Journeys End in Lovers Meeting
O apostrophe mine, where are you roaming?
Mr Gardner has moved on from Disney to Shakespeare. We reach the end of GoldenEye’s festival of Bond, twelfth night of a sort, and the Clown shall surely sing:
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
(She naturally fled, from this charming man)
O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming
That can sing both high and low;
(His ABBA medley is… open to challenge)
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—
(Told you there was an apostrophe. Chapter should be called “The Edge of Apostrophe ” )
Every wise man’s son doth know.
(She’s closer to his son’s age, so this is a solid hypothesis)
What is love?
(Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more)
’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
(Not here)
What’s to come is still unsure:
(The Brosnan Quartet - the Brosnan QuarTat - never do find their feet, do they?)
In delay there lies no plenty,—
(In the next 25 years there will only be 8 more Bond films)
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,
(Sweet-and-fifteen)
Youth’s a stuff will not endure
(…and is no guarantee of innovation, which GoldenEye confirms)
A story that commenced with suspect geography, all that dam-and-gorge malarkey, ends with suspect geography: I still don’t understand how the lake works. This observed, Mr Gardner is giving verisimilitude one last all, describing every rivet, cable and wire as Bond hauls himself around the dish. My patience is thinner than Mr Brosnan’s stunt double.
Natalya runs into “the protection of the jungle” – O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? – and well away from the impending scene of two late middle-aged men manhandling each other around a massive erection.
I owe that Pierce Brosnan a long-overdue apology. To act Bond’s observation - “Some went directly down, through the maintenance chamber and from there into what could only be the true mechanism for repositioning the antenna, yet there seemed to be another set of thicker cables. These went over a series of pulleys and wheels” – yet make it look like none of that is actually crossing his mind for one second, demands enviable talent.
The antenna is a big needle / icicle shaped thingy, which is a departure from the film. Guess where it ends up. Another villain doomed by their own design, and I’m curious whether Mr Gardner will try a “pierce” joke within the few paragraphs still left to him, paragraphs he is currently filling with architectural detail whilst the characters assume their final positions.
“From far below, he still caught the sound of occasional explosions coming from deep within the earth beyond the dish.” No, the lake is beyond the dish.
Isn’t it?
Is this dish what-not still invisible to satellite surveillance, then? If it was the Russians who put it there, are they not now the teensiest bit curious why it’s suddenly emerged? If not the Russians, are they not now the teensiest bit curious about what happened to that lake in Cuba and, for that matter, where all the water went and why there’s a huge satellite dish suddenly nailed into a Cuban forest as if it were a council estate? Moonraker may be (gloriously) stupid but at least they acknowledged that there had to be a radar jamming system. Quite why, once the dish emerges, a rain of fire doesn’t immediately descend upon it, is curious. They probably didn’t have the budget to do it.
“…Trevelyan’s men kept their eyes on this danger point, as though trying to divine the moment when they would have to give up and evacuate the complex.” I’ll take the use of “divine” as John guessing that when the roof gives way, it’ll be water. He doesn’t know either. He doesn’t care to know; he has cables and wires and machinery to tell us about instead. John is happy.
“[Trevelyan] was away and running towards the exit, pushing firefighters out of the way, heading for the cable car that would take him as far as the catwalk above the maintenance room”. So the cable car starts in the underground/water base and… probably best to abandon any attempt to work it out. When did the fire brigade arrive? There’s no indication any of these guards etc are Russians. Who are all these folk, anyway?
The maintenance room in which Bond finds himself bears close similarity to how Natalya described it – how shockingly lucky – and Ken Spoon potters about for a few hundred words, wondering how the mechanism works. Again, Mr Brosnan is able to exude all that in one split-second glance. Depth. John prefers breadth, giving unto us lengthy business about dismantling a mine and deactivating its timing device and… something. I gave up.
Ah, the lovers meet. They fight. That’s less engaging than cogs and microchips and generators, so John hastily cuts away from that lest it becomes interesting, and back to Boris “down under the earth”, which is a) wishful thinking and b) not true and he must really have drowned by now. “ ‘Yes! I am invincible!’ “. Hopefully not.
The fighting having been brief, John’s now manoeuvred Bond back into the safe space of describing “maintenance room”, “mechanism”, “fuse box”, “cables”, “apex of the structure” and other exciting things that will really sell 007 to da kids. Seems it’s all coming down to finding the fuse box, which reminds me I need to replace the bulb in the downstairs loo. “Outside, he looked down and dropped, landing on the housing that he knew contained the final stage of the mechanism.” He doesn’t know this. Far more about-flingery in the book, Ken Spoon leaping around this latticed metal structure as if he’s in Casino Royale. Which he’s not. The fuse box has “butterfly bolts.” The fuse box has had more description than most of the book’s characters. There is safety in inanimate things.
Still uncertain what Bond’s plan is, here. He’s ninety feet above the dish and has planted a mine and now smashed all the fuses, so he’s going to be blowing up with it and either burning or falling or both. Denied the slightly visceral thrill of Bond and Trevelyan actually fighting – one of the film’s most engaging bits – and Bond using the dropping ladder as a means of avoiding being shot, here he just… uses it.
“Below ground….” debateable “…in the control complex, Boris stared unbelievingly at the screen which now read out…” … with Alan Cumming. “He began to scream and stamp, yelling unintelligible obscenities.” Natural reaction.
John doesn’t have Trevelyan fall because he is distracted by the helicopter and Natalya, nor the subsequent grabbing of his leg by Bond: here, he falls because a rung gives way. Tchoh! Cuban builders. Nor is there any of the lively debate about whether Bond’s next action is For England or For Me (very Boris), instead a simple invitation to “Go to hell!”, which seems a bit impersonal but then it is impersonal to drop a former boyfriend quite so literally.
At this point the mine explodes, which strikes one as perilous. Things go bang in the film just after the helicopter rescues Bond; here, the helicopter flies into the explosion, which seems unwise. The helicopter pilot “…was acting under her instructions, which, because of the skeletal edifice they were approaching, were not always practical.” I’ve no idea what this is means other than the girl-child is forcing him to fly into a burning structure and he wishes to express reservations about his working conditions.
“In the centre of the dish, Trevelyan regained consciousness. His eyes opened and the pain that swept over him, combined with the blood in his mouth, told him that he was near death. “ Or near an Alan Cumming performance, which is going on somewhere beneath him, as it is indeed beneath us all. The “long silver spike” does impale Trevelyan. Half of everything is luck, and half of everything is avoidable means of your own destruction. Quite a bit of impaling in the Brosnans – Trevelyan, Carver, Renard, Zao – as if they were pushing at the “pierce” idea without ever making it too blatant a joke. Film suggests the collapse of the superstructure goes into the base, as it did in Severnaya. Foggier, here. Also foggy is the fate of all that money he’s already stolen. Questionable succession planning.
“For a second, Boris knew what was happening…” No basis for a system of accountable government, that. Still: not invincible. Ah, hope remains.
Natalya decides to bark orders at the pilot in Russian, despite there being no evidence of any Russians in the vicinity. As with the film, this helicopter just… flies off. Despite the imminent arrival of three American ones. From a height. Silently. In Cuba. Yeah. And the “forty or so marines” who have been having a nice lie-down rather than provide any meaningful assistance. Jack Wade rises from the bushes, and it’s not the first time he’s hidden himself like that, to spy on youthery.
“Bond needed no backup at this particular time.” You wouldn’t want Wade and forty marines to join in; poor, poor girl. She is never mentioned again. And…that’s it. The Clown shall surely sing.
End credits
Spare yourself the song; it’s vile.
As a point of reflection, and given that GoldenEye wants to have been a reflective exercise, one does wonder quite why one has picked this 25 year-old novelisation apart in such a churlish and bloated manner.
Underlying it is, I think, a recognition that I won’t read this book again. I read it twenty-five years ago. I read it now. Another twenty-five years and I’ll be lucky to read anything other than a prescription, or yet another eulogy for yet another family member. That’s it. One of those life events now spent and not returning. That is to blame it for my frailties rather than those it possesses, a projection activity rather than any intrinsic blameworthiness. In the only life I will ever live, this has been part of it and that leaves me irrationally angry. An irritation that something like this absorbed any of my time. That I have wasted yours, however, restores hollow glee, for like any bully that is how I get my wobblies.
Yet…
The tone not just of what I’ve written but what I have read, is weirdly discordant. Time allows a reflection on GoldenEye’s place in the Bond series, its status as a stand-alone mid-franchise pause for commentary rather than a straightforward continuation. Where the film’s approach to the self-regard is optimistic, aiming to refresh, there’s a sourness, dourness and peevishness of spirit in the novelisation that makes for a fascinatingly uncertain duality. Janus, indeed. Fascinating to me: I suspect you got bored long ago.
Going back to GoldenEye when the superficially appealing novelty has long worn off, the film amuses, and I’ve become considerably fonder of it the more I have written this, because it’s so overtly trying to entertain me. The book, though, is so off-message in how it delivers the same overall picture, and I’m of the view that’s no accident, that its lasting impression of investing a plainly jaded approach to the written Bond into the new and shiny product, designing a fatal weakness into one’s lovely new Death Star, was never going to be a terribly wise strategy. That does give the book an edge, but it’s a precipice I too easily leap from in the pursuit of a fleeting sneer. Generating my darker gut instincts, I’m not sure it’s been a very good idea to read it.
I won’t be doing so again.
The film I may yet dip into once or twice, in time, as it does seem a more optimistic enterprise. The book?
Let it burn.
No longer my concern.
James Bond will return in Tomorrow Never Dies, liberated from the clutches of the old and charging into the future. Ken Spoon, split now from his host at the candle’s last flicker, will return in the 007th Chapter of COLD, and if you thought this one ended bleakly, brace yourself. Jacques Stewart wasted time; now time doth waste him.