Although the title is undoubtedly more famous as the second movie in the James Bond film franchise, From Russia, with Love was originally the fifth novel by author Ian Fleming to feature his Agent 007 character. In bringing Bond to screen, the movie producers had very little concern for translating the work faithfully. The books were tackled out of order, and their plots heavily altered to the point that many of them barely resemble Fleming’s writing.
Despite this, the movie version of From Russia with Love released in 1963 may be one of the closest adaptations from Fleming to film (aside, perhaps, for the comma omitted from the title). In comparing them today, a reader will find many of the most iconic moments from the movie already present on the page, and the general arc of the story structure maintained. Even so, I feel this is a case where the movie improves upon the source.
| Title: | From Russia, with Love |
| Author: | Ian Fleming |
| Originally Published: | 1957 |
| Format: | Softcover Book |
I went through a huge Bond phase in my teenage days and, after marathoning all the movies, tore through all the Ian Fleming novels as well. In more recent years, I’ve periodically made attempts to re-read those books, only to inevitably stall out before getting very far. In my last shot at it, I stopped after the fourth novel, Diamonds Are Forever. That was a full decade ago. I’ve had very little desire to pick up again where I left off, but a hint of OCD in me hates leaving a project uncompleted.
To be blunt about it, Fleming’s books are very tough reads, especially for someone who comes at the James Bond character first as a fan of the movies. The author’s writing is very densely-worded with intricate descriptions of even the most insignificant details about locations the character visits, what he eats there, and how the food or drinks were prepared either for or by him. In some respects, this can make the books charming time capsules looking back to places that no longer exist. The downside to this, unfortunately, is that the stories are often lackadaisically paced and lazily plotted. Where the James Bond movies are action and suspense thrillers, the James Bond novels are more travelogue journals in which Ian Fleming reminisces about his favorite hotels and restaurants around the world, and some of the colorful people he met at them. The adventure elements of Bond’s spy missions come almost as an afterthought.
That sort of thing can certainly have its appeal, but, compounded with a more serious issue I’ll discuss shortly, the adult me finds many of Fleming’s books a slog to read.
First published in 1957 as From Russia, with Love (that comma frequently got dropped from later reprints), the fifth novel finds Agent 007 the target of an elaborate Soviet scheme to humiliate the British Secret Service and take revenge for Bond’s prior interference with Russian assets Le Chiffre (Casino Royale), Kanaga (Live and Let Die), and Drax (Moonraker). The plot is hatched by Kronsteen, a brilliant planner and chess master who can foresee his opponents’ moves well in advance, and Col. Rosa Klebb, the Head of Operations and Executions for SMERSH, the official counter-intelligence and murder branch of the Russian government.
SMERSH was in fact a real spy organization during the Cold War, and a main recurring antagonist for Bond in the book series; the movies chose to replace it with a fictional terrorist group called SPECTRE, which wouldn’t appear in Fleming’s writing until the ninth novel, Thunderball. That may be a pretty significant change off the bat, but in other respects, the later movie version of From Russia with Love tracks pretty well with the book.
To wit: Bond is lured to Istanbul by a pretty Russian agent named Tatiana Romanova, who claims to have fallen in love with him based on photographs and wishes to defect to the West. As dowry, she offers to bring with her an extremely valuable Spektor cryptography decoding machine (renamed a “Lektor” in the movie to avoid confusion with SPECTRE). Bond partners with Kerim Bey, the head of intelligence operations in Turkey, and arranges to sneak Romanova out on the famed Orient Express. The whole time, however, the Russians monitor every action Bond takes, illicitly film his affair with Romanova, and send an intimidating assassin named Red Grant to murder him on the train.
All that plot later wound up in the movie very similar to how Fleming wrote it, including many key scenes that are more-or-less transferred directly from one medium to the other. (Compare that to the movie version of Moonraker, which retains Fleming’s title and a couple character names, but almost nothing else.)
On the other hand, the From Russia with Love movie sells many of the more far-fetched aspects of this story more convincingly than the book does. To be blunt about it, the literary Bond is mostly a terrible spy. Even though he has no reason at all to believe Tatiana’s tale of falling in love with his photos, Bond fully buys into her ridiculous story with no reservations – simply because she’s a pretty girl, and thus couldn’t possibly be capable of deception. Likewise, he misses or willfully ignores countless clues to the true nature of the Russian plot against him. Tatiana herself is similarly a naïve fool, every bit the stereotype of a silly girl with a crush on a handsome man. Meanwhile, masterminds Kronsteen and Klebb make the asinine mistake of putting a real, functioning top-secret decoder into enemy hands, and exert no effort to kill Bond on numerous occasions where he leaves them plenty of opportunity. Fleming provides only the thinnest of excuses for these contrivances.
I get the sense that, in cranking out a new novel every year during his holiday schedule in Jamaica, Ian Fleming didn’t plan his stories out in too much detail before he started writing. His plots feel like he was mostly just winging it, starting with a general idea of what he wanted and then seeing where it took him.
In at least the first few movies before the series got too outlandish, the cinematic James Bond is a lot smarter than this, and his foes less incompetent. By introducing SPECTRE as a third party trying to play the Russians and Brits against one another in order to steal the decoder for themselves, the From Russia with Love film actually tightens up and makes better sense out of the sloppiness of Fleming’s plotting. The movie then also throws in a couple terrific action sequences at the end (involving a helicopter attack and a boat chase) that aren’t in the book at all.
Lest I sound too negative about it, I actually enjoyed this read of From Russia, with Love. The book has a number of evocatively written passages, and certainly concocts a more interesting story than its immediate predecessor, the truly half-assed Diamonds Are Forever. In his fifth novel, Ian Fleming finally seemed to find some footing with the James Bond character. I can understand why this was so popular upon its original publication, to the point that President John F. Kennedy even listed it among his ten favorite books.
Versions of the Novel
The copy of From Russia, with Love I own and read here is a softcover reprint from 2012. Beyond removing the comma from the title (which some prior printings had also done before it), the text of the book is otherwise, to my knowledge, the same as Ian Fleming originally wrote it in 1957.
Should one choose to buy new copies of any of the James Bond books available today, be aware that printings since 2023 have featured “sensitivity revisions” – in other words, censorship. I have very mixed feelings about that.
I’m not a fan of censorship in general, and for my own reading, I prefer to have the original text as it was first published, warts and all. The problem is, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels have a lot of warts. A lot.
In addition to some of his other deficiencies as a writer, Ian Fleming himself was a quite virulent racist, misogynist, and homophobe, and all those attitudes make their way directly (and extensively) into his James Bond stories. Fans who know the character mainly from the movies may be quite shocked to read some of the original books and find, for example, the hero casually tossing around the n-word and expounding at length upon why the Black race is inherently intellectually inferior to the more sophisticated white mind (a theme repeated in almost every chapter of Live and Let Die.)
In that regard, From Russia, with Love is thankfully one of the tamer Ian Fleming novels I’ve read. I suspect that, as his fame and success grew and his audience expanded, the author felt pressured to tone down some of his more controversial thoughts – at least publicly.
Nevertheless, this book contains quite a few lengthy, uncomfortable passages that will be very difficult for a modern reader to get through. Fleming depicts the Rosa Klebb character as a cold and calculating sociopath, which he explicitly links as a consequence of her “sexual neutrality” (i.e. bisexuality). Elsewhere, Bond has a discussion with one of his MI6 superiors, the paymaster named Capt. Troop, in which Troop bemoans the hiring of “intellectuals” in the intelligence services – such intellectuals he also refers to as “long-haired perverts” and makes the argument, “I thought we were all agreed that homosexuals were about the worst security risk there is.” To this, Bond offers no objection, except to bemusedly remind Troop that not all intellectuals are homosexuals, though of course most of them usually are.
The most galling thing about this excerpt is the fact that the entire discussion serves no greater purpose in the story, except as a digression for Fleming to insert his own bigoted views into the material in order to educate readers on the tremendous threat he would have them believe homosexuality poses to national security and world order in general. Fleming’s books overflow with offhand moments like that, be they about race, sexuality, gender, or any topic where he feels the need to assert the superiority of the straight white male over all others.
I haven’t read the revised version of From Russia, with Love, and don’t have any plans to. If I’m going to read any further Ian Fleming novels, I think I’ll want them unfiltered, so that at least I won’t be left wondering how much worse the original versions could be. The books are a product of their time, and should be read in that context. However, it also must be acknowledged that, if these books were being published for the very first time today, any sensible editor would immediately cut all that trash out of them.
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