Moonraker (novel) - Characters and Themes

Characters and Themes

According to continuation Bond author Raymond Benson, Moonraker is a deeper and more introspective book, which allows Fleming to develop the characters further and so Bond "becomes something more than a cardboard figure" than he had been in previous two novels. The start of the book concentrates on Bond at home and his daily routines, which were largely modelled on Fleming's own.

As with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and Mr. Big in Live and Let Die, Moonraker involved the idea of the "traitor within". Drax, real name Graf Hugo von der Drache, is a "megalomaniac German Nazi who masquerades as an English gentleman"; his assistant, Krebbs, bears the same name as Hitler's last Chief of Staff. In using a German as the novel's main enemy, "Fleming ... exploits another British cultural antipathy of the 1950s. Germans, in the wake of World War II, made another easy and obvious target for bad press." Moonraker uses two of the foes feared by Fleming, the Nazis and the Soviets, with Drax being German and working for the Soviets; in Moonraker the Soviets were hostile and provided not just the atomic bomb, but support and logistics to Drax.

Moonraker played on fears of the audiences of the 1950s of rocket attacks from overseas, fears grounded in the use of the V-2 rocket by the Nazis during World War II. The story takes the threat one stage further, with a rocket based on English soil, aimed at London and "the end of British invulnerability".