Warning: Here be spoilers.

I doubt there's ever been a living adult who chose to read Moonraker because they loved the movie so much that they demanded more, yes more!, laser guns and girlfights and couldn't be sated until they attempted the novel. If they went looking for a probing examination of the mindset of the giant, steel-toothed rube Jaws, they'd have been better off using their Barnes & Noble gift card on a travel Battleship set, because it ain't in there. In fact Jaws isn't in there at all, nor his teeny Heidi of the Alps girlfriend, nor a space station full of ladies, nor outer space at all, nor really anything from the film except for James Bond and his nemesis, Hugo Drax. This, for all literate humans, is a good thing, because Moonraker the novel is smaller in scope and more elegant and engaging than the film that uses its title, and it showcases Ian Fleming doing what he does best, which I'll explain what it is in a second now that I've finished this introductory paragraph.

A week or so I wrote about Fleming's decadent and indulgent description of Bond and M's dinner at the Blades club early in Moonraker. I'm three books into the 007 series, and I'm starting to think that type of thing -- more than espionage, guns, or even sexily named ladies -- is what drove Fleming to writing. I don't mean just luxuriant food, but the British good life in general. Nice cars, expensive alcohol, tobacco, travel, gentlemen, the strict standards of behavior that accompanied all of those, and the dirt and illicitness of the reality those standards masked. Ian Fleming's accounts of high-society 1950s London feel as real and engrossing as Raymond Chandler's 1940s backdoor Los Angeles. They escort you somewhere that you'd never otherwise be allowed, and you want to stay.

For that reason the first half of Moonraker is the better of the two, with its focus on Bond slithering amongst M's aristocrat buddies to discreetly teach a lesson to multi-millionaire industrialist Drax, who's been caught cheating at cards. It's Fleming in his element, sketching out a world where the very security of the United Kingdom could collapse if the wrong fat cat gets called out during the right bridge game. (This all clearly inspired the opening bits of the movie version of Goldfinger, in which 007 humiliates Auric Goldfinger after catching him cheating at both cards and golf. (Or maybe that's in the novel Goldfinger too; I've have three more books to go before that one.) A couple of decades later, the theme also made its way into Octopussy. When Roger Moore's Bond out-cheats Kamal Khan at backgammon, Louis Jordan replies with a line lifted straight from Moonraker: "Spend the money quickly, Mr. Bond.")

See, Sir Hugo Drax has kindly agreed to spend some of his fortune building for Great Britain the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. The Moonraker, as he calls it, would allow the UK to nuke any capital in Europe and -- as I guess could reasonably have been believed when the book was published in 1956, a year before Sputnik and the Space Age -- keep the country safe for all eternity. So the nation can ill afford any tarnish to Drax's reputation that might lead to his river of cash drying up.

Once the novel leaves the cards club in the second half and sends Bond out to investigate Drax and Moonraker firsthand, things wilt a little. As you can guess, things aren't as they seem, (If you can't guess, you might consider picking up a library card. They're available at those buildings full of books that you sometimes go into to poop.) and 007 ends up having to save England.

From that point on it's well written but predictable stuff. Though to Fleming's credit, in Moonraker he corrects many of the errors that made the preceding novel, Live and Let Die , such a tooth pull. Fleming lets Bond operate in the middle of the action this time, bravely and smartly, rather than playing events out around him. Gala Brand, Bond' female sidekick, (Sad to say that, so far, Fleming's female characters aren't much more than sidekicks.) massively improves on Solitaire, that warm pile of urchin uni from Live and Let Die. Brand shows skill and brains and saves the day more than Bond saves her. And she doesn't even sleep with him.

Fleming also spends plenty of time helping us to understand James Bond the man, almost as if he's making up for the page space he should've given him in Live and Let Die. For 007 enthusiasts (Anyone know if there's a name for us, like "Sherlockians" or "Trekkers"?) the most enjoyable parts of Moonraker are the ones that show us what the movies never do: the details of Bond's quotidian routine when he's not on a mission. Moonraker reminds us that Bond's a civil servant who spends most of his days in the office (with his extraordinarily named secretary Loelia Ponsonby) reading files, taking meetings, and wishing M would wrap it up so he can get to lunch in the commissary. We learn the specifics of his modest salary and much less modest expense account. Turns out Bond's just a guy with a job, be it one that two or three times a year requires him to kill some people. James Bond has a life outside of rescuing civilization, and it's not a very exciting one. When he makes a list of what to do with his massive bridge winnings from the Drax affair, he decides to spend a chunk of it on a new Bentley, some diamond tie clips, and maybe a new set of golf clubs. As for the rest? Well, his apartment really needs to be painted.