Flandry And Bond On Women

At the end of his second novel, Dominic Flandry makes a judgement about women whereas, at the end of his first novel, James Bond makes a judgement about one woman, having expressed himself about women earlier. In both cases, the judgement arises from the duplicity of Intelligence work. When Flandry suggests that Djana join Naval Intelligence, maybe even becoming a double agent in the Roidhunate, she sees this as yet another man trying to use her and puts her distinctive kind of psychic curse on him. Flandry concludes:

"Women! The aliens among us!"

-Poul Anderson, A Circus Of Hells (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 193-365 AT p. 365.

Bond would have proposed to Vesper Lynd and maybe resigned from MI6. However, she commits suicide, leaving a letter telling him that she has been a double agent for the Russians. He resolves to remain in the Service in order to track down SMERSH and phones HQ:

"'This is 007 speaking. This is an open line. It's an emergency. Can you hear me? Pass this on at once. 3030 was a double, working for Redland.

"'Yes, dammit, I said "was". The bitch is dead now.'"

-Casino Royale, CHAPTER 27, p. 189.

Aliens; the bitch.

It has been good to reread a novel from cover to cover, to pick out several single sentences or short passages for comment and comparison and to illustrate these posts with notable book covers. We may have completed Flandry-Bond comparisons for a while.