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UBC #5: Diamonds are Forever
UBC #5
Fleming, Ian. Diamonds are Forever. 1956. New York: Berkley Books, 1986.
Tiffany Case joins Pussy Galore and Honeychile Rider as a woman whose only experience of heterosexual intercourse is rape, who falls in love with Bond with no provocation, and who is cured by the power of his love-making.
I like Tiffany quite a lot, actually. She has a sense of humor, and she's far from being a damsel in distress. She's not the problem I had with this book.
The problem I had is that the pieces of the story don't seem to fit together. Oh, they do: one event leads to the next, to the next. But they don't feel coherent. In particular, there's a moment, about three-fourths of the way through, where they might as well have inserted a title-card:
THERE IS AN EXPLOSION OF TESTOSTERONE.
The sudden upswing of violence does get explained later, but it didn't, for me, retroactively make sense of the explosion.
And it's not--let me be clear--that I object to the violence. I don't. I like action movies (given a choice between an action movie and a romantic comedy, I'll pick the action movie every time, unless the action movie is very very bad). And it's certainly not like I'm surprised that there's a lot of violence in a Bond novel.
It's just that narratively, somehow, it doesn't fit. The story doesn't fit together.
It's a series of set pieces: the opening with the scorpion and the helicopter; Bond's foray disguised as a policeman to get a look at the prime suspect; his first meeting with Tiffany; crossing the Atlantic; New York; Saratoga (in two parts, the horse race, and the terrible fate of Tingaling Bell); Las Vegas (in sevral parts); Spectreville (in several parts); and the closing of the ring composition. I can't explain why it is that these set pieces don't mesh together for me into a coherent whole, but they don't. Perhaps because they're a series of separate climaxes, rather than an escalation. Each individual piece was fine, but the whole failed to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Fleming, Ian. Diamonds are Forever. 1956. New York: Berkley Books, 1986.
Tiffany Case joins Pussy Galore and Honeychile Rider as a woman whose only experience of heterosexual intercourse is rape, who falls in love with Bond with no provocation, and who is cured by the power of his love-making.
I like Tiffany quite a lot, actually. She has a sense of humor, and she's far from being a damsel in distress. She's not the problem I had with this book.
The problem I had is that the pieces of the story don't seem to fit together. Oh, they do: one event leads to the next, to the next. But they don't feel coherent. In particular, there's a moment, about three-fourths of the way through, where they might as well have inserted a title-card:
The sudden upswing of violence does get explained later, but it didn't, for me, retroactively make sense of the explosion.
And it's not--let me be clear--that I object to the violence. I don't. I like action movies (given a choice between an action movie and a romantic comedy, I'll pick the action movie every time, unless the action movie is very very bad). And it's certainly not like I'm surprised that there's a lot of violence in a Bond novel.
It's just that narratively, somehow, it doesn't fit. The story doesn't fit together.
It's a series of set pieces: the opening with the scorpion and the helicopter; Bond's foray disguised as a policeman to get a look at the prime suspect; his first meeting with Tiffany; crossing the Atlantic; New York; Saratoga (in two parts, the horse race, and the terrible fate of Tingaling Bell); Las Vegas (in sevral parts); Spectreville (in several parts); and the closing of the ring composition. I can't explain why it is that these set pieces don't mesh together for me into a coherent whole, but they don't. Perhaps because they're a series of separate climaxes, rather than an escalation. Each individual piece was fine, but the whole failed to be greater than the sum of its parts.
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I wonder what the popularity of the books was, back before the movies? Were they giant bestsellers, or just moderate?