Licensed to fantasise with the literary James Bond
04-Feb-2006 • Literary
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But beyond the world of Bond conventions - where boys of all ages get to admire the Aston Martin with the ejector seat or even meet George Lazenby - there are Ian Fleming's books and the character he created, which had a big impact on popular culture long before the Bond films established themselves as the greatest franchise in movie history. One of the best things about Henry Chancellor's excellent James Bond: The Man and His World, the latest study of the Bond phenomenon, is what it has to say about why Fleming's novels became so popular when they first appeared, especially in England. Bond was very much a man of his time, someone who was tailor-made for it.
When the first book in the series, Casino Royale, came out in 1953, Britain had not completely recovered from the privations of World War II. Food rationing was still in force, and the elaborate meals Fleming provided for Bond would have been as wonderfully appealing to read about as all of those feasts the Larkin family regularly treated themselves to in another bestseller of the 1950s, H.E. Bates's The Darling Buds of May.
If, as Chancellor notes, you had never seen a banana (as many people in Britain apparently hadn't), then reading about Bond and a female companion tucking into caviar, followed by tournedos of beef with a Bernaise sauce and artichoke hearts, and a dessert of strawberries and cream, all washed down with vintage plonk, must have been a sensual fantasy of Lucullan proportions.
Fleming himself was a man of simple tastes when it came to food and drink, and sometimes he got things wrong; but even when Bond ordered a half bottle of Pol Roger - the only champagne not produced in half bottles - the public eagerly lapped it up. As Chancellor notes, Fleming focuses on food in these books because it was his job as a writer of thrillers to stimulate his readers' senses as well as their minds. It is possibly this quality that gives the Bond books much of their enduring appeal, in the way that Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, constant bestsellers since the '70s, has a tough-guy private eye who is also a dab hand in the kitchen.
One of the most famous Bond images has him at a casino, a well-tailored winner, a beautiful girl on each arm, and a vodka martini (shaken, not stirred) in his hand. Gambling was illegal in Britain during the '50s except in private members-only clubs, so his British fans were given a glimpse of a glamorous decadent world forbidden to them.
It was even better when 007's missions took him to a foreign country. Fleming realised after he set his third book, Moonraker, entirely in England that his fans relied on him to provide them with the literary equivalent of an exotic vacation: the letters of protest he received meant that from then on he regularly had Bond setting off as soon as possible from a rainy London to some place overseas where the sun was always shining.
At a time when England was suffering an overall decline, the Bond series tried to put the great back into Britain. Its message was that this was a nation that could do no wrong and must, by any means necessary, defeat evil foreigners who threatened it. Bond's missions have little to do with true espionage: essentially, with his licence to kill, he's a government hit man whose brief is to seek out and destroy several wonderfully eccentric leaders of diabolical conspiracies. Compared with the downbeat, grey worlds of John le Carre and Len Deighton, the Bond books were infinitely comforting to readers whose own world was downbeat and grey. Not for nothing did Fleming describe Bond's adventures as fairytales for adults.
In many of the books and movies, there's a moment before a briefing when Bond engages in flirtatious badinage with M's secretary, Miss Moneypenny. It was all we ever saw of her. She and Bond never got on together - a blessing, considering the high mortality rate among his bed mates - and these tantalising glimpses of this character, neatly parrying his thrusts, made many of us want to know her better. Sadly, The Moneypenny Diaries - allegedly edited from the original manuscript by Miss Moneypenny's niece - doesn't help much. This is just the familiar fairytale trendily reversed, where the damsel is not in distress but kicks ass as yet another foot soldier in a monstrous regiment of feisty women.
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