The Moonraker Tweets
by Eric Stroud
March 2023
Eric Stroud whiles away a long weekend with the audiobook of Ian Fleming’s third novel—and live-tweets his increasingly-bemused reactions.
7:01 28 Jan 23 Listening to Moonraker at the moment. Incredible stuff. 1955 Fleming makes Andrew Tate sound like Peter Tatchell
7:01 28 Jan 23 The millionaire must be dodgy because he cheats at cards
Shortly after finishing Moonraker, I read the excellent Love and Let Die by John Higgs. Higgs points out that Bond only likes the kind of sports where he doesn’t have to compete with the working classes. The bad guy, Drax – ‘Sir Hugo’, NB – is supposedly a working-class boy made good, so obviously has to be put in his place at the bridge table.
7:03 28 Jan 23 Trying to make the private members' club, Blades, sound classy, Fleming tells us it has a direct line to Ladbrokes
7:09 28 Jan 23 We've learnt that James Bond's car can go 100mph. A five-year-old wrote this
7:26 28 Jan 23 I don't mind 'frayed at the edges' as a euphemism for tipsy
7:32 28 Jan 23 ‘The best English cooking is the best in the world.’
Higgs alleges that Bond’s need to have the best of everything stems from a pathological need to believe that the best people can identify the best in everything. Bond is basically ‘The Princess and the Pea’.
7:33 28 Jan 23 Bond has just stirred some Benzedrine into his Champagne
7:52 28 Jan 23 Wake me up when they've finished playing cards
8:05 28 Jan 23 Credit where credit’s due: Fleming tells us what Bond earns right at the outset, so we have a reasonable handle on what other amounts of money mean to him
9:28 28 Jan 23 Bond has just read an article about the introduction of metal detectors at airports. He is concerned that this will make it harder to smuggle his gun through customs. I expect this will become pertinent later
Reader, it did not.
6:46 29 Jan 23 Moonraker turns out to be a missile rather than a space rocket
6:46 29 Jan 23 I'm starting to think they're not going to go into space
6:47 29 Jan 23 A woman's breasts turn out to be ‘as splendid as Bond had guessed from the measurements on her record sheet’
6:59 29 Jan 23 We're getting hints here and there that Drax is secretly German
Higgs points out that Drax, like almost all of Fleming’s villains, actually has dual heritage. You wonder how widespread this prejudice was among Fleming’s class and generation.
7:21 29 Jan 23 Bond reads The Express a lot
8:49 29 Jan 23 The most surprising thing – especially compared with the film – is how parochial it is. Never mind space: Bond isn't leaving Kent!
9:55 29 Jan 23 Something in the early descriptions of Drax reminded me of things that Evelyn Waugh says about Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited. This made me wonder if Waugh and Fleming read/knew each other
They were mates apparently, and Waugh stayed with Fleming at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica
4:55 30 Jan 23 We've been told that (sexy Special Brancher and brilliant scientist) Galatea ‘Gala’ Brand is an expert in jiu-jitsu, but she is very easily overpowered by a pipsqueak
4:56 30 Jan 23 Bond only kisses his secretary on her birthday, at Christmas, and when there is something dangerous to be done
5:18 30 Jan 23 Good car chase. That's where Fleming earns his money
5:26 30 Jan 23 *¡Spoiler!* Drax is indeed a German. The big reveal is slightly undermined by the fact that his staff have been openly German all this time
5:31 30 Jan 23 P.S. He hates being called a ‘Kraut’
5:35 30 Jan 23 P.P.S. He’s also into monologuing
6:16 30 Jan 23 I'm not sure the plot makes loads of sense. Drax, an industrialist and secret Nazi, develops a state-of-the-art rocket with the help of the British government. He has secretly armed it with an atomic warhead, and plans to divert it towards London on its maiden flight
6:22 30 Jan 23 But here's the thing: if you're in Dover with an atomic warhead, you don't need a missile to get it to London; you barely need a lorry. The hard part is getting the warhead. This has been supplied by the Soviets, with whom Drax is quite happy to collude, despite his Nazism
6:24 30 Jan 23 ... and the fact that they have laid waste to and occupied his country. His whole motivation is antipathy towards Britain, but he's happy enough to forgive the Russians
6:27 30 Jan 23 My point is that the titular Moonraker is completely incidental to the plot
17:58 30 Jan 23 When Bond discovers this dastardly scheme, his first instinct is to try to blow up the rocket on the launchpad, killing himself in the process. Very courageous and all – but Gala points out that they can just redirect it into the North Sea
17:59 30 Jan 23 Drax is escaping by submarine at the time. You'll never guess what the rocket hits
18:20 30 Jan 23 I thought it was interesting how Bond cites Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ (‘The boy stood on the burning deck...’), and says that he wanted to copy him since he was five. You have to wonder if the writers of No Time to Die were thinking of that
It can’t be irrelevant that Fleming’s father was killed at the Battle of the Somme.
5:05 31 Jan 23 The last chapter is well written, Bond reflecting on the destruction that might have been, and then losing out to a man called Vivian
5:07 31 Jan 23 Actually, a lot of innocent people do die after all. I'm not sure this would have happened so casually in the film version. Proximity to the Second World War?
5:21 31 Jan 23 There are plenty of older authors you might read today with roughly the same intentions as the original readership – but surely not Fleming? It's hard to imagine reading him as anything other than a historical document or a curiosity
5:31 31 Jan 23 It's a trivial point, but worth remembering, that Fleming was writing the Bond books without the Bond books as a prototype. Before you dismiss him, you have to remember he invented a grammar that is inescapable across espionage, action-adventure and superhero films
5:32 31 Jan 23 You wouldn't fly in a Wright Brothers plane now; but Ian Fleming walked so that Lee Child could run
