Quote:
Originally Posted by Bêthberry
An interesting comparison. Fleming's books have sold "over a 100 million copies worldwide", if Wiki is to be trusted. It's been years, nay decades, since I read any of them, but I don't recall that they are particularly well written--certainly Bond does not come near the complexity and quality of George Smiley and I at least was never motivated to reread them--an effect quite different from that of reading Tolkien.
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Uncannily enough, I am in the midst of re-reading my Fleming-written Bond books for the first time in many years. I have just begun
From Russia With Love, going in chronological order.
It may come as no surprise that I quite like the books, preferring them to the films. Bond is more "human" in the books to me, making mistakes and such, and the silly gadgetry is much more subtle. Still, I wouldn't exactly call them
realistic.
I read somewhere that works like the Bond books are to men as the Gothic romances are to many women: escapist adventure that makes few demands on the reader. In that way they are quite dissimilar to Tolkien's works, which present the reader not only with characters who have depth and sometimes enigmatic motivations, but with moral and philosophical questions that engage the mind.
Those qualities are difficult to translate to a film, where one is under a time-crunch to hook the viewer and conclude the film as neatly as possible. For Bond, that isn't a big deal. For Gandalf, it's a different ball game.