Toyt own Express
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. By Ian Fleming. (Cape, 12s. 6d.) WE all think that we could write a good thriller if we tried; and when, four years ago, Mr. Fleming published his first one it was I generally taken to be a flash in the pan. A forked flash, perhaps, and a pan from Vatel's batterie; but not something that would become as regular as Encke's comet. Well, we were mistaken. Punctual himself, Mr. Fleming is source of punctuality in others; and he now has a large public, for whom spring perusals are as important as spring migrations are for others. What is it that draws them? Partly, of course, the sheer excitement which Mr. Fleming makes us feel in spite of our better, or more solemn, selves. Outwardly no swot, he gets up his subjects so thoroughly that we end by feeling that we too could play bridge for £150 a hundred, break a man's pelvis with, the back of our hand, or combat a sea-monster five fathoms below the surface. But there is more to it than that. In Diamonds Are Forever, he invests an 1870 wood-burning locomotive with his own brand of lunatic poetry; and when at last the over-heated veteran comes pounding along the track in pursuit of the heroine, we feel against all reason that a noble animal is somehow being outraged. It is our affection that Mr. Fleming engages; and he does it by consistently going beyond ridicule—identifying himself with his subject in such a passion of sympathy that only the most meagre of natures could fail to respond. No parodist himself (even I was not deceived by what purports to be an American sports article on pp. 97-101) he defies parody in others by going farther in all seriousness than anyone else would go in fun. Laugh on the wrong pages and he'll hose the grin off your face.
His novels are romances, really : not thrillers at all. His hero, James Bond, fulfils every male fantasy known to me (except Stendhal's most curious requirement). But the real romance is not with the attainable dream-girl (discovered, this time, half-naked in what looks like the Strand Palace Hotel) but with the United States of America. In fact I'm not sure that 'evangelical' is not the word for this aspect of his fictions, and when he takes us, in this one, to Saratoga for an early morning gallop the voice woos as compellingly as Billy Graham's and the message is 'You'd like this, too. Try it.'
And that's what I'd like to say of the book. JOHN RUSSELL
Previous page
