What are you Currently Reading? (Page 18 of 18)

Young Bond volume 1: Silverfin
Charlie Higson

I have all five of these books, and may finally read them over the next couple days.
Does anybody know if the short story "A Hard Man to Kill" is online anywhere?

first thought: this is more to do with Harry Potter than James Bond. (in 2005 Rowling had just released the 2nd last book, and the fourth film came out that year). Especially the first section which is set in Eton, all the usual Tom Browns Schooldays nonsense I can never relate to. House rivalries, school bullies, big sporting events, and long train ride home.
And though there are several specific paraphrases of Fleming, the sentences are much closer to Rowling.

Fortunately Bond goes to northern Scotland on Easter break after a few chapters, and the real story begins. He goes to visit Aunt Charmian and a new character Uncle Max.
Charmian is depicted as an experienced world traveller herself, an anthropologist and Katherine Hepburn type. She wears trousers and drives the original Bentley.
Max is dying of lung cancer (so first mention of smoking in this series for children is cautionary), and reveals to his young impressionable nephew that he was a spy during the Great War.

Max's homevillage of Keithly is apparently fictitious, but the detailed directions tell us it is off the main road somewhere in between Kinlocheil and Glenfinnan, 45km northwest of Glencoe.
As well as meeting Charmian, we are introduced to May the housekeeper, and learn how Bond gets his scar.

And he inherits a car, but its an early model Aston not the Bentley.
In Casino Royale he tells Vesper he bought his Bentley in 1933, so this inheriting a car business may be an attempt to make that troublesome sentence fit the chronology.

Bond's age is not explicitly stated, but its >=1933, as Hitler is the new Chancellor. Bond is starting his second semester at Eton, after having missed the first, so how old would that make him? if he's 13, that fits the 1920 birthdate given by Pearson, otherwise Pearson's Bond biography is disregarded.

The real plot involves a a scary castle up in the hills overlooking the village, where unspeakable scientific experiments are going on. Very Universal Horror (which was at its peak in 1933), but also very Island of Dr Moreau whats going on there.
In fact, some of the deaths and other atrocities to the human body are way more graphic and disgusting than anything Fleming ever described. I guess Higson thinks young boys like blood and gore? Well I sure did at that age, so its all good.

Also similar to Harry Potter is all the emphasis on death, the death of Bonds parents, and the deaths he witnesses over the adventure. The first section at Eton is in fact a long build up to the revelation what happened to Bond's parents.

According to Pearson's Fleming biography, when Fleming was a teenager, one of his first writing attempts was a Gothic melodrama about the lord of a spooky castle with lots of torture. So Fleming might well have approved!

these Young Bond books were quick reads, so I just kept going and made notes afterwards:

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Young Bond volume 2: Blood Fever

The scale of this one is huge, moreso than most of the films. After some brief scenes at Eton, introducing Bond's new club the Danger Society, the scene changes to Sardinia, where Young Bond accompanies a school trip studying archaeology. There he crosses paths with a villain with ties to Mussolini, who models himself on the Caesars and has built a palazzo high in the mountains complete with working aqueduct. There are also art thieves who have kidnapped a schoolgirl (Amy Goodenough), travels with backwoods bandits, and a visit to a surrealist's artist studio.

This volume continues the graphic blood and gore of the previous volume, with a villain walking round with a gangrenous knife wound til the very last pages.

There is also a secondary Young Bondgirl in this volume, literally named Vendetta, one of the bandits who is basically a savage. Both Bondgirls are very capable though, as primary Bondgirl Amy Goodenough is herself responsible for the villain's festering knife wound in the very first chapter.
(Amy is fought over by two competing villains, who each propose to sell her in the white slave trade then decide to keep her for themselves, yet it is never stated precisely what these villains intend to do with their teenage prize. This is left to our sordid adult imaginations, but rather creepy for a childrens book.)

A lot of the imagery is more Tintin than Harry Potter (which in my opinion is a better source of inspiration), including the art thieves, the archaeology, and especially that scene in the surrealist's studio.

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Young Bond volume 3: Double or Die

This time we tour Eton, Cambridge, and all across London, especially the poverty stricken East End. The reality of the Great Depression is important here, as is the lure of Communism.
Towards the end, there is revealed to be a forgotten network of tunnels that crisscrosses london, foreshadowing SkyFall.
Red Kelly reappears, along with the whole Kelly clan, including little sister Kelly Kelly, who is the Bondgirl of the adventure. Bond and Kelly Kelly even sleep together, although it's not what you think.

There are cameos by real life historic figures Alan Turing and Dutch Schultz. The attempts at early computing are central to the plot (there is a good explanation of Babbage's Difference Engine), and computing's actual origins are correctly shown to be direct function of spywork.

Also Bond learns to gamble, and visits his first casino. And gets drunk for the first time, which, as with smoking in the first book, is represented as highly dangerous, not glamourous at all.

And there's a lot more graphic gore and grotesqueries. A particular highlight is the visit to the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, where Bond studies a room full of freak specimens preserved in jars, while his pal Perry sits through an educational lecture on plastic surgery restoration of war injuries.

Also: Bond does indeed purchase a Bentley nearly new in 1933 (actually it's a wreck), making that sentence in Casino Royale correct after all.
(EDIT: I just realised the discovery of a wrecked racing car, and the decision to purchase and restore it, is near identical to the opening of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!)

This book again has the problem of scale that undermines Fleming's books. The extended finale at the London Docks is actually closer to the Spy Who Loved Me (film) than anything Fleming wrote.

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Young Bond volume 4: Hurricane Gold

Thankfully no Eton content in this volume, except for a set of letters between chapters that Young Bond never gets the chance to read.
Bond accompanies Aunt Charmian on a trip to Palenque but gets seperated in  hurricane, and spends the rest of the book travelling in circles round Mexico with Precious Stone, a spoiled little rich girl who has lost everything. The two of them must escape the criminals who robbed her father's house, then instead decide to track those same criminals down to recover a set of stolen military plans.

The description of the hurricane and the flooded village are excellent. The scenes in Palenque come and go too fast, but that's OK because there's another villain who captures them in the end with his own set of Mayan ruins, and these are explored.
And again theres the gag of a vilain who is hideously injured early on, and just keeps walking round dropping body parts for a couple hundred more pages. Variations of this recur in Volumes 2, 3, and 4.

Much of the appeal of this volume is the story of Precious Stone, who undergoes a sort of reverse Pygmalion process, gradually evolving from pampered brat into a rough and tumble survivor, the kind of female character that Fleming celebrated. Young Bond ends up liking her very much, but he has remade her in his own image.

one thing about the ending...

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"A Hard Man to Kill" - short story
I haven't read this one. It is included in a supplemental volume entitled Danger Society. There is a very brief excerpt in Volume 5, continuing the story from the previous volume as Bond and Aunt Charmian return home on an ocean liner. I gather from comments online that Wilder Lawless, from Volume 1, reappears.

Last edited by caractacus potts (5th May 2020 23:47)

Do you therefore think Higson would have been a good choice to write a "normal" Bond book, ie an adult Bond adventure?

Yes, I read them (I have one autographed by Higson) and enjoyed them though am not in a hurry to re-read them. I very much agree with your apt phrase "Harry Potter with a gun" especially in the early books and think Higson should be allowed a stab at an adult Bond book.

Thanks, Sir Miles!

I just finished all the Harry Potter books and now continuing the Bond novels. I've only read them 'till DAF in Dutch, so I can't wait to go on in English with the Folio Society versions. The first five chapters are really nice and I love Grant's backstory. Can't wait to read more.

The book looks interesting. Maybe I will get to read it if they ever publish an affordable version.

I have purchased Colonel Sun from Audible, and will start listening to it this week.

I just finished FOREVER AND DAY and it has to be one of the weakest of all the Bond novels. Which is saying something. And I was a pretty big fan of Horowitz's TRIGGER MORTIS so I was surprised.

SPOILERS BELOW

That 10 page chunk of text wherein 16 tells her entire life story, beginning to end, was some of the most hackish writing I've ever read. No one talks like that, ever. No one presents their life in these perfectly tidy little packages of character background (you could just see Horowitz's biography notes). A wholly unconvincing (and stupid) villain with a wholly ludicrous plan (even by Bond standards) considering his goal.

Additionally, I don't know how much heroin it takes to become an addict but the failure to address that question really had me wondering why Bond wasn't fighting some preoccupation for another hit. Shouldn't he at least, you know, make a mental note of wanting another dose? It was a non-issue after the scene was over. Man, this book didn't work for me at all.

And yeah, we all saw Titanic too, Horowitz. Thanks for the recap.

It’s probably 30 years since I’ve read a Fleming Bond and I’m reading Casino Royale, sat in my rocking chair on the balcony with a Long Island Iced Tea 

I’ve forgotten most of this novel but what I can never understand is the popularity of the card game baccarat. It’s a game of complete chance, like blackjack is, just a chance of a gut feeling on whether to draw a card when you have a 5, all the other options are automatic.

I like the writing style and the descriptions of all that exotic food and champagne must have been mouth-wateringly out of reach of most of Britain’s after the war.

I’m currently reading Making Movie Magic by FX master, John Richardson, who worked on Moore, Dalton and Brosnan Bonds as well as iconic movies from the 70s onward such as Superman, Flash Gordon, Aliens and the Harry Potter movies. It’s actually a pretty light read, making me wish he had gone into more detail with the effects. But as it’s the nature of such memoirs, the accounts are more often anecdotal.

I’m also about to begin on Volume 2 of James Bond: Origin, which compiles the series of Bond comics of that title.

Both these books are digital, with free access courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library. I read these on my laptop and smart phone, sometimes as I watch TV with the fam!

I first read CR about 3 years ago. My husband likes Bond but is not into reading that much so would ask me about what was happening and I'd fill him in, including the torture scene. Fast forward a few months and we were staying with my son who was house sitting for friends. In the bedroom where my husband and I were sleeping, on the wall above the bed as part of the decor, there were three cane carpet beaters! I immediately thought of CR and had great fun all weekend threatening my husband that if he wasn't really nice to me, I just might use them. 

I couldn't help wondering what if Bond had stayed at a house or hotel where it had carpet beaters as decor and how he would he have reacted.