The story is far from a typical Bond adventure filled with guns, girls, and megalomaniacal villains bent on world domination, and there isn't a single character with a ludicrous name like Auric Goldfinger, Pussy Galore, or I. P. Freely.
As the story begins, 007 has just finished a routine operation which is described matter-of-factly in one paragraph on the second page. Bond is in Nassau, dutifully chatting with the Governor after a tedious dinner party, when he makes a flippant remark about marrying an air hostess, i.e. a stewardess. That prompts the Governor to tell the story of an old friend who did indeed marry an air hostess, with tragic results.
Between puffs on his cigar, the Governor delivers a surprisingly poignant tale which shows how even the gentlest of people can become cruel and vindictive when pushed too far. But how far is too far? That's where the title comes into play.
Here's how the Governor describes it to Bond:
You're not married, but I think it's the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good.
Well, duh.
The Governor goes on to call this the Law of the Quantum Of Solace, meaning that as long as you offer the other person a glimmer of hope, or a quantum of solace, then there's a chance the marriage will survive.
Fleming seems overly proud of himself for giving a simple concept such a grandiose title, and he even has Bond say that it's "a splendid name for it" before giving his own thoughts on the theory.
I still stand by the claim that Quantum Of Solace is a terrible name for a James Bond movie, and I don't think it was a very good title for a short story either. It reeks of a pulp fiction writer getting all pretentious and trying to prove that he could have been taken seriously as an author if that was what he'd wanted.
The thing is, when Fleming isn't patting himself on the back for that title, he actually manages to tell a very compelling human drama with a nice little twist at the end. Hopefully the movie pulls off the same trick and manages to be a good film with a bad title, but if any character in the movie uses the title in a line of dialogue, I'll most likely puke up my popcorn.
Another intriguing aspect of the story is that Fleming seems to be re-examining his own career path in this passage after Bond has heard the Governor's entire story:
Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure strip in a cheap newspaper.
And later still:
He reflected on the conference he would be having in the morning with the Coastguards and the FBI in Miami. The prospect, which had previously interested, even excited him, was now edged with boredom and futility.
Fleming seems to be wondering if he's wasted his life writing adventure tales without much emotional resonance or insight into the human condition.
I think there's always a time and a place for escapism, and I grew up on James Bond movies and novels, and even obsessed over the role-playing game for a while, but as I got older I became more interested in realistic human dramas, and it seems as though Fleming was feeling the same way.
Not counting Thunderball, which was developed from a screenplay that Fleming had been collaborating on for years, the next Bond novel published after Quantum Of Solace was The Spy Who Loved Me, which was also radically different from typical Bond fare. It was considered a failure, both critically and financially, and I remember hating it when I read it years ago, but it's interesting to see how Fleming was stretching himself, perhaps reflecting the same soul-searching expressed in that short story whose name I can't bear to type yet again.
Fleming then wrote several more successful Bond novels that stuck to the formula, but he hadn't completely given up on the idea of pushing himself because he also wrote the children's book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was published in 1964, the same year he died.
Who knows what other directions his work might have gone in if he had lived, but hopefully the writing of a successful children's book that had nothing to do with Bond gave a dying man a quantum of... nope, I'm so not going there.
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