The British Bond with Tea
As everybody knows the British love their tea. And what 20th century fictional character is quite as globally recognizable as representing the British than James Bond? Which makes the imagery devoted to this collision of English stereotypes all the more striking. James Bond, it appears, does not just refuse to partake in the British tea ritual, he rejects in on account loathing and despising the beverage which he describes—if only to himself—as:
“that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses”
Blofeld
Blofeld is the recipient of a healthy heaping of imagery used for the purpose of physical description. This imagery is telling enough in itself and gives an insightful view into the man beneath the flesh, but with the publication of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service a few years later takes on a much greater significance. By that point in the future, Blofeld has so radically altered his appearance that what is described in this novel no longer even applies:
“…no sign of debauchery, illness, or old age on the large, white, bland face under the square, wiry black crew-cut. The jaw line…showed decision and independence. Only the mouth, under a heavy, squat nose, marred what might have been the face of a philosopher or a scientist. Proud and thin, like a badly healed wound, the compressed, dark lips, capable only of false, ugly smiles, suggested contempt, tyranny, and cruelty---but to an almost Shakespearian degree.”
Sea Lessons
One of the highlights of any Bond novel is the sequence where 007 fends off potential death at the hands—or, rather, teeth—of a barracuda. As he is doing so, his mind quickly reels through the lessons he’s learned about how to protect himself in the alien environment of the sea. The imagery is as ruthless terrifying as it is relentlessly informative:
“The first rule was not to panic, to be unafraid. Fear communicates itself to fish as it does to dogs and horses. Establish a quiet pattern of behavior and stick to it. Don't show confusion or act chaotically. In the sea, untidiness, ragged behavior, mean that the possible victim is out of control, vulnerable. So keep to a rhythm. A thrashing fish is everyone's prey. A crab or a shell thrown upside down by a wave is offering its underside to a hundred enemies. A fish on its side is a dead fish. Bond trudged rhythmically on, exuding immunity.”
Plan Omega
Operation Thunderball is the western intelligence community’s plan to respond to Plan Omega which is the nefarious plot by SPECTRE to use two stolen nuclear bombs for blackmail for an enormous ransom under threat of detonating the bombs over two large cities. Plan Omega sounds pretty complicated and, indeed, the carrying out of it is quite complicated, but surprisingly, the actual meat and potatoes of their plan is surprisingly easy to explain through imagery. Which Bond’s boss M does:
“…the nose is full of ordinary T.N.T. with the plutonium in the tail…they would need a man with good physics knowledge who understood the thing, but then all he'd have to do would be to unscrew the nose cone on the bomb…and fix on some kind of time fuse that would ignite the T.N.T. without it being dropped. That would set the thing off. And it's not a very bulky affair. You could get the whole thing into something only about twice the size of a big golf bag. Very heavy, of course. But you could put it into the back of a big car, for instance, and just run the car into a town and leave it parked with the time fuse switched on”
