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Welcome back to Book Club! Get your drinks, snacks and any notes you have and gather round for the first discussions on Live and Let Die! If you want any resources for the book, please find the link to the resources in the sidebar on the right! Please check the schedule to find out what chapters we're discussing this week!

Book Club is designed to be a place where you can go beyond the Bond movies and delve into another medium with our favourite secret agent. There is no set discussions, if you have anything interesting you want to discuss about your reading experience, comments on the text, or even how reading the book might have changed your view on the characters in the movies then do share!

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Please note: Live and Let Die (and most of the other Bond books, if we're honest) contains a lot of racist material. Slurs without asterisks or other censoring will not be tolerated. If you’re not quoting, please avoid using slurs altogether, but if you are quoting, use asterisks! This is not restricted to the n-word, but any slur used in the books, racial or otherwise.

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Some questions to start off

What are your impressions of the book so far?

What do you think of Fleming's depiction of a culture that would have been considered exotic by him and most of his readers?

Do you have any favourite characters or scenes so far?

We will be discussing chapters 1 - 11 of the book this week, so naturally there will be spoilers if you have not yet finished these chapters. Please don't discuss anything that happens in other chapters if you've read ahead!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

1) I really liked getting to see M again (and get another one-sentence mention of Q! haha), and I am delighted to see Felix. (I ship Bond and Felix pretty hard in the books now tbh. BESTIES IN THE FIELD AND BESTIES IN BED. I love that Bond can rely on him.)

The buried treasure plot is so ridiculous and fun, and Mr. Big is an intimidating adversary! I mean, I'm cringing at the racism pretty frequently while reading, but the plot itself is fast-paced and engaging. I got so into it that I ended up finishing the whole thing! (No spoilers, of course.)

I'm a bit WTF at this clairvoyance schtick that Solitaire has. In a book with buried treasure and a restaurant table that turns into a cage like something out of Scooby Doo, the clairvoyant thing is what breaks the suspension of disbelief for me, especially because other things that seem ~mystical~ at first, like parts of Fleming's depiction of the Vodou religion, are revealed to be very IRL-based manipulations by Mr. Big. The second half will reveal whether Solitaire's "gift" is confirmed in any way by the narrative or if it remains fuzzy and semi-deniable so Fleming doesn't have to step completely into the psychic realm.

OTOH, I can't help but like Solitaire! She takes her chance to escape from her captor when she can, which is brave, and she seems to be a bold match for Bond sexually. (An "allumeuse," as she calls herself, is a tease. The word comes from the french verb "allumer," which literally means to light, to start, or--when talking about an electric light--to turn on.)
There's also this moment:
'Which seat would you like?' asked Bond.
'I don't mind,' she said anxiously. 'You choose.'
Her response read to me like the response of someone who is used to choice being a trap instead of a freedom; better and safer for the more powerful person in the room to choose instead of risking making the wrong choice and getting punished for it. It was a small moment, but one that made me feel a lot of empathy for her.

Finally: BOND. Are you ever going to go somewhere WITHOUT the villain knowing about it in advance? Will you ever have a book in which you aren't captured?

From: (Anonymous)

2. Fleming is so racist. Like, I know, we've already established that up in the post I'm responding to; I just feel the need to say it again. But in a way, it feels like he's trying to include some parts where he's trying not to be quite /as/ racist, but failing at it? There's his whole thing about Mr. Big being the black Moriarty, like, "See, black people can be master criminals, too!" But then he goes and screws that up by being like "OF COURSE HE'S NOT ALL BLACK. THERE'S GOOD FRENCH STOCK IN HIM." And during Bond and Felix's trip to Harlem, Bond has this line, "'Seems they're interested in much the same things as everyone else - sex, having fun, and keeping up with the Jones's.'" Like, "Hey, black people are people too!" (Bc that totally needs to be clarified, jfc.) And there's a few more token lines about black achievement, and Felix is hip to the jazz scene and the Harlem social strata, and there's that one porter who tips Bond off in the train, etc. It all tends to be wrapped up in a tone of insulting condescension, but Fleming at least gives occasional lip service to the idea that black people aren't a uniform menace to white society.

Having acknowledged that, Fleming's narrative really does seem to...be totally built on the idea that black people are a uniform menace to white society? Black people are an exotic other, often identified with animals (like the stripper, who Bond thinks of as a "chienne," which is a female dog), and much of the threat and suspense in the book comes from the idea that any/all black people could be working for Mr. Big, because of course all black people have the same beliefs in Vodou and connections with a criminal empire or whatever. The threat reminds me a lot of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which is a movie (made in roughly the same time period) in which pod people clones replace ordinary people and there's a lot of fear over whether someone you've known for years has now been turned into an enemy: the pod people could look like anyone! etc. With the Cold War and the communist witch-hunt going on (or starting, anyway), conspiracy by an otherized enemy was in vogue.

Fleming's treatment of Vodou is probably insulting to actual people who participate in that religion. On the other hand, it's pretty effective writing--human sacrifice always makes for a good scare and it ratchets up our expectations of the horrors Mr. Big might be capable of committing, the drums are a cool auditory motif, and the talk of witches and curses plays on the ~spooky~ fears that people in a Western society tend to grow up with, as a familiar part of pop culture if not as an active superstition. Since Christianity is the dominant faith in the U.S. and England, the inclusion of the Vodou religion really exacerbates the feeling of "us vs. them" that already dominates with the white vs. black conflict in the book.

From: (Anonymous)

3: So that scene where Felix is like "And then I talked about jazz and made friends with my captor!" is one that I really like. I mean, it's probably terrible--it has a "white man befriends the simple-minded POC" trope vibe to it, right? I'm not crazy? But it made me develop the personal headcanon that, instead of Felix's captor being easily manipulatable, Felix is just a ridiculously gregarious friendship unicorn who literally can't go anywhere without magically making people feel liked and respected and sorry that they have to cosh him upside the head. Felix is the Foggy Nelson to Bond's Matt Murdock, is what I'm saying.

I also really enjoyed the briefing with M. M is just so chipper, like, "I found you a nice SMERSH organization! Don't kill everyone all at once! Good kick! *wink*"

And the comedic interplay between Bond, Felix, and their FBI guy was good. That dinner they had, which was described in ridiculous detail (Bond's reservations about the melted butterscotch, lol) and which they apparently ate in awkward silence until everyone was finished, haha. All of Fleming's petty jabs at America/Americans. Bond's conversation with headquarters in the aftermath of all the murdering he did.

Also, this magnificently un-self-aware comment from Felix cannot escape comment: "Often you get tossed out on your ear, simply because you're white. And you don't get any sympathy from the police either.'" OMG FELIX, DO YOU MEAN IT SUCKS NOT TO BE ABLE TO GO PLACES BECAUSE OF YOUR RACE???

I also loved Felix and Bond's conversation about why they do what they do instead of quitting while they're still alive: "But I know what you mean -better the frying-pan you know than the fire you don't."

Finally, there were lots of little things from the first book that I recognized in this one: Bond's imagination scenes (just like with Le Chiffre, Bond apparently figured out Solitaire's entire detailed history from a few clues), Bond's "as a woman" statement, Bond's food snobbery ("Eyewash"), Bond sneaking into a room ready to meet the enemy only to find the empty room sneering at him... It's fun to find the things that are making up the Bond formula!

From:

isthisrubble.livejournal.com

oh god, I never really thought about Solitaire like that, but of course! she's been trapped for a year so naturally she's going to react in a way that I might find strange. I feel bad for being so annoyed with her now...

and Bond has to be captured. that's the point. I mean, how else are we going to be able to find out the villain's evil plan?
... it always happened to Nancy Drew, too, now that I think about it

From:

isthisrubble.livejournal.com

It all tends to be wrapped up in a tone of insulting condescension exactly

like the stripper, who Bond thinks of as a "chienne," which is a female dog I did not know that, wow, the things you can get away with by putting it in a different language

I have no idea what Vodou is like in real life, but the one thing about it as a plot device is that, in the world Fleming has set up where almost all the African-American people believe in it, it becomes a very effective weapon? like it makes a lot of sense for Mr Big to take advantage of the superstition? even if it's racist as fuck

From:

isthisrubble.livejournal.com

yeah, the thing with Felix and his captor is really ugh, but I like your thinking with the whole daredevil thing!

From: (Anonymous)

...please tell me the Young Bond books are like a Nancy Drew AU.

And yes, I've detected a /slight/ pattern of evil monologuing in Fleming's books, hahaha.