Your Bond is No Good

[Gregg]

I loved the Bond books whenI read them starting when I was 12 or 13. In the last year, while I was recovering from my accident I re-read some of them, from Casino Royale through Live and Let Die and I was kind of shocked both at how openly racist they seem by today's standards and how the writing does seem for lack of a better term, simple. They're good for what they are and a great read for young people who need to discover recreational reading, but they're nothing compared to Tom Clancy for instance.
I hardly ever read fiction and haven't since I was a teen,but thanks to Commander Bond I always love a good spy novel.

[notorial dissent]

I will say in the Bond book's defense, that they were and are truly and purely a product of the era they were written and published in and of the mind set of the man who wrote them who grew up during the English Raj in a privileged very wealthy upper class family with all the mental sets that entailed. He pretty much lived his life that way as well. I always wondered why he wrote such utter dreck when he really had lived a life during the war of such activity that would have made much more entertaining reading I always thought. The only three things I can put it down to were the mentality times, what would have sold then, and most probably general laziness. Beyond that it has always puzzled me. I have to agree that Clancy in general has him beat in many directions, although I am not sure that he would have sold then, literary taste being what it is. The only other thing that I have never understood is Bond having the rank of Commander. I just cannot come up with any way that with the mind set and quite frankly class system of the time that he would ever have gotten an officer's commission let alone that rank. That I just never have seen.

[martin123]

I absolutely agree with you!

[operabuff]

I'm not sure that there's any mystery to Bond's rank. Unlike the actor who first played him, he did not come from the lower class. His parents had money. He attended Eton (although sent down). He was in the Royal Naval Reserves in WWII, a time when promotions were relatively easy to come by.

I'll confess that I enjoyed reading Clancy's novels, but I certainly wouldn't rate him above Fleming as a writer (probably below.) I had to laugh years ago when a colleague (at the IRS, to bring this closer to being on topic) said that he did not enjoy the movie version of Hunt for Red October because it lacked the depth of character present in the book. I'm afraid I thought Clancy's characters rather wooden. Clancy's strengths were his plotting and his display of apparently encyclopedic knowledge regarding military matters, not his prose.

[martin123]

remarkable!

[wserra]

martin123 adds a commercial sig that's (a) size=1 and (b) transparent, making it all but invisible to eyes - but not to search engines. Bye, martin.

I'm tempted to do my own SEO with jerkoffs like this, perhaps together with a site like the Fogbow: publish lists of the deadbeat companies that advertise on someone else's dime. Problem is, guys who do this are charter members of the "the only bad publicity is no publicity" school. Publishing their names for any reason may be doing them a favor.

[notorial dissent]

Depriving them of a) money and b) attention is far more painful and fulfilling. However, complaining to their ISP for spamming works wonders too.