It’s really quite affecting, and more graphic than previous novels. It’s a completely new dynamic on sex for Fleming, shedding any fantasy or romanticism, and committing to Viv’s embarrassment and vulnerability.

In a very uncomfortable chapter, the two are discovered at the cinema in a compromising position and so travel to a local meadow instead. She falls in love with Derek but it becomes clear he’s only interested in her for sex and she reluctantly agrees to relinquish her virginity. The plot is near non-existent but there are flashes of character that build Viv into a sympathetic individual, the primary aim of the first third of the novel. In the early chapters Viv details her teenage years as a French Canadian who moves to England to go to finishing school before getting a job working for a newspaper. And despite being from Viv’s perspective, Fleming can’t drop the military similes and metaphors despite them not fitting the character, from “wild maples flamed here and there like shrapnel-bursts” to the “gun-metal surface of the lake”. The Bond of the early novels in the series would make for a good contrast of personality with Vivienne but he has grown increasingly melodramatic in recent outings, notably Thunderball, and there is surprisingly little distinction between the two at times. Fleming also uses a very different writing style, swapping his crisp, clear prose for long sentences filled with remembered tangents. She’s probably the best-realised female character in a Bond novel, as she should be considering Fleming keeps her the sole point-of-view character for all 200 pages. The novel’s narrator is Vivienne Michel, a 23-year-old wayward, independent, and somewhat melancholic woman. As it concludes it becomes apparent the novel fails dramatically at its initial goal but the sheer attempt at doing something so different keeps The Spy Who Loved Me immensely readable throughout despite its baffling nature. The purpose of The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be to correct the image of Bond in popular culture, to show him again as a dangerous cold man to be wary of rather than treat as a classical hero. The secret agent himself doesn’t appear until 120 pages in. The writer interrupts his SPECTRE trilogy to deliver a tale told in the first person by a young woman who has a brief but memorable encounter with James Bond one dark and stormy night. The slight novel, barely 200 pages, is a true oddity in Fleming’s canon an experiment that went awry. He blocked a paperback edition being published during his lifetime and refused to let the plot be adapted into a film, only the title could be used.

Ian Fleming doesn’t want you to read The Spy Who Loved Me.

The spy who loved me novel