Review of newly republished `James Bond: the Authorised Biography`

Sinclair McKay reviews James Bond: the Authorised Biography by John Pearson for The Telegraph.

There are few fictional figures so familiar as agent 007. But look again: how familiar is he really? The James Bond of the films – from the insouciant Sean Connery to the glowering, swimming-trunk sizzler Daniel Craig – is one thing. But the spy of Ian Fleming's original novels is actually a little more enigmatic, and occasionally complex. For heaven's sake, the man's a mess.

Next year, to mark Fleming's centenary, we will see Sebastian Faulks's fresh approach to Bond in his novel Devil May Care. One imagines Faulks will try to give the character more emotional resonance, to build on the curious gaps and hints left by his creator – the moments of melancholy and solitude, like that in the odd opening chapter of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963), where a Brittany beach pulls Bond back to his childhood.

One also imagines Faulks will go further than the loving homage written by Kingsley Amis in the form of Colonel Sun (1968), four years after Fleming's death.

It is always an intriguing experiment for one author to take on the popular creation of another – and it is one that is carried out with aplomb by John Pearson here in this sly, witty and hitherto rarely seen exercise.

The premise of Pearson's narrative – first published in 1976 and now reprinted for the first time in 30 years – is that the author has been summoned to write the real life story of Bond. He flies to Bermuda, where 007, now in his fifties, is in luxurious mothballs, awaiting the call to return from M. What follows enjoyably adds to Fleming's books.

We learn of Bond's peripatetic childhood, and of the effect his parents' deaths on a Swiss mountain had on him. We learn how, before the war, the young man was inveigled by a mix of terrible accident and deception into the secret service.

Then, quite brilliantly, we learn why the journalist Ian Fleming was called upon by MI6 to write novels about the agent's exploits, to make him, in the eyes of the world and the KGB, a fictional creation rather than a real-life spy.

Fleming's literary agent Peter Janson-Smith has commented elsewhere on how difficult it is to approximate the Fleming style. Looks easy; isn't.

When reading Bond novels, you occasionally laugh – for instance, at the climax of Dr No (1958), when Bond fights a giant squid – because you think the author is quietly laughing too; then you stop when you realise Fleming was being quite serious.

Pearson, while allowing for the wry, knowing joke, also maintains a poker face when plunging Bond into all sorts of adventures Fleming never told us about: an encounter with vicious gangsters operating behind the cult of an erotic goddess of death; lonely assassinations in the eerie half-light of Scandinavia; an absurd cliffhanger during the Hungarian uprising where a naked Bond is shut in a zoo cage with a frenzied gorilla.

We find out more about Bond's women, too, and why he had such difficulty forming proper relationships. The episode explaining why Tiffany Case loved him and left him – a clash of wills between her and Bond's treasured housekeeper May – is very funny. So, too, is the reappearance in Bond's life of the former shell-gatherer Honeychile Rider – now a divorced Honey Schulz.

By contrast, Bond's tragic first love affair, with the young madame of a high-class Parisian brothel, is rather moving. Pearson, like Fleming, invites us to enjoy high-spirited adventure and sex, but then swiftly, on a sixpence, turns and darkens the mood.

This "authorised biography" is a clever, bittersweet disquisition on what becomes of our heroes. But more than this, it is also a shrewd running critical commentary on Fleming, going some way to explain the outbreaks of bleakness and sourness in the original novels, and also ingeniously explaining away a lot of their absurdity. It is an enjoyable exercise in having cake and eating it.

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