The increased level of violence as a key factor in Amis' Colonel Sun (1968)?

What are your thoughts on the uncharacteristically violent nature of Colonel Sun by Robert Markham, as a James Bond novel?

Did Kingsley Amis (or Robert Markham) go too far in the CR and LALD direction, do you think?

This level of violence - rape/skewering/stabbing/burning/head torture etc. - was it a step too far for a James Bond novel or do you think it fitted in with the works of Ian Fleming?

There are characters brutally stabbed to death, skewered with wooden skewers, almost burnt alive, raped, and Colonel Sun is stabbed by Bond twice in the back and then partially blown up by his own mortar bomb and finally given the coup de grace by a knife slid into his heart by Bond, after he has apologised for the head torture that he had just inflicted upon him and that he was a mad fool to quote Le Sade etc.. I think the violence in this Bond novel is certainly more graphic than those by Ian Fleming. It's also quite a different death scene for a villaion here, with Sun calling Bond "James", rather like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. This is indeed appropriate as Colonel Sun sits very much with the more brutal and violent James Bond early novels like Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever and Dr. No.

I'm currently writing a lengthy article on this aspect of the first James Bond continuation novel, entitled 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun'. Watch my blog space, The Bondologist Blog, for when it features there, soon.

I read Colonel Sun about 6-7 years ago, but don't recall finding the violence standing out so much more than in most of Fleming's novels. Casino Royale and Live and Let Die definitely set a strong precedent for the tortures Bond goes through on his missions. Now, I did find the Colonel Sun character very interesting - not a typical Fleming villain, more politicized and real. The story itself is also unusual, given the limited setting of the second half.

I wish Amis would've written another one or two continuation novels... Colonel Sun is worthy of being in the "canon."

Any further interest on this one at all?

Yeah I'm re-reading Colonel Sun right now and I can't say as the violence strikes me as any more than any other Fleming book. Man with the Golden Gun has a magnificently gory ending, You Only Live Twice is also very violent. There are long portions of Colonel Sun, on the other hand, with very little violence at all it seemed to me. Lots of hanging around on that boat talking politics.

No, it didn't strike me as out of place at all, especially considering that the YOLT movie had just come out with it's ninja-assault-on-volcano-lair climax so I'm sure there was some pressure on Amis to up the action content.

As usual I think you're grasping at straws with this one. Amis knew his Fleming very well and I think the level of violence is more or less typical of the original Bond novels -- if there's perhaps more of it I think it may be because CS has a fairly simplistic plot, otherwise.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

Yeah I'm re-reading Colonel Sun right now and I can't say as the violence strikes me as any more than any other Fleming book. Man with the Golden Gun has a magnificently gory ending, You Only Live Twice is also very violent. There are long portions of Colonel Sun, on the other hand, with very little violence at all it seemed to me. Lots of hanging around on that boat talking politics.

No, it didn't strike me as out of place at all, especially considering that the YOLT movie had just come out with it's ninja-assault-on-volcano-lair climax so I'm sure there was some pressure on Amis to up the action content.

As usual I think you're grasping at straws with this one. Amis knew his Fleming very well and I think the level of violence is more or less typical of the original Bond novels -- if there's perhaps more of it I think it may be because CS has a fairly simplistic plot, otherwise.

Thanks for your input.

But do I really always come across as if I'm grasping at straws on BaB with my posts?

I'd be glad if you could explain a little further what you mean by this, F-S.

Just mean to say that you are always trying to draw connections and conclusions in odd places seemingly out of nowhere. A little apophenic, perhaps. Rather than discuss a novel on its own terms you'll invent terms to discuss it, usually in the context of writing an essay for your blog on the subject. Like, for a hypothetical instance, wondering if perhaps the novels of Jacqueline Susan were inspired by Fleming's Spy Who Loved Me.

As for Colonel Sun, maybe it is more violent but I cant say it seemed out of place because it was still violence that fit into the paradigm of Fleming's style. As to why it's more violent I would say that between 1964 and 1968 everything got more violent. Movies, TV, the news. It was more part of people's experience in their media than it had been when Fleming died.

I just want to make clear that I in no way use this forum as an extension of my blog; that said I like to sometimes get a barometer of fan opinion sometimes to see how near or wide of the mark I happen to be on a given subject. I'm sorry indeed if my views come across as mere muddling. Perhaps it's just that I see things others don't and comment on them. This is the raison d'etre of The Bondologist Blog. It's a webspace dedicated to all of the arcane and esoteric aspects of the literary and cinematic James Bond, and beyond.

Certainly. Fair enough.

I think it's fair to say that the violent aspects of Colonel Sun result from a combination of the increasingly violent nature of late-60s action/adventure media as well as a need to fill out a plot which otherwise has little going on in the way of events. That said, I don't think it comes across as inconsistent with the style and amount of violence in Fleming's tales.

One of the finest commentaries on America's loss of innocence in the 60s and the increasing brutality of the era is Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 debut TARGETS.

'68 in particular being a rough year of course.

The greatest mystery to me about Colonel Sun is the damned first edition cover art. I've seen other books with art by Tom Adams that are far less inexplicable. Who thought "Dali-esque" was a good image for Bond, even in 1968?

I actually quite like the Dali-esque cover of Colonel Sun. I think it has the right mix of Bondian bizarre elements.

Largo's Shark wrote:

One of the finest commentaries on America's loss of innocence in the 60s and the increasing brutality of the era is Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 debut TARGETS.

Thanks for making me aware of that film; I'd not heard of it until now, it shames me to say. I need to get a copy and watch it pronto!

I see that there are many .pdf files on the increases in violence in various types of media since the 1960s, so some mention of this would seem to be required in my article, 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun'.

While I don't think the violence in Colonel Sun is much more marked than any Fleming Bond, I have read others commenting on it being the turning point for Amis becoming a conservative. Yet because it was written in the spirit of Fleming, Amis could claim they weren't his own views, merely Bond's or Ian's.

Perhaps looking at the work in the wider context of Martin Amis's oeuvre?

Largo's Shark wrote:

While I don't think the violence in Colonel Sun is much more marked than any Fleming Bond, I have read others commenting on it being the turning point for Amis becoming a conservative. Yet because it was written in the spirit of Fleming, Amis could claim they weren't his own views, merely Bond's or Ian's.

Perhaps looking at the work in the wider context of Martin Amis's oeuvre?

Thank you, LS. Yes, Amis switched from (former Communist) to Socialist to Tory voter around this time, hence his Colonel Sun being described as "fascist" writing in some critical quarters. I find the death scene of the eponymous Colonel Sun himself to be a rather drawn-out affair and I make reference to this in my article, which is still in the works (had the idea as far back as 2008 in my notebook). I think that this follows along the dark path of the similar drawn out death scene of a certain Francisco Scaramanga (compared also to the film "clean kill" death scene of Scaramanga) in Fleming's last Bond novel The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which as we all know came just directly before Amis' Colonel Sun, so perhaps Fleming himself started this progression towards more violent ends for the Big Bad towards the end of his reign as Bond's creator.

Yes that's sort've what I meant originally. Scaramanga's death is very gory and drawn out and so reading things in order it doesnt seem like too much of a leap.

There's almost a breaking down of Colonel Sun's character there, too, isn't there, where he apologises to Bond for the torture just before Bond slides the knife through his heart and he becomes doll-like in death. I think that this is one of the best and most interesting villain deaths in the Bond series; it recalls Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye the film too. This is why 'The Strange Death of Colonel Sun' does need to be written, and does need some time well spent over it, too. 5 years is about long enough as a gestation period, I think, though, so it will feature on The Bondologist Blog soonish.

Largo's Shark wrote:

One of the finest commentaries on America's loss of innocence in the 60s and the increasing brutality of the era is Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 debut TARGETS.

Could you provide any other examples of increased violence in film, novels, TV, theatre etc, LS. I am most fascinated in this area.

This is very interesting and it a;lso ended in 1968 which seemed to be a key year for the end of the stricter forms of censorship in film.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

--Dragonpol.