Rereading 007 - Thunderball
As always, this blog-post contains spoilers. Please don’t read it if you have yet to read Thunderball.
This story starts in the doldrums. James Bond is not looking after himself – he’s drinking too much, smoking too much. He always did ,of course, but it’s suddenly having a much more serious effect on him. Which is rather odd. Peering forward in time, we would expect to see this after the tragedy that concludes OHMSS and in The Man With The Golden Gun, which was Fleming’s last book, written when he was struggling with ill health himself. But why now, midway through the run?
In the story, it’s vaguely ascribed to being bored at work. And that’s a catch-22 because not having a mission makes Bond indulge in unhealthy pastimes, making him less mission-fit and less likely to get tasked with anything interesting to do. Either way, his ennui has an unfortunate effect, making him unusually disagreeable to and about the hapless women who have to work with him – a low-point both for him and his creator.
Losing patience (with Bond’s poor state of fitness, not his views on women, naturally), M sends him to a health farm called Shrublands. And things almost immediately improve as Bond engages in an animated discussion with his taxi driver, a young man with ambitious plans for the future and entertaining views on Shrublands and the local community. How many self-absorbed and self-pitying spies can show this genuine interest in other people? It’s one of Bond’s best traits and restores my faith in him.
Once he arrives at Shrublands, he is quick to start ogling the female clinical staff (Bond’s inability to meet professional women without assessing their desirability is one of his worst traits) and picking a fight with another inmate. There’s coincidence at work here – it’s sheer chance Bond was sent to the same health farm as Count Lippe and that they have simultaneous massage appointments which allow Bond to see the tattoo beneath the Count’s removed watch-strap. But it’s the sort of coincidence that kickstarts an interesting adventure rather than being required to disentangle the plot once it has got hopelessly snarled up, so we can let it pass.
By the time Bond finishes his stay at Shrublands, he has become a complete convert to health foods and started lecturing his secretary about it just like M does. Perversely, Fleming now performs an abrupt volte face on the matter, having Bond’s housekeeper May tearfully inform her employer that he’s ‘not himself’ when eating this stuff.
Next, we arrive at a significant milestone in 007’s adventures, as the reader meets Ernst Stavro Blofeld for the first time. We can’t complain about the introduction being over-casual – in a few pages, we learn almost everything we could possibly want to know about Blofeld. His birthplace and early life, appearance, exact weight, business address in Paris, financial accounts, preferred operating methods and the three different ways he has chosen to eliminate inefficient or treacherous colleagues (so far).
Blofeld’s new project is a plan to steal a British plane (the ‘Vindicator’) with two atomic warheads and hold the ‘Western Powers’ (i.e. Britain, the USA, other European countries at a pinch) to ransom by threatening to blow up first a military installation and then a major city unless SPECTRE are paid £1 million in gold bullion. The budgetary element has not aged well – a point nicely skewered by the first Austin Powers film – but generally Blofeld’s plan is efficient. No wonder it got reused in film after film. The one oddity is that the whole plan is allowed to hinge on a letter which has to be posted by a specific operative on a specific day. Surely there must have been other ways to send a ransom note. Also, SPECTRE apparently have numerous operatives in the UK – why not get one of them to post the letter rather than Count Lippe, after his war of attrition with Bond saw him immobilized with severe burns?
Once the letter is received, all hell breaks loose. Either paying the ransom or not paying it will be disastrous for the ‘Western Powers’, so they concentrate their efforts on searching for the bombs. All the secret services of the West will need to work together, which bodes ill for Bond, never a team player. Fortunately, M has decided to focus on a report of a plane spotted off the American coast, and pursues one of his notorious ‘hunches’ to decide that the target military installation will probably be in the US and that it would be too difficult for SPECTRE to base themselves on the American mainland, so they’re probably in the Bahamas. So he packs off Bond to the Bahamas, with the vague instruction to ‘look around’. Before he goes, Bond tells May to throw away the yogurt etc and make him some scrambled eggs, as he can’t work on all that ‘muck’. “Oh and bring in the drinks tray.”
Before Bond leaves London, a vengeful Count Lippe attempts to eliminate him. Unfortunately for the Count, Blofeld has instructed two of his operatives to eliminate Lippe as a punishment for inefficiency. These two assassination attempts happen simultaneously, leaving Lippe dead but Bond alive. This is a messy business in both senses. We keep being told how brilliantly organized SPECTRE are and that they think of everything, but Count Lippe did not bother to find out anything about Bond or the building he worked at, while the German operatives tasked with taking Lippe out don’t notice that he’s trailing someone with a view to assassinating him. This carelessness extends to Bond too – uncharacteristically, he fails to spot Lippe trailing him from his flat to his workplace and avoids being shot by seconds. Even then, he shrugs off the assassination attempt as probably a hangover from a previous job, as does M. Black marks for everyone all round.
The action moves to the Bahamas, which Fleming presumably knew well, as the Caribbean is his ‘backyard’. We get an unnecessary amount of back-story about Giuseppi Petacchi, the Vindicator pilot who foolishly threw in his lot with SPECTRE and was killed for his pains as soon as he had safely landed the Vindicator in the shallow sea off the Bahamas. We get even more on Emilio Largo, Blofeld’s second in command, in charge of the retrieval and hiding of the atomic warheads, and owner of the Disco Volante yacht. Largo is one of those warmly charismatic, masculine, Mediterranean men Bond is instinctively drawn to, like Darko Kerim in From Russia With Love.
Largo and his associates are in the Bahamas under cover of treasure hunting. While Fleming would have known this was a plausible cover due to the region’s history of pirates targeting Spanish bullion, Largo and his associates go out of their way to court attention with their flashy yacht. As a result, when Bond hits town looking for a large group of men, he is almost immediately directed to the only plausible group on the islands. As in Diamonds Are Forever, he finds his villains at the first cast. These stories are hardly ever whodunits, which is a pity.
Why did Largo bring all the ‘shareholders’ to the yacht? None of them have any active role to play in retrieval of the bombs or the next phase of the operation. A much smaller group would have attracted far less attention.) Also why does Bond specify, in his questions to Our Men In Nassau, that he’s looking for a group of men? He has no reason to know there are no women in SPECTRE. For that matter, why didn’t Blofeld introduce some women into the group to make it look more innocent? In fact there is a woman on board, Domino, something everyone seems to forget until Bond visits the main town and spots her immediately, despite not knowing there’s a woman in the party.
The beautiful girl in the stylish two-seater who captures everyone’s attention must have been a favourite fantasy of Fleming’s as it crops up so often in the books. Dominetta Vitali is Italian, but having decided on this, Fleming instantly seems to forget it again. We learn that Domino was sent to boarding-school in England and then studied acting at RADA, so she talks and behaves like an upper-class English girl. She is also the sister of Giuseppi Petacchi, the dead Vindicator pilot. This is another untidy coincidence – SPECTRE seem to have no idea of the connection and it’s hard to see how it could have come about. It’s only there to give Domino a motive to help Bond and take revenge on Largo and surely Fleming could have thought of something else.
Bond’s attempts to pick Domino up in a cigarette shop are clumsy, but she agrees to go for a drink with him. She proves refreshingly lacking in vanity, explaining that her effect on the local men is only because they’re all so old and she’s the only young woman around. “You’ll probably have the same effect on the old women with pince-nez and blue rinses.”
The USA arrives in the form of Felix Leiter, always welcome as far as I’m concerned because he’s funny and positive despite having plenty of reasons not to be cheerful. He and Bond make a great double-act – I love it when they criticize tourist prices and service on their travels, they should have their own travel show. Here, they dine in the hotel restaurant and grumble about how poor the food is – the book quotes from the menu and you can practically hear Fleming’s loathing of the overblown culinary language and reliance on Capital Letters. Felix thinks the assassination attempt on Bond sounds fishy and suggests Lippe was the operative who was meant to post SPECTRE’s ransom note to the Prime Minister and this is why it was apparently delayed. This is a lightning leap of logic from Felix but it’s a relief that someone has finally figured it out.
As inLive And Let Die, Bond and Leiter decide to start their investigations by checking out their suspects in person and making their interest obvious. They head over to the Disco Volante in the hotel launch and ask to be shown around it, with an unconvincing story about wanting to buy the beach house Largo is renting. Bond follows this up with his favourite ploy of confronting his suspect at the nearest casino and beating him at cards. Domino is also there but it’s an undercooked scene –Largo’s reaction to losing a lot of money to Bond is decidedly reasonable. Domino has a drink with Bond and tells him an imaginary story she has woven about the ‘hero’ illustration on her favourite Players cigarettes. It’s nice that Bond listens to her long story with attention and sympathy – not many of the fictional hard-bitten spies or detectives of his era would do so. To make up for the lack of sparks at the casino, Fleming throws in an underwater scene as Bond decides to inspect the Disco Volante from beneath. (Conveniently she is now in harbour.) He learns nothing from this except that the yacht has an underwater hatch and an armed sentry, but the venture allows for an underwater fight that’s broken up by a large barracuda.
Next day, Bond and Leiter borrow a small plane and go looking for the sunken Vindicator. The drama of the search is undermined by the fact that we already know the bombs have been removed by Largo. The plane is covered by a camouflaging tarpaulin but Bond spots the sharks circling above it, a piece of good detective work from him. There’s a compelling scene in which he dives down to the wrecked plane and finds the cabin full of scrabbling octopi, although it’s a missed opportunity for a dramatic encounter with one.
Finding Giuseppi Petacchi’s body means breaking the news of his death to Domino. Unfortunately, this has to be done at the romantic beach setting Domino has chosen for seduction of Bond and her ploy of having sea urchin spines in her foot which he has to help her remove therefore feels bitter-sweet. Once Domino knows about her brother’s death, she agrees to help Bond by accompanying Largo on the yacht to retrieve the atomic bombs. This is a dangerous job for her and Bond knows it. It’s also a badly-designed plan. Domino says she will come up on deck to signal if the bombs are on board, but stay below if they are not. It doesn’t seem to occur to either her or Bond that someone might prevent her from coming on deck (or force her to do so). And when this plan does indeed go wrong (despite having said she will carry out her task well, Domino makes a complete mess of it), Bond, Leiter and the US nuclear submarine crew that have come to help out all ignore the lack of signal, making it pointless.
The climax of the book is, for me, a disappointment. The moving of the bombs underwater from one craggy rock to another is not a sufficiently dramatic moment – it contrasts badly with, for instance, the climax of Moonraker, which takes place when an actual rocket is being launched and targeting London. There are too many vehicles involved in transporting the bombs around (yachts, undersea sleds, chariots) and it’s hard to keep the details and various geographical locations of Blofeld’s plan in mind. The underwater fight between Largo’s men and the American submarine sailors is underwhelming, with no marine creatures involved, and even the confrontation between Bond and Largo is not particularly interesting – there are no clever uses of props or creatures or ingenious subterfuges. Bond looks to be beaten at the end and Domino saves him by shooting Largo with an underwater spear-gun. The final scene of the book sees Bond in hospital arguing with the doctor and wanting to see Domino but that feels like an anti-climax too. Oh, and Blofeld has got away. Fleming must have already sensed he would want to use him in another book but it’s hard to see why from Thunderball. For me, it remains one of the more disappointing Bond outings, its early promise fizzling out with a plotline that’s both obvious and unconvincing.
This story starts in the doldrums. James Bond is not looking after himself – he’s drinking too much, smoking too much. He always did ,of course, but it’s suddenly having a much more serious effect on him. Which is rather odd. Peering forward in time, we would expect to see this after the tragedy that concludes OHMSS and in The Man With The Golden Gun, which was Fleming’s last book, written when he was struggling with ill health himself. But why now, midway through the run?
In the story, it’s vaguely ascribed to being bored at work. And that’s a catch-22 because not having a mission makes Bond indulge in unhealthy pastimes, making him less mission-fit and less likely to get tasked with anything interesting to do. Either way, his ennui has an unfortunate effect, making him unusually disagreeable to and about the hapless women who have to work with him – a low-point both for him and his creator.
Losing patience (with Bond’s poor state of fitness, not his views on women, naturally), M sends him to a health farm called Shrublands. And things almost immediately improve as Bond engages in an animated discussion with his taxi driver, a young man with ambitious plans for the future and entertaining views on Shrublands and the local community. How many self-absorbed and self-pitying spies can show this genuine interest in other people? It’s one of Bond’s best traits and restores my faith in him.
Once he arrives at Shrublands, he is quick to start ogling the female clinical staff (Bond’s inability to meet professional women without assessing their desirability is one of his worst traits) and picking a fight with another inmate. There’s coincidence at work here – it’s sheer chance Bond was sent to the same health farm as Count Lippe and that they have simultaneous massage appointments which allow Bond to see the tattoo beneath the Count’s removed watch-strap. But it’s the sort of coincidence that kickstarts an interesting adventure rather than being required to disentangle the plot once it has got hopelessly snarled up, so we can let it pass.
By the time Bond finishes his stay at Shrublands, he has become a complete convert to health foods and started lecturing his secretary about it just like M does. Perversely, Fleming now performs an abrupt volte face on the matter, having Bond’s housekeeper May tearfully inform her employer that he’s ‘not himself’ when eating this stuff.
Next, we arrive at a significant milestone in 007’s adventures, as the reader meets Ernst Stavro Blofeld for the first time. We can’t complain about the introduction being over-casual – in a few pages, we learn almost everything we could possibly want to know about Blofeld. His birthplace and early life, appearance, exact weight, business address in Paris, financial accounts, preferred operating methods and the three different ways he has chosen to eliminate inefficient or treacherous colleagues (so far).
Blofeld’s new project is a plan to steal a British plane (the ‘Vindicator’) with two atomic warheads and hold the ‘Western Powers’ (i.e. Britain, the USA, other European countries at a pinch) to ransom by threatening to blow up first a military installation and then a major city unless SPECTRE are paid £1 million in gold bullion. The budgetary element has not aged well – a point nicely skewered by the first Austin Powers film – but generally Blofeld’s plan is efficient. No wonder it got reused in film after film. The one oddity is that the whole plan is allowed to hinge on a letter which has to be posted by a specific operative on a specific day. Surely there must have been other ways to send a ransom note. Also, SPECTRE apparently have numerous operatives in the UK – why not get one of them to post the letter rather than Count Lippe, after his war of attrition with Bond saw him immobilized with severe burns?
Once the letter is received, all hell breaks loose. Either paying the ransom or not paying it will be disastrous for the ‘Western Powers’, so they concentrate their efforts on searching for the bombs. All the secret services of the West will need to work together, which bodes ill for Bond, never a team player. Fortunately, M has decided to focus on a report of a plane spotted off the American coast, and pursues one of his notorious ‘hunches’ to decide that the target military installation will probably be in the US and that it would be too difficult for SPECTRE to base themselves on the American mainland, so they’re probably in the Bahamas. So he packs off Bond to the Bahamas, with the vague instruction to ‘look around’. Before he goes, Bond tells May to throw away the yogurt etc and make him some scrambled eggs, as he can’t work on all that ‘muck’. “Oh and bring in the drinks tray.”
Before Bond leaves London, a vengeful Count Lippe attempts to eliminate him. Unfortunately for the Count, Blofeld has instructed two of his operatives to eliminate Lippe as a punishment for inefficiency. These two assassination attempts happen simultaneously, leaving Lippe dead but Bond alive. This is a messy business in both senses. We keep being told how brilliantly organized SPECTRE are and that they think of everything, but Count Lippe did not bother to find out anything about Bond or the building he worked at, while the German operatives tasked with taking Lippe out don’t notice that he’s trailing someone with a view to assassinating him. This carelessness extends to Bond too – uncharacteristically, he fails to spot Lippe trailing him from his flat to his workplace and avoids being shot by seconds. Even then, he shrugs off the assassination attempt as probably a hangover from a previous job, as does M. Black marks for everyone all round.
The action moves to the Bahamas, which Fleming presumably knew well, as the Caribbean is his ‘backyard’. We get an unnecessary amount of back-story about Giuseppi Petacchi, the Vindicator pilot who foolishly threw in his lot with SPECTRE and was killed for his pains as soon as he had safely landed the Vindicator in the shallow sea off the Bahamas. We get even more on Emilio Largo, Blofeld’s second in command, in charge of the retrieval and hiding of the atomic warheads, and owner of the Disco Volante yacht. Largo is one of those warmly charismatic, masculine, Mediterranean men Bond is instinctively drawn to, like Darko Kerim in From Russia With Love.
Largo and his associates are in the Bahamas under cover of treasure hunting. While Fleming would have known this was a plausible cover due to the region’s history of pirates targeting Spanish bullion, Largo and his associates go out of their way to court attention with their flashy yacht. As a result, when Bond hits town looking for a large group of men, he is almost immediately directed to the only plausible group on the islands. As in Diamonds Are Forever, he finds his villains at the first cast. These stories are hardly ever whodunits, which is a pity.
Why did Largo bring all the ‘shareholders’ to the yacht? None of them have any active role to play in retrieval of the bombs or the next phase of the operation. A much smaller group would have attracted far less attention.) Also why does Bond specify, in his questions to Our Men In Nassau, that he’s looking for a group of men? He has no reason to know there are no women in SPECTRE. For that matter, why didn’t Blofeld introduce some women into the group to make it look more innocent? In fact there is a woman on board, Domino, something everyone seems to forget until Bond visits the main town and spots her immediately, despite not knowing there’s a woman in the party.
The beautiful girl in the stylish two-seater who captures everyone’s attention must have been a favourite fantasy of Fleming’s as it crops up so often in the books. Dominetta Vitali is Italian, but having decided on this, Fleming instantly seems to forget it again. We learn that Domino was sent to boarding-school in England and then studied acting at RADA, so she talks and behaves like an upper-class English girl. She is also the sister of Giuseppi Petacchi, the dead Vindicator pilot. This is another untidy coincidence – SPECTRE seem to have no idea of the connection and it’s hard to see how it could have come about. It’s only there to give Domino a motive to help Bond and take revenge on Largo and surely Fleming could have thought of something else.
Bond’s attempts to pick Domino up in a cigarette shop are clumsy, but she agrees to go for a drink with him. She proves refreshingly lacking in vanity, explaining that her effect on the local men is only because they’re all so old and she’s the only young woman around. “You’ll probably have the same effect on the old women with pince-nez and blue rinses.”
The USA arrives in the form of Felix Leiter, always welcome as far as I’m concerned because he’s funny and positive despite having plenty of reasons not to be cheerful. He and Bond make a great double-act – I love it when they criticize tourist prices and service on their travels, they should have their own travel show. Here, they dine in the hotel restaurant and grumble about how poor the food is – the book quotes from the menu and you can practically hear Fleming’s loathing of the overblown culinary language and reliance on Capital Letters. Felix thinks the assassination attempt on Bond sounds fishy and suggests Lippe was the operative who was meant to post SPECTRE’s ransom note to the Prime Minister and this is why it was apparently delayed. This is a lightning leap of logic from Felix but it’s a relief that someone has finally figured it out.
As inLive And Let Die, Bond and Leiter decide to start their investigations by checking out their suspects in person and making their interest obvious. They head over to the Disco Volante in the hotel launch and ask to be shown around it, with an unconvincing story about wanting to buy the beach house Largo is renting. Bond follows this up with his favourite ploy of confronting his suspect at the nearest casino and beating him at cards. Domino is also there but it’s an undercooked scene –Largo’s reaction to losing a lot of money to Bond is decidedly reasonable. Domino has a drink with Bond and tells him an imaginary story she has woven about the ‘hero’ illustration on her favourite Players cigarettes. It’s nice that Bond listens to her long story with attention and sympathy – not many of the fictional hard-bitten spies or detectives of his era would do so. To make up for the lack of sparks at the casino, Fleming throws in an underwater scene as Bond decides to inspect the Disco Volante from beneath. (Conveniently she is now in harbour.) He learns nothing from this except that the yacht has an underwater hatch and an armed sentry, but the venture allows for an underwater fight that’s broken up by a large barracuda.
Next day, Bond and Leiter borrow a small plane and go looking for the sunken Vindicator. The drama of the search is undermined by the fact that we already know the bombs have been removed by Largo. The plane is covered by a camouflaging tarpaulin but Bond spots the sharks circling above it, a piece of good detective work from him. There’s a compelling scene in which he dives down to the wrecked plane and finds the cabin full of scrabbling octopi, although it’s a missed opportunity for a dramatic encounter with one.
Finding Giuseppi Petacchi’s body means breaking the news of his death to Domino. Unfortunately, this has to be done at the romantic beach setting Domino has chosen for seduction of Bond and her ploy of having sea urchin spines in her foot which he has to help her remove therefore feels bitter-sweet. Once Domino knows about her brother’s death, she agrees to help Bond by accompanying Largo on the yacht to retrieve the atomic bombs. This is a dangerous job for her and Bond knows it. It’s also a badly-designed plan. Domino says she will come up on deck to signal if the bombs are on board, but stay below if they are not. It doesn’t seem to occur to either her or Bond that someone might prevent her from coming on deck (or force her to do so). And when this plan does indeed go wrong (despite having said she will carry out her task well, Domino makes a complete mess of it), Bond, Leiter and the US nuclear submarine crew that have come to help out all ignore the lack of signal, making it pointless.
The climax of the book is, for me, a disappointment. The moving of the bombs underwater from one craggy rock to another is not a sufficiently dramatic moment – it contrasts badly with, for instance, the climax of Moonraker, which takes place when an actual rocket is being launched and targeting London. There are too many vehicles involved in transporting the bombs around (yachts, undersea sleds, chariots) and it’s hard to keep the details and various geographical locations of Blofeld’s plan in mind. The underwater fight between Largo’s men and the American submarine sailors is underwhelming, with no marine creatures involved, and even the confrontation between Bond and Largo is not particularly interesting – there are no clever uses of props or creatures or ingenious subterfuges. Bond looks to be beaten at the end and Domino saves him by shooting Largo with an underwater spear-gun. The final scene of the book sees Bond in hospital arguing with the doctor and wanting to see Domino but that feels like an anti-climax too. Oh, and Blofeld has got away. Fleming must have already sensed he would want to use him in another book but it’s hard to see why from Thunderball. For me, it remains one of the more disappointing Bond outings, its early promise fizzling out with a plotline that’s both obvious and unconvincing.
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