Bonding with James - a look at the literary canon
30-Jan-2006 • Literary
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He's one of the more peculiar heroes of our times. Sure, James Bond is brave, handsome and debonair, drives excellent cars, travels to exotic locations on a generous expense account and nearly always gets the girl.
Most men want to be him, most women want to bed him.
But Agent 007 also is a heavy drinker, deeply misogynist, wracked by self-doubt, pernickety to the extreme about what he wears and puts in his mouth and subject to regular bouts of bizarre torture sessions. And, gasp, he smokes!
For more than 50 years, Bond, James Bond, has been the subject of intense fascination, the most recognisable fictional secret agent the world has seen.
Despite several parodies, including the hugely successful Austin Powers films, the agent with a licence to kill retains his power.
A number of recently released books shine some welcome light on this very English secret agent, and the man who created him. The most notable of them is Henry Chancellor's excellent James Bond: The Man and his World, suitably subtitled The Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation.
Adopting Lewis Carroll's timeless advice, Chancellor begins at the beginning: February 17, 1952.
On that day, Ian Fleming, a 43-year-old journalist, was sitting at his desk at Goldeneye, his holiday house in Jamaica, trying to take his mind off his imminent wedding.
Chancellor brings the scene to life: "He had already swum to the reef that morning, as was his habit, before breakfasting on his usual scrambled eggs and Blue Mountain coffee. Somewhere out in the garden, Ann Rothermere, his wife-to-be, was painting a watercolour of flowers.
"The sound of the waves and the birds filtered up into the room. After putting a fresh sheet of paper into the roller of the battered Royal portable in front of him, with six fingers he typed out the words 'Scent and smoke and sweat hit the taste buds with a thwack at three o'clock in the morning'."
Two tweaks later, Fleming had his opening sentence to Casino Royale â "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are naus eating at three in the morning" â and by lunchtime he had written 2000 words.
By March 18 he had finished the manuscript and it was published the following year, despite some initial protestations by Fleming, who claimed he had just dashed it off using half his brain and that it was really "a dreadful oafish opus".
He didn't really believe that, and neither did the critics nor, more importantly, the reading public.
"The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards," reads an early review of Fleming's work.
No wonder it became an instant success.
For the next 12 years Fleming would build on his reputation, returning to Goldeneye each January and leaving in March with another Bond adventure under his belt.
Bond first captured the attention of the British, as you would expect, with his fictional account of a competent secret service saving the world. It was far preferable to the truth, as the likes of Philby and Blunt later demonstrated.
The US caught up quickly after president John F. Kennedy told Time Life magazine in 1961 that From Russia With Love was in his personal top 10 books of all time. Movies followed, some critically acclaimed, and continue to be churned out despite the inconvenient fact that Fleming died in 1964.
He was influenced by the movie adventures of his spy, but the humour seen on screen, taken to increasingly silly lengths during the Roger Moore era, rarely surfaces in Fleming's fiction.
Indeed the cinematic James Bond, Sean Connery excepted, is quite a different creature from that found in the pages of the original books.
All this is history and much of it well known. If Chancellor had simply reheated the facts his book would be a bore, but he hasn't.
He delves deep into the life of Fleming and his fictional alter ego and comes up with a story that is interesting and highly readable.
The similarities between Fleming and Bond are striking.
Both had unhappy childhoods. Fleming lost his father early and endured the horrors of English boarding schools. Bond was orphaned early and also had his share of beatings and awful food.
Perhaps as a result, they liked inflicting pain. Bond constantly threatens to spank women. Fleming followed through, with consent from his partners.
The author and his creation shared a disdain for the opposite sex, treating them appallingly but having no trouble finding willing bed partners.
Both men married late in life. Fleming married Ann because she was pregnant and he lived to regret it. Theirs was an unhappy union and both cheated on each other.
Bond, who would have been aged in his 40s at the time, married Tracy Di Vicenzo, but she was killed just hours later by Ernst Blofeld. It wouldn't have lasted anyway, but Bond was heartbroken.
Their differences are even more startling. While Bond led a precarious existence in the field, his life constantly endangered by megalomaniacal villains intent on torturing and killing him, Fleming's experience in espionage was limited to a desk job at the Department of Naval Intelligence during World War II. It was an excellent position in which to glean tales of derring-do, but not one that risked life and limb.
Chancellor devotes a chapter to Bond's famously fussy taste in food and beverages.
Fleming liked his food simple, but shared with Bond a particular fondness for eggs. He would eat them at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and was known to have ordered scrambled eggs at Lutece, one of the most expensive restaurants in New York at the time.
Bond, on the other hand, would be more inclined to order caviar with plenty of toast, followed by very small tournedos, underdone, with Bernaise sauce, and a coeur d'artichaut, washed down with Taittinger Blanc de Brut, 1943.
Fleming made it his business to know of such things, collecting menus during his wide-ranging travels, and picking the brains of fastidious friends who knew all about charmingly obscure and resolutely exclusive fripperies such as Tiptree Little Scarlet Marmalade.
As Chancellor explains, Fleming wrote thrillers and it was the job of a thriller writer "to stimulate the readers' senses, rather than his mind and that included exciting the taste buds".
And so it goes â the gadgets, the sports cars, the boats, the names, the characters â all of it is carefully scrutinised by Chancellor and thrown together beautifully, aided by excellent illustrations.
For those more open to the Bond-related works produced after Fleming's death â and there have been dozens â some other recently released books are worthy of attention. The Moneypenny Diaries delivers a new perspective on Bond, seen through the eyes of the always reliable Miss Jane Moneypenny, personal secretary to Bond's boss, M, and her niece, Kate Westbrook.
The clever conceit behind this book is that Moneypenny kept a diary throughout her lengthy career at the Secret Intelligence Service, in leatherbound journals, and left them to her niece, to be delivered 10 years after her death.
On reading them, Westbrook, described as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, decides the material within is worthy of publication and this book is the result.
Westbrook is in fact Samantha Weinburg, who is not a Fellow of Trinity College, but that doesn't detract from the fact she has written a thoroughly entertaining story.
While it's difficult to banish the image of Moneypenny as a prim secretary useless outside of an office, by the end of the story Weinburg has managed the trick by giving her a back story that allows readers to believe she's capable of so much more than taking dictation and smiling winsomely.
Weinburg also does an excellent job in putting the events, both fictional and non-fictional, into historic context.
For whatever reason The Moneypenny Diaries hasn't hit the spot with the book-buying public.
The Young Bond series has a more certain future. Charlie Higson captures well the energy and pace of Fleming's writing and also shares his facility for naming characters with care and wit.
The adventures of a schoolboy Bond would be sure to please young readers, particularly boys, who are beginning to grow out of the magical world of Harry Potter.
There are two books so far, Silverfin and Blood Fever, to be released in Australia in March, with more surely to follow.
Last but not least is Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, edited by a trio of academics, and reading just so.
However, it's worth a look for one essay alone. Under the engaging title of Alimentary Dr Leiter: Anal Anxiety in Diamonds are Forever, Dennis W. Allen posits that the story isn't about smuggling and world domination but rather Bond's uncertain sociosexual status and concommitant fantasies of sodomy.
How very peculiar, 007.
Thanks to `James Bond [007]` for the alert.
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