elsewhere: bondage. secretarial bondage.

[iainpj]

It's wrong of me to snicker at the fact that the title of this entry is going to produce some really spectacular false drops, isn't it? Ah, well. Never said I was nice.

Media Relations: bondage. secretarial bondage.

The Moneypenny Diaries
by "Kate Westbrook" (Samantha Weinberg)
volume 1 (London: John Murray, 2005, published in Britain with subtitle "Guardian Angel"; New York:Thomas Dunne/St Martins Press, 2008)
volume 2: The Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant (London: John Murray, 2006)
volume 3: The Moneypenny Diaries: Final Fling (London: John Murray, 2008

So, you always wondered what Miss Moneypenny got up to while James Bond was off saving the world, right? After all, she couldn't have been waiting there for James to come back and flirt with her again, no matter how the movies made things look. Well, with The Moneypenny Diaries, we finally get to find out...

[...] Weinberg also illuminates some points of Bond history that either I'd never read in the books or had completely forgotten. For example, it turns out that "James Bond" is a use name for MI6; the most effective agent gets that name on their promotion to the 00- unit. (I wouldn't be surprised if, over time, the 007 call sign winds up permanently linked to the "James Bond" house name.) It also turns out that, very briefly, Bond had a number in addition to 007, because he was administrative head of the 00 unit. It didn't last long; shortly after that promotion, he went to Japan and got involved in the "You Only Live Twice" mess. Getting brainwashed, it turns out, tends to result in demotion. Fleming's books -- though apparently not the films -- also exist in that reality, as a sort of version of James Bond's diaries transcribed by Fleming. "James Bond", in one of those oddly ironic moments, winds up outliving Moneypenny, and we even meet him as part of the story. Very technically, we aren't meant to know that at the time -- Westbrook certainly doesn't -- but honestly, it feels very anvillicious. That said, I don't know if it was more obvious to me because I read the entire series over two weeks; if I'd read it over three years, as originally released, some of the clues might have been less apparent....

Comments

[columbina.livejournal.com]

The bit about Bond being a house name is not in Fleming, it's a retcon; however, it's an excellent retcon and it is one that the filmmakers have reportedly toyed with using to explain casting changes (especially since the Bonds tend to start out young, get older, and then suddenly become young again. Given that the operational span of a 00 is very short as such - there's a bit at the beginning of Moonraker where Bond speculates on the number of tough cases he'll still have to do before changing to a desk job - this explanation, that there are many "James Bond"s, becomes even more attractive.

Are those Moneypenny books any good?

[iainpj.livejournal.com]

The bit about Bond being a house name is not in Fleming

Ah, good. I didn't think it was, but it's been so long since I read them that I wasn't absolutely sure. The copyright on the books is held by Ian Fleming Publications, Ltd., and not Weinberg herself -- and I would imagine that they went over things very carefully, since her references were the books and not the films -- so I'd think that they accept the small changes to canon that she makes.

In the Moneypenny Diaries, what she says is that they somehow "wipe clean" a 00-agent's background and give him a new name. In theory, if an agent retires or resigns, they get their name back and some explanation for where they've been all that time. In practice, I'm not certain, but I think it turns out that Bond is actually the only one of his group of 00-agents to survive to retirement.

Are those Moneypenny books any good?

Hmph. I see you're no better at following links than anyone else. But yes, they are. Not quite as intense as I remember the Bond books being, and the spy plot for the Westbrook character is quite misguided, but still a good read.

There must be a fair amount of information about the operational aspects of MI6 out there; the operational and administrative arrangement of the 00 section looks very like the arrangement of the Minder section in Greg Rucka's Queen and Country series, with the exception of the number of agents. (There are four minders, compared with nine 00 agents. Minder 4 tends to get killed off rather a lot.)