A very regrettable incident has occurred. A US Moonraker space shuttle, on loan to the British, has disappeared - apparently into thin air. Who has the spacecraft? The Russians? Hugo Drax, multi-millionaire support of the NASA space programme, thinks so. But Commander James Bond knows better.Aided by the beautiful - and efficient - Dr Holly Goodhead, 007 embars on his most dangerous mission yet. Obective: to prevent one of the most insane acts of human destruction ever contemplated. Destination: outer space. The stakes a high. Astronomical even. But only Bond could take the rough so smoothly. Even when he’s out of this world…Not to be confused with the Fleming original, this is the novelisation of the screenplay (which Wood also wrote) - hence the title - and follows the film closely, though it does include some interesting tangents. The James Bond portrayed here is closer to the novels than Sir Roger Moore ever played him and even though this includes the same wit and one-liners as the film, there’s a more gritty atmosphere to it all. The gondola chase is shorter (and has a much more abrupt ending than the bit in St Marks Square and so misses the bloody double-taking pigeon), the boat chase in the Amazon is preceeded by the fact that Bond has endured three days on the boat and we don’t get the scene where Corinne is chased by the dogs (Holly tells Bond about it when they get together in Venice). In fact, the book was written before the filming was shifted to France, since Corinne Dufour (the helicopter pilot who helps Bond and then pays for it) is Trudi Parker here, a Californian Valley-girl (when the production shifted to France, it necessitated the casting of a French actress). Jaws is very differently portrayed, with little of the slapstick - he’s not on the plane at the beginning or the boat in the Amazon, though he’s wet when he pulls Bond from the pool - and a nice touch of melancholy at the end (when he’s finally joined by a girl in the part of the space station that drifts off). Hugo Drax is as good a character as the film would suggest, though he’s clearly not Michael Lonsdale - the novelisation Drax “is a large man with shoulders like an American football player”, a “red head, with plastic surgery scarring on his right temple”, his right ear is badly mangled and his face has a “lopsided look because one eye was larger than the other”. Bond assumes this is because he was injured in the war but it made me wonder why a multi-millionaire hadn’t paid for the plastic surgery to sort it out. I liked the book (I like Wood’s writing, generally), it has a good pace and a nice sensibility about it, but I can see how that might be influenced by my liking the film. As it stands, I enjoyed it and for a fan of the film, I’d say it was very much recommended. Fleming purists, however, might well disagree.
Read this as a 10yo kid not knowing the whole 'book of the film' not the 'film of the book' thing. The plot was a space version of the previous movie the Spy Who Loved Me which only had the rights to use the name, so the plot was itself a submarine remake of Roald Dahl's original You Only Live Twice screenplay. Flemings Moonraker was a England based Police Procedural with Bond transferred to Special Branch to investigate a millionaire building a rocket weapon, this plot was finally used as Gustav Graves and the Icarus satellite in 2002s Die Another Day.
