz, exhibiting a softer side, confers human vulnerability on Slater and uses a last-second decision by Bond to spare the man as a key marker of moral difference between Bond as the hero and Sin as the villain. It's tempting to compare this modern take on Bond's moral compass with recent explorations of the character's judgement in the films. In QOS, Daniel Craig's Bond kills a "Mr. Slate" - also sandy haired, though himself a professional killer - much to M's dismay (she wanted Slate brought in alive for interrogation); by the end of the film, Bond has learned the necessary restraint, apparently foregoing personal vengeance in leaving Yusef alive for interrogation.
While we're on the subject of the films, I can't resist mentioning a trivial detail by which Horowitz links Jeopardy Lane to screen heroines Camille in QOS and Aki in YOLT. In QOS, Camille repeatedly instructs Bond to "Get in!" various vehicles - a cute nod to Aki, who herself told Bond to "Get in!" her car for two different escapes. Back in 1967, there might have been some sexist/racist joke under the surface re. a woman being in the driving seat and repeatedly taking charge, but by 2008 the QOS allusion to Aki is just a whimsical piece of intertextuality. In 'Trigger Mortis', Jeopardy commands Bond to "Get in!" her Plymouth to escape the gunmen in the Starlite Motel compound, and then again she orders him to "Get on!" her Triumph Thunderbird, in pursuit of Sin's R-11: it seems that Horowitz, too, is enjoying some subtle, intertextual play!
I found it very predictable, almost boring, and to a large extent a rehash of Dr. No/Man with the Golden Gun.
It's certainly better than anything written by Benson- but that's not saying much........
Trigger Mortis is the Book at Bedtime-10.45pm for 2 weeks (10 parts-Mon to Friday.) on BBC Radio4 (UK).
Starting tonight and then I'll watch The Graham Norton Show with Bond actors. at 11.20. (repeated from Friday.)
cheers, Bleuville.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2015/nov/06/anthony-horowitz-webchat-trigger-mortis-dinner-with-saddam
http://thefederalist.com/2015/11/06/shaken-but-still-stirring-60-years-of-james-bond-novels/
The short version is that I'm part of the crowd that just doesn't get all the early positive reviews.
I do think this novel has been generally overrated by Bond fans and with time will be viewed as a stinker- think Faulks and Benson.
You make it sound like one has a poor sense of taste to like it. I liked TM more than any of the Benson books, some of the Gardners, and definitely more than Deaver, Faulks, Boyd and even Cole.
I was simply stating my opinion on the book and was pleased to see a review that I generally agreed with. I was very excited when TM was released, but in my opinion it was poorly written, boardered on plagiarism, and a very big disappointment. Only my opinion, sorry you were offended.
PS- for what it's worth, I think you were spot on regarding your comments on the new comic release!
the same books.
Apologies for being harsh, PB0007. I suppose after taking in a book and everything that process entails, whether one likes it a little or a lot becomes personal. TM wasn’t a perfect book, but there were enough elements to make the overall reading experience a satisfying one, IMO superior to the past (almost) dozen continuation novels.
The late 60s was a great time to explore in the literary Bond world in Boyd's novel, but all the gains made in the begining were lost to the Dogs of War rip-off in the rest of the book.
The answer is once, not three times thanks, just once. What kind of audience need their hands held to that extent? Answers on a postcard please.
Oscar Wilde
definitely better than the other recent oneshots, and from what I remember better than the Gardners I read (never tried the Bensons)
I didn't get the feeling the author had just pasted James Bonds name onto some other characters adventure to get it published, like most of the other recent continuations
maybe it helped Horowitz was working from Fleming's own notes, and worked hard to place it within the appropriate slot in Fleming's continuity?
meaning, it was sourced from leftover plot outlines that otherwise became For Your Eyes Only, so therefor it makes sense that this adventure should follow immediately after Goldfinger
I think we got more scenes with Pussy Galore in this book than we got from Fleming ... and she does talk like a tuff American dame, moreso than Honour Blackman did in the film
I like how she runs off with the lady Bond was planning to boink next: Bond in fact does not convert her, she just enjoys a satisfying single serving of beef before returning to her preferred diet of tuna
probably a more modern understanding of homosexuality than Fleming would have had. Bond's contact in Berlin is also a gay man, who Bond has been buddies with since the war. Bond doesn't tell his buddy his theories about having given women the vote.
Also at one point Bond lets a minion live, with uncharacteristic worries about the minions family. Could this be the beginning of the brooding about the "dirty damn business" that recurs in Fleming's later novels? the origins of Bond's conscience regarding the nature of his work?
The frequent action scenes seem more like the movies, but they're all very gripping, and most of them I could easily imagine being filmed. I especially liked the motorcycle chase across 1950s Brooklyn. I want to get a map out and see if the route described actually works. I wish there'd been more of Coney Island though, especially since two coincident plotthreads telegraphed that this would be an inevitable location for the later scenes. I love Coney Island, and am sure in the 1950s there would have been many more rides and amusements than survive today. (as the wooden roller coaster says "hold on to your wigs and carkeys")
Being buried alive is something we've recently seen happen to Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, and Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Played with Fire. I guess its new to Bond but still I kept thinking of those other stories. And Bonds escape was described in the same surprise flashback style as seen (every five minutes) in recent Guy Ritchie movies, a bit of a narrative cheat I think and definitely not the way Fleming would have explained a sequence of events.
So Moonraker looms pretty large over this story, yet all we get is Bond thinking he has so witnessed a rocket launch before, and from a very special point of view too, but he does not say so aloud while meeting the people running the rocket launch site. Why doesn't Bond speak up? Could this be canonically significant? Pearson's 007 Authorised Biography tells us Moonraker is the only adventure that did not "really" happen, that Flemings book was an elaborate conspiracy to confuse the Russians, whereas all the others were true. But maybe the event was "real", and so top secret Pearson's Bond was not allowed to speak about it to "Pearson" even 20 years later, whereas all his other missions were declassified by that point? Thus in 1957 Bond can remember it but cannot speak about it. And therefor... making Pearson's book (possibly) canonical!
And then maybe the reason we never heard about this adventure before is because all Space Program related missions are extra double top secret?
From memory (actually from Pearson's other Bond-related biography), there were at least three leftover plot outlines from the abandoned TV series, that did not get used in FYEO. Hopefully Horowitz will be invited back to flesh those out into proper Bond books as well.
It's being done!
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/horowitz-write-new-bond-novel-jonathan-cape-404116
http://www.ianfleming.com/anthony-horowitz-write-next-james-bond-novel/