The Spy Who Loved Me - Softcover

IanFleming

3.4

13,438 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612185533 ISBN 13: 9781612185538

Publisher: Thomas&Mercer, 2012

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Set apart from the other books in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, The Spy Who Loved Me is told from the perspective of a femme fatale in the making––a victim of circumstance with a wounded heart.

Vivienne Michel, a precocious French Canadian raised in the United Kingdom, seems a foreigner in every land. With only a supercharged Vespa and a handful of American dollars, she travels down winding roads into the pine forests of the Adirondacks. After stopping at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court and being coerced into caretaking at the vacant motel for the night, Viv opens the door to two armed mobsters and realizes being a woman alone is no easy task. But when a third stranger shows—a confident Englishman with a keen sense for sizing things up—the tables are turned.

Still reeling in the wake of Operation Thunderball, Bond had planned for his jaunt through the Adirondacks to be a period of rest before his return to Europe. But that all changes when his tire goes flat in front of a certain motel…

The text in this edition has been restored by the Fleming family company Ian Fleming Publications, to reflect the work as it was originally published.

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Product Description:

Vivienne Michel is in trouble. Trying to escape her tangled past, she has run away to the American backwoods, winding up at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court. A far cry from the privileged world she was born to, the motel is also the destination of two hardened killers - the perverse Sol Horror and the deadly Sluggsy Morant. When a coolly charismatic Englishman turns up, Viv, in terrible danger, is not just hopeful, but fascinated. Because he is James Bond, 007; the man she hopes will save her, the spy she hopes will love her . . .

Review:

"I felt the prod of a gun in my back but swung the door wide open ... I had gambled that they wouldn't shoot. They hadn't. Now all depended on the solitary man who stood on the threshold." When James Bond makes his first appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me, the novel is two thirds complete. It is Fleming's most experimental Bond story but one of his most successful, developing characters with a new fullness and constructing an adventure which builds momentum through a series of genuinely thrilling crescendos. We may see comparatively little of Bond himself here but The Spy Who Loved Me reveals more of the man than ever before.

This is the story of Vivienne Michel, a Bond Girl with a difference, whose first-person narration moves through three sections: "Me", describing her childhood, unhappiness and disastrous love affairs; "Them", in which she escapes the past only to find herself caught up in a life-threatening insurance job at the Dreamy Pines Motel Court; and "Him", where Bond enters and the story moves rapidly towards its resolution. There's a mythical quality to James Bond's appearance and disappearance from the action, but Fleming explores his character with great realism, enjoying the freedom to observe his hero objectively.

In many ways this is barely a Bond story at all--the book is firmly in Fleming's gangster tradition and Bond is not even on a mission, just stepping by chance into someone else's nightmare--but The Spy Who Loved Me is nonetheless one of the most exciting and skilful additions to the 007 canon. --Iain Campbell

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