Masaryk university

57

187are important both to the plot and to the atmosphere, and they are crucial to the dynamism of the stories. Their meetings also provided an opportunity for expressing values and establishing the ethical status of the main figures and their characters. Fantasy plays also a very important role in spy novel stories. The world described in the novels is depicted with a rich fantasy. There was mostly an excitement about luxury cars, boats, planes, machines, air travel, sea travel, luxury clothes, jewellery or exotic drinks. Bond lives in welfare fantasy, free from daily worries about salaries, mortgages, debts, pays and far from the worries of common people. He was created as a timeless cosmopolitan man. Dramatic and scenic development of a story is an important feature in the settings of Bond´s ta le s. Surrounding plays also a very important role in the story. Mountains are useful and popular element in the setting as well as the element of underwater. Both take the reader or viewer where he or she will rarely get an opportunity to be. Both provide the chance for hazardous surprising adventures. In contrast to mountains there has been relatively little use of forests, although one was used for example in Dr. No and Drax´s Brazilian base in Moonraker in deepest Amazonia. There are also urban elements in Diamonds Are Forever. Animals, especially sharks are other equivalent. Sharks play important role in many of the stories, they feature evil and terror. The first story with underwater plot occurred in Thunderball and it was also for the first time when the golden grotto sharks were used by a villain to kill somebody. Sharks also play a major role in Never Say Never Again and in License to Kill The villain of Moonraker, Sir Hugo Drax plans to destroy London. The pace of the stor y is set by the pre parati on for the roc ket ´s launch. Bond has to save the city. The plot was really apocalyptic. The novel Moonraker connected together the two different issues, the Nazis and the Soviet. Drax works for the latter, but he was also a Nazi. Drax was wealthy but simultaneously he was an outsider. He constructed a nuclear rocket. The story played with the idea that the Great Britain could develop the new progressive technology to overcome the economic and military status of the superpowers. Drax´s Nazi origi ns and his scheme for a rocket att ack on London gives an interesti ng theme. Fleming did not use class enemies for his villains. The ordinary people were not

187 Black,Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. p. 169-173

58

188heroes. They lacked great wealth, evil, megalomaniacal greediness, they could not be the villains. Fleming was not interested in common daily people. Drax is shown as cruel and arrogant. He is also sadist with perversive elements. Bond in contrast to Drax is presented as a gentleman. Drax is also without any girlfriend. “ Fleming also represented a widely held fear of Germany as the eternal enemy (Drax - Nazi origin). In the early 1950s, the British were less enthusiastic than the Americans about rearming the West Germans and integrating them into NATO, although they overcome their doubts in order to please their allies. Drax maybe also represented broader concerns about the survival of Nazism. For Fleming the past was not dead. Moonraker was the most British of the Bond novels, as far as setting and context are conce rne d. The set ting in Kent re flect ed Fleming´s knowledge of the count y but shows the significance of the White Cliffs of Dover for Great Britain. There was a sense that in Kent, Grea t Brit ain was most exposed”. 189 What is int eresting, in Brit ain Fleming´s for ei gn vill ains used first of al l foreign servants and employees. Drax used Germans, Goldfinger Koreans, Dr. No employed Chinese-Negroes. In fourth Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming chose a foreign setting and depicted a menace to Great Britain. The subject was the richest smuggling operation in the world, but diamonds were stolen. This theft provided opportunities for villains as for making money and threatening British interest. Apart from other villains, this villain was created and shaped in a bit different way, because he is not dominant. There was no megalomania features either. Diamonds Are Forever lacked also a real focus as a place. The used and described places of a story Saratoga and Springs and Las Vegas were either well realized or presented, the same it is with London or New York. What was apparent in the story, the plot lacked also menace. Bond´s enemy in From Russia, With Love was Soviet power. The novel featured current public interest in East West espionage. These interests arouse from the outbreak of the Cold War. The plot in From Russia, With Love gave Fleming an opportunity to use his knowledge on the Cold War. Fleming demonstrated an extremely anti Soviet position in the novel. The use of Istanbul presented the reality of a location of East West intelligence operations and described Istanbul as a exotic place of the world. In a way of

188 Black,Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. p. 23

59

190Istanbul description there is a similarity to the world of Eric Ambler (The Mask of Demetrius) than of Deight on´s Berlin (The Funeral in Berlin). Dr. No was a novel about a discovery of conspiracy. “Rockets were a major issue in 1957 when Fleming was writing the book. The Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit that year. Dr. No is in partnership with the Soviet Union and he prepares to negotiate with China.” 191 Goldfinger, the novel was put in the period of the Cold War. The Cold War is strongly here present, as in a sense of America under threat. Figure of Goldfinger was personally disordered. He was a Balt with possible Jewish blood. “ Bond feels, due to his shor t man´s int eri orit y co mple x “Napole on had been sho rt, and Hitler as well. It was the short men that caused all the troubl e in the world” .

191 Black,Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2005. p. 37-38

60

7.The books with spy plot
Bond is what every man would like to be and what every

woman would like to have between her steets. Raymond Chandler192

193 7.1. Casino Royal Ian Fleming wrote this novel at the age of 44 in Jamaica, where he built his house, Golden Eye. Casino Royal was finished on 18 March 1952. The whole book is divided into 27 chapter and each chapter bears its own title. In this book Ian Fleming for the first time introduced a story of his secret agent 007 called James Bond, charming, sophiscated, handsome spy licensed to kill. This novel, like the other early Bond works, was a novel of the Cold War produced in the shadow and fading effects of World War II. The plot of Casino Royale introduced the world of the casino and its linking to the British Secret Service. One of the main figures, Le Chiffre, was an individual who paid the Communist-controlled trade union in France. The trade union was presented as an important fifth column in the war with so called “Redland”, the Sovie t Union. “ Le Chiffre financed also communist spies.

194Th e Paymaster will fix the fun ds . I´m go ing to as k the Deuxieme to stand by. It´s their territory and as it is we sh all be lucky if they do n´t kick up rough. I will try an d persuade them to send Math is. You seemed to get o n well wit h him in Monte Carlo on tha t oth er Casino job. And I ´m going to tell Wa shington because o f the NATO angle. CIA have got one or two good men at Fontainebleau with the joint intelligence chaps there.

Fifty million francs of trade union funds were proposed to win at baccarat at the casino in Royale-les-Eaux, a fictional spa. Le Chiffre´s made this plan to wreck their

192193 Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2002. p. 020. Ousby, Ian.: Op.,cit. p. 356 Casino Royal (novel) Wikipedia \free Encyclopedia. 10 December 2009