Forging Ahead

Much as I've enjoyed rereading some of the novels on my shelves recently it struck me as being a bit overly inward-looking. With that stricture in mind I popped into the library at work yesterday and came out with three titles intended as reading (of fiction) for the next couple of months. Not necessarily in order of merit they are: Conrad's Chance, Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid and Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love. (To be honest, they are in descending order of merit, but you're not allowed to say that sort of elitist thing these days. I'm hoping the brackets will save me from general opprobrium on social media. That and the fact that my readership remains helpfully low in number.)

I made a start on Fleming's fifth Bond outing and, I must say, it's a stormer. Vastly superior to Casino Royale, the first in the series, which I borrowed from the library some time back. There were signs of fine writing in Casino Royale, but also a lot of clumsiness and downright uncertainty. However, I've just finished the first part of From Russia with Love, which is set almost entirely in Russia as the dastardly plot against Bond is worked out and the writing is uniformly excellent. Not that I'm claiming it's got the subtlety of John le Carre - Fleming is writing in-your-face popular fiction; but he's writing it as well as it can be written.

I'd cite as evidence the brilliant first chapter, in which nothing much happens except a somewhat unpleasantly tough and mysterious chap getting a massage at a poolside from an attractive young lady. There's a vaguely sexual undertone to the description, but nothing overt - which later turns out to be important in terms of the characterisation of the chap, a Smersh assassin - but far more significant is the explicit yet unrealised sense of menace. Fleming conveys this in the slightest details. I said he wasn't subtle, but how about: To take the small things first: his hair.? I love that colon (the only one in the whole of Part 1 if I'm not wrong) beautifully suggesting the slight hesitation of the unnamed masseuse as she assesses her client's body in a detached, deliberately distanced, fearful fashion.  As I said, nothing happens, but you just have to read on. 

I should add, by the by, that I'm mixing my reading of Fleming with the very chunky Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid. I've dipped into Reid's selection often but I've decided it's time to go cover to cover. Hughes's spelling is something to wonder at, by the way. I suppose when you're a genius you can afford not to care about the conventions we ordinary humans have to follow but TH couldn't be bothered even before anyone knew he was officially the real thing. Though even the very earliest pre-Cambridge letters explode with something very like genius.