Books: Of Human Bondage

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (211 pp.)—Ian Fleming—Viking ($3.95).

Among the shocks and disappointments 1962 still has in store for President John F. Kennedy and many thousands of other unsuspecting people is the discovery that the cruel, handsome, scarred face of James Bond does not turn up until more than halfway through Ian Fleming's latest book. They will look in vain for the familiar early scene in the eighth-floor office on Regent's Park where the taciturn M re-lights his pipe and hands Bond his latest assignation with Death and the Maiden.

And that is not all they will miss; unaccountably lacking in The Spy Who Loved Me are the High-Stake Gambling Scene, the Meal-Ordering Scene, the Torture Scene, the battleship-grey Bentley, and Blades Club.

But these lapses are understandable after all—Fleming is not the author. As he archly explains in a foreword, he found the manuscript on his desk one morning—"the first-person story of a young woman, evidently beautiful and not unskilled in the arts of love," who was involved "both perilously and romantically with the same James Bond whose secret-service exploits I myself have written from time to time."

The Dreamy Pines. Vivienne Michel is her name. Motel receptionist is her game—at least when Bond meets her. The first half of the book is a detailed flashback to explain how Miss Michel happened to find herself one dark and stormy night in a deserted motel between Lake George and Glens Falls, N.Y. "I was running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love affairs . . ." Vivienne goes on at some length about the love affairs. The most recent was Kurt, a West German newspaperman, who made love with West German industry and efficiency until she, with English inefficiency, got pregnant. After an abortion in Zurich she bought a Vespa, some saucy fur-lined goggles, and "a rather dashing pair of black kid motorcycling gloves," then set out to work and scooter her way down the U.S. coast to Florida.

And so to The Dreamy Pines Motor Court, where two hoods called Sluggsy and Horror find Vivienne all alone in her black velvet toreador pants ("with the rather indecent gold zip down the seat"). They behave tastelessly ("Okay, Horror. Let her go. This is for me"). Enter, at long last, the man with the white scar on his left cheek. "I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness. Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right."

Rather Cold Passion. She is all right, of course, with Bond beside her in a blaze of bullets and burning motel.