The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 10 December 2008
by Ian Fleming
It's fairly soon after World War 2, soon enough that a big group of German engineers working on a flashy new project building an ICBM raises eyebrows in the British secret service. Normally, agent 007, James Bond, doesn't get to work on domestic missions, but since there are so many foreigners on the project and this missile is so high-profile, he is going to work as a security agent for the project's leader, eccentric and mysterious millionaire Sir Hugo Drax. It is hard to imagine a world in which a nation becomes collectively excited about the test firing of a weapon of war, but it is here portrayed as a singular point of national pride. The Moonraker can reach far into Europe from the white chalk cliffs of Dover. The test firing is a sensitive moment for the country, as people wait with excitement for the flight far above the atmosphere and the harmless splash in the North Sea. And yet the first third of this novel is taken up with a game of bridge. It is a peculiarity of British fiction in the middle of the 20th century that detailed descriptions of bridge games often appear. If you don't play bridge, this narrative could grow tiring. Fleming manages to keep these passages just short of skippable. Anyway, Hugo Drax is cheating at cards at a local gentlemen's club. M. asks Bond to figure out Drax's method of cheating. Elsewhere, on that same night, a murder-suicide occurs among the people working on the Moonraker. And this is how Bond gets caught up in Drax's intrigue. Fleming capitalizes on avant garde Cold War issues of Russian meddling, while interweaving still-fresh memories of Nazi brutality in the recent war. What is Drax up to? Is the precious Moonraker in danger? It goes without saying that the intrigue will grow increasingly tense as the book progresses. Bond teams up with Gala Brand, a pretty agent working undercover as Drax's secretary. Together, they try to foil the sinister plot behind this great national moment, the launch of the Moonraker's first test flight. The book is dripping with the usual assumptions of the spy genre, the noble and lonely hero, his access to great decadence described in succulent detail, the women described the same way, the extreme bashing the hero and heroine endure by the end. But, if you come to Moonraker from the 1979 movie of the same name, you'll find the book isn't much like the film at all. Also, if you're new to Fleming's books, you'll find the gadgetry fetish of the movies is almost missing, and that the hero doesn't always get the sexy girl. The book also makes reference to the proverbial suitcase bomb, which makes the reader wonder. After fifty years, we are still shaking our heads at military priorities that don't seem to anticipate this particular potential terror disaster?