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Casino, monopolizes five pages to describe, with great detail, the box of Player's cigarettes. This is something quite different from the thirty pages employed in Moonraker to describe the preparations and the development of the bridge party with Sir Hugo Drax; here at least suspense is set up, in a definitely masterly manner, even for those who do not know the rules of bridge. The passage in Thunderball, on the contrary, is an interruption, and it does not seem necessary to characterize the dreaming spirit of Domino by depicting in such an abundance of nuances her tendency to a purposeless 'phenomenology'. |
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It is also 'purposeless' to introduce diamond smuggling in South Africa in Diamonds Are Forever by opening with the description of a scorpion, as though seen through a magnifying glass, enlarged to the size of some prehistoric monster, as the protagonist in a story of life and death at animal level, interrupted by the sudden appearance of a human being who crushes the scorpion. Then the action of the book begins, as though what has gone before represents only the titles, cleverly presented, of a film which then proceeds in a different manner. |
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And even more typical of this technique of the aimless glance is the beginning of From Russia, With Love, where we have a whole page of virtuosity exercised upon the body, death-like in its immobility, of a man lying by the side of a swimming pool being explored pore by pore, hair by hair, by a blue and green dragonfly. As soon as the author has infused the scene with a subtle sense of death, the man moves and frightens away the dragonfly. The man moves because he is alive and is about to be massaged. The fact that lying on the ground he seems dead has no relevance to the purpose of the narrative that follows. |
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Fleming abounds in such passages of high technical skill which makes us see what he is describing, with a relish for the inessential, and which the narrative mechanism of the plot not only does not require but actually rejects. When the story reaches its fundamental action (the basic "moves" enumerated in an earlier section), the technique of the aimless glance is decisively abandoned. The moments of descriptive reflection, particularly attractive because they are sustained by polished and effective language, seem to sustain the poles of Luxury and Planning, whereas those of rash action express the moments of Discomfort and of Chance. |
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Thus the opposition of the two techniques (or the technique of this opposition of styles) is not accidental. If Fleming's technique were to interrupt the suspense of a vital action, such as frogmen swimming towards a mortal challenge, to linger over descriptions of submarine fauna and coral formations, it would be like the ingenuous technique of Salgari, who is capable of abandoning his heroes when they stumble over a great root of Sequoia during their pursuit in order to describe the origins, properties, and distribution of the Sequoia on the North American continent. |
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