Having finished Casino Royale, I decided to carry on with the Bond books for a while and see how they panned out. Having been such a fan of the films for so long, I thought I really ought to see what inspired them.

I’ve read a few before: Diamonds are Forever and You Only Live Twice years ago while I was working at Thorpe Park, but I remember very little of them. So, I’ve been keen to see how close they were to the film versions.

Which brings us to Thunderball.

The basic plot is the same. Spectre has hijacked an RAF jet, murdered the crew and stolen two atomic bombs. They then proceed to hold the world to ransom, demanding £100,000,000 for the safe return of the weapons. The main baddy is called Largo, and his girlfriend is Domino, just like in the film (or films, I should say, as this book was re-filmed in 1983 as Never Say Never Again - a dreadful Bond immitation, with Kim Basinger as a floppy and unconvincing femme fatale). Blofeld is the head of Spectre - again, as he was in the films.

The back of the book, though, would have been more accurate if it had been reviewing Thunderball the film, rather than Thunderball the work of literature. ‘Hair-raising underwater battles,’ it promises, but in actual fact the battles, such as they are, amount to a small one-on-one skirmish beneath Largo’s boat, and then a brief scene at the very end, from which Bond quickly departs, taking the reader with him. All very disappointing.

What you notice about these books when you read them now, though, as they approach their 45th birthday (Thunderball was written in 1961), is how much more leisurely they are than a modern thriller. There are long, weaving tracts in which little happens, and character descriptions can run to a page or more. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not actually bad. In fact, it’s quite good, as it’s so relaxing, but I can’t believe many publishers would take them seriously if they were submitted for publication now.

Perhaps the strength is in the plot, though. It has aged well, and still seems relevant today:

Bond reached in his pocket for another cigarette. It couldn’t be, yet it was so. Just what his Service and all the other intelligence services in the world had been expecting to happen. The anonymous little man in the raincoat with the heavy suitcase - or golf bag, if you like. The left luggage office, the parked car, the clump of bushes in a park in the centre of a big town. And there was no answer to it. In a few years’ time, if the experts were right, there would be even less answer to it. Every tin-pot little nation would be making atomic bombs in their backyards, so to speak… This was the first blackmail case. Unless Spectre was stopped, the word would get round and soon every criminal scientist with a chemical set and some scrap iron would be doing it. If they couldn’t be stopped in time there would be nothing for it but to pay up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.