Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia with Love, The Diamond Smugglers, Dr. No, Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Thrilling Cities, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Octopussy and The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming
After spending a month reading everything of his save Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, I must conclude that many who criticised Ian Fleming’s works during his lifetime were quite pointedly incorrect in their attacks. This is not a new observation. Jeremy Duns has spent years saying so, as has more than one generation of Bond fans. Just as the TLS reviewer and the Telegraph snob were wrong in their day, so too have Kingsley Amis and Raymond Chandler — early advocates of Fleming’s work — been subsequently lauded as far-sighted.
More controversially, perhaps, I have also come to disagree with the apparent consensus of the fans. The best Bond books are often those the fans dislike. And two of Fleming’s most interesting books — Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers — have nothing to do with Bond at all.
First, let’s briefly attempt to understand the premise. The Bond books are unpretentious thrillers. They have an espionage focus. Fleming wrote them in the two months’ holiday he had each year from his post-war job at the Sunday Times. He averaged 2,000 words of each of them per day.
In keeping with these origins, the books are appealing in their bold straightforwardness. James Bond is an archetype — the ‘secret agent’ manifest. He is, to borrow a phrase direct from archetype, a ‘competent man’. He drives well and fast. He shoots to kill and rarely misses — only for plot points, or for effect. And much is made of his trusty muscles, his flat stomach, his solid six feet of height. Everyone thinks he is handsome, if a little cruel-looking. No one seems to mind his scars. All this is the canvas for the action.
Bond is in general tasked to interrupt some criminal scheme or to monitor something which swiftly embroils him in more than he has asked for. He must investigate and reach conclusions. He must often fight, for self-protection and for an objective. Generally, someone needs to die.
On the other side, to leaven the bread, there is also what a comedy prude might call A Lady. Ally or initial foe, she’s usually attractive — Fleming has a few specific descriptions down pat — and although she may initially resist Bond’s advances, she will eventually relent.
The above description might seem a little disappointing — even mechanical. That is how the old critics described the books. It misses what they missed — which is the technical proficiency of the books, and their sparks of magic.
I probably don’t need to say it, but I may as well: that by the conclusions of each of the major novels, I could hardly turn the pages fast enough. The books tear along at a pace readers of mainly literary fiction would almost likely scoff at. There are few false steps, no missed handholds. Off we go, each time, and are glad that we have gone.
These are also books of surprising, if incidental, details. Fleming is often very funny. Not the cheap wisecracking of the sort of penny novelettes written by Holly Martins, protagonist of The Third Man, but amusing little touches which seem funny because they are true or are otherwise zanily implausible. The most groaningly sardonic of these are still funny: Bond’s friend Leiter is bitten up by a shark in Live and Let Die. Bond receives a note reading ‘He disagreed with something that ate him’. Jokes like that don’t need Sir Roger Moore’s raised eyebrow.
The books are full of travel, too — little hints picked up from Fleming’s own lifetime of world-spanning movement and from other books. Bond consults Paddy Leigh Fermor on the Caribbean. Fleming uses his own observations from the articles which made up Thrilling Cities liberally to spice up Bond’s adventures.
Spice is appropriate. Especially in the early books, food is one subject Fleming never fails to exploit. Rarely has a book been written for hungrier readers. Lobsters drip with cream and cigars and brandies are ever close at hand. Bond at one stage attempts a ‘raw diet’ before being told by May, his tearful housekeeper, that in his line of work, a man needs some crispy bacon and some well buttered eggs. In one short story, “007 in New York”, Fleming even offers a footnote on how to cook ‘scrambled eggs James Bond’: they are identical to how I cook them, save for Bond’s stipulation that they must be accompanied by pink champagne.
All this colour saves the books not just from boredom, but from the howls of the critics. It is the living rebuke to the idea that the books are clanking and mechanical, that they have no heart and no sense of humour about themselves.
The critics also accused Bond and Fleming of sadism, something I can heartily rebut. Bond kills a lot of people, but he does not do so wantonly. They ordinarily attack him first. When cold-blooded killing is called for, Bond not only quails internally, he also finds a way to avoid carrying out the order.
There are torture scenes — granted. The visceral pulping of part of Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is verbatim taken from the book; except that Le Chiffre, in the book a big Frenchman, not debonair Mads Mikkelsen, does not first say ‘Wow — you’ve taken good care of your body’. (It might have been in Craig’s contract.)
But the charge of sadism collapses because the torture in the books is usually a contrivance to justify later liquidating the villain. And any enjoyment the reader or author may have got from these horrors is a little undercut by how studiously, if ineffectually, Bond attempts to die in the process of these sufferings instead of prolonging his pain or giving up some vital information.
One thing Fleming might perhaps be guilty of is having Bond threaten to spank this or that disobedient lady a few too many times, in various individual fits of pique. But this amuses rather than annoys after the first couple of instances. Flavour for the pot, one might say.
After all this defence, I may say something against the fans. They are decidedly wrong when they say that the Bond books which most depart from the formula are the least enjoyable. The Spy Who Loved Me is not written from Bond’s perspective, and in any case, like with From Russia with Love, he turns up for the first time a hundred pages in. Both books are better for it, and The Spy Who Loved Me is surprisingly good in describing the dull humiliations wrought on otherwise decent girls by the hypocrisies of 1950s sexual politics. And after all that, some gangsters still get shot up in the end.
The best books of Fleming’s are each not Bond novels. Two collections of short stories — For Your Eyes Only and the posthumous Octopussy and the Living Daylights — contain brilliant work: Fleming’s best of Bond. “Quantum of Solace” takes the form of a long conversation between Bond and an elderly colonial administrator. As a piece of Somerset Maugham-adjacent social drama it is both true to life and riveting. “Risco” is a good old fashioned adventure story amid gangsters in Venice. “The Hildebrand Rarity” and “Octopussy” are nautical-themed attacks on the abuses of arrogant tough-guy men. (The ‘Octopussy’ of the short story is not a lewdly-named woman. It refers, in actual fact, to an octopus.)
Fleming’s other best work — or at least most emblematic work — comes in books of travel and non-fiction. The Diamond Smugglers is not in practice very exciting. Fleming himself was apparently unsatisfied with it, and wrote it in a haze in Tangier in two weeks, with a man from the diamond companies standing over his shoulder as he did so, adamantly taking out all the good bits. But as a failed experiment it is a revelation. Thrilling Cities is not an especially accomplished travel book, but it contains excellent stories of the Big Men at work in Macao, some of the Japanese customs which mystify Bond in You Only Live Twice, and a denunciation of New York so great that it apparently elicited outcry among the reading public of America.
I will conclude with this. Although Bond’s missions all end the same way, and this or that girl is discarded in favour of a new one, I found by the end that I was beginning to grow sentimental. Perhaps this was because, in closing the series, I came closer each volume to Fleming’s own untimely death. Perhaps it was because reading nothing but thrillers for a month short-circuited my brain.
But when I read of Bond at the conclusion You Only Live Twice — being pulled, amnesiac, out of the sea by the fisherwoman Kissy Suzuki, who tries to revive him and keep him as her husband on her little island of Kuro, despite knowing that something will draw him away from her and back into the world in the end — I must say the unexpected tragic beauty of the situation proved surprisingly moving. For those with the text to hand, ‘Surely they would do no harm to a fisherman from Kuro?’ is the point at which I had to fight back tears. (I read subsequently that the fans did not get it.)
In the course of the last month I came to understand the formula Fleming uses rather well. I saw every example he put through its gears. It made me want to try something similar myself, at a suitable distance. In the partially completed thriller which resulted, no matter the tricks I used, no matter the personal and private knowledge I brought in to aid it, I could not approach the magic of Fleming and Bond. There’s something to be said for that.