Licence to intoxicate - book extract from Henry Chancellor

The Australian (newspaper) has printed another excerpt of Henry Chancellor's new book on James Bond works of Ian Fleming.

For the record, the James Bond of the books (in total contrast to the Bond of the films) not only does not enjoy killing people, he does not actually kill that many of them. Over the course of 14 books he accounts for a mere 38 deaths, plus one shared with a shark.

In addition to this there are 70-odd others when nuclear installations blow up or cars tumble down mountainsides, but none of these fatalities is by Bond's own hand.

James Bond's moments of doubt and regret - "the deathwatch beetle of the soul" - afflict him with a regularity that is just enough to keep him human, but his true nature is revealed when he falls asleep: "With the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold."

It is a quality recognised by his friends and admired by his enemies.

Bond may have looked the nasty type, but he is in essence a 1950s off-the-shelf attractive man. Contemporary Bond fans would have had no trouble imagining what he looked like, as James Bond was everywhere.

Advertisements for suits, whisky, cars, cigarettes all showed a tall, dark man with comic-book good looks, whose muscular frame looked good in a single-breasted suit. In films this type was Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper: a type of male omnipresent before the '60s introduction of the skinny rock star.

What Ian Fleming added to this standard saturnine male was a dangerous coldness (note the scars: this man likes fighting) and a solitary, enigmatic nature.

Kingsley Amis, writing in the early '60s, identified Bond as the natural successor to Heathcliff and Mr Rochester: a kind of Byronic hero who is out of sorts with the world.

One of the best-known charms of the screen James Bond is his dry and rather obvious wit. The one-liners, so memorably associated with the movies, are conspicuously lacking from the novels, where Bond appears to have no sense of humour. When the critics complained that Bond was too serious, Fleming was in no doubt that he had to be, as he firmly believed that irony and satire were not appropriate weapons for the thriller writer.

The original James Bond is a man who struggles to be tough and his body bears all the marks of his trade. When he strides down the beach he looks as if he has been in the wars, the scars from various knife fights standing out pale against his bronzed skin.

And as the series goes on, Bond becomes more preoccupied with how many more head-stampings and testicle-beatings he can take.

He knows that his licence to kill will be revoked when he reaches the age of 45, which is always just around the corner, and then he will either have to leave the service or put up with a desk job, to which he is patently unsuited.

His future is never resolved, but Bond feels the threat of accidie, the torpor of the soft life, almost as keenly as the threat of a violent and painful death that lurks at the end of every assignment. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make bored," says 007.

At the beginning of Thunderball (1961) Bond is in such a bad way that M sends him to a health farm to purge the poisons in his system. Bond's medical report demands it.

"When not engaged upon strenuous duty," it reads, "the officer's daily consumption of alcohol is in the region of half a bottle of spirits of between sixty and seventy proof. On examination, there continues to be little definite sign of deterioration. The tongue is furred. The blood pressure a little raised at 160/90. The liver is not palpable. On the other hand, when pressed, the officer admits to frequent occipital headaches and there is a spasm in the trapezius muscles and so-called fibrostis nodules can be felt.

"I believe these symptoms are due to the officer's mode of life. He is not responsive to the suggestion that over-indulgence is no remedy for the tensions inherent in his professional calling and can only result in the creation of a toxic state which could finally have the effect of reducing his fitness as an officer. I recommend 007 should take it easy for two to three weeks on a more abstemious regime."

Half a bottle of spirits a day was not considered excessive at the time and even M, the head of the books' British Secret Intelligence Service, is forced to admit that Bond does have "a head like a rock".

Before taking on Drax at bridge in Moonraker, Bond consumes a vodka martini, then a carafe of pre-war Wolfschmidt vodka from Riga, then a bottle of 1946 Dom Perignon champagne. He wants to appear drunk to trick Drax into betting unwisely on his hand. To keep his wits about him in the ensuing card game he adds his own ingredient: Benzedrine, or racemic amphetamine sulphate, prescribed as a stimulant and an antidepressant.

Edited extract from James Bond: The Man and his World by Henry Chancellor (John Murray, $39.95 AUD)

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