james bond live and let die graphic novel ian fleming

It’s about time they turned out a great criminal (Mr Big).’ But the main part for me that is really cringeworthy is when he writes in the voices of the black characters and he writes their colloquialisms and accents in a phonetic way. He actually bigs up the ‘negro races’ in several places, such as saying ‘And the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s just all done in the casual racism language of the day, which isn’t particularly palatable today, to say the least. Fleming does often seem to say positive things about different races, and for example saying good things about the nightlife in Harlem and the music there etc. I’m sure a lot of it might be described as institutional or casual racism.

There are certainly a tonne of expressions, names, language, and settings in this book that could be called racist today. I’m still wondering if he was particularly racist himself, or if just some his characters were, and/or if he was just using commonplace language used in those un-woke times. I’m still learning what kind of a writer Fleming is. Let’s address the racism issue in Live and Let Die now.I’m sure the pendulum swings more into the misogyny side of things, but I’m interested to see how Fleming handles women in all the rest of the novels. In Moonraker which I’m reading right now, he describes Gala Brand as being able to break Bond’s arm if she so desired. He describes Moneypenny here as ‘all powerful’ and in the first three Bond books he has two female spy characters. But he’s also capable of showing women of power too in different ways. He’s certainly not above sexualising women, and sometimes making them damsels to be rescued by Bond. p13 – ‘The desireable Miss Moneypenny, M’s all powerful private secretary’.

I wonder if it will become a regular tactic in every novel. I quite like that narrative tool that Fleming uses. Again we have a flashback about meeting M.Just little digs about the food, and the fashion, and the colloquial words etc. Bond finds himself in America for the majority of this book, and early on Fleming seems to get in a fair few anti-American digs.I’d only really seen footnotes like that used in comics before. I found it interesting that were was a footnote on p8 referencing the previous novel, Casino Royale.The words ‘negro’ and ‘negress’ were mentioned matter of factly in the first five pages, so it was pretty clear early on the sort of language and descriptions that were going to be used.

James bond live and let die graphic novel ian fleming