I have just finished re-reading Thunderball by Ian Fleming.  It was Fleming’s eighth full-length novel to feature secret agent, 007, James Bond, and was published by Jonathan Cape in 1961, a year before the first James Bond film––Dr No––was produced.

I wonder how many people can come to a Fleming novel these days without having previously seen the film version?  I know I can’t.  I think that I must have seen every James Bond film long before I read its Fleming original.  Which is something that I now rue.  Although, I recognise that my responses were different when I first read the books.  That would have been the late 1980s.  Late-teens, early-twenties.  Connery, Lazenby and Moore all history; Timothy Dalton the present incumbent.  At that time, I remember reading both Moonraker and The Man with the Golden Gun and being slightly outraged that they were nothing like the films; naively––I was still a gawkish teen, remember––to the book’s detriment.  Nowadays, they are the two books of the series that I can re-read most contentedly, in my attempt to read Bond unsullied by the movies.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love the Bond movies.  But… the books.  The books are different.  Not even necessarily better, but decidedly different.  Take my two examples: Moonraker and The Man with the Golden Gun.  I would argue that Moonraker the book is far superior to Moonraker the movie.  On the other hand, the film of The Man with the Golden Gun is great entertainment, whereas the book…?  Let’s just say, it is… different.

And what of my re-reading of Thunderball?  Filmed in 1965 as the fourth Bond movie, and only four years after the publication of the book, and one year after the death of Ian Fleming himself, the plot of the book and the film are relatively close.  Actor Adolfo Celi makes for a convincing Emilio Largo; the technology has not greatly advanced in the interim between book and film––an obvious issue with Moonraker––and, indeed, the film, arguably, deals more credibly with the rather inexplicable coincidence in the book of Giuseppe Petacchi’s sister, Domino, being resident on Largo’s yacht.  But…

I would still like to be able to read the book without a constant frame-by-frame recollection of the film at the back of my mind.  The faces of Sean Connery and Claudine Auger; the scene where Bond sucks sea-urchin poison out of Domino’s foot; the final, large-scale, underwater fight sequence.

A Bond virgin.  Not Miss Moneypenny, but that now rare person who read the novels pre-1962 and the advent of the first film; that contemporary person who has never seen the long catalogue of Bonds on celluloid––Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig.  Do they exist?  How can I recapture that state of blissful ignorance?

It is too late.  There is no going back.  I cannot escape my memories.  The best I can do is to re-read Moonraker, and hope that it is never remade more faithfully on film.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow wonders if his inherent unsuitability makes him a shoe-in to play the next on-screen Bond.