The Imitator

James Bond without his creator

Colonel Sun by Robert Markham

Robert Markham was Kingsley Amis. This was widely known when his book, a continuation novel authorised by the inheritors of Ian Fleming, was about to be published, and when it was new. Amis was hired because he was an early supporter and fan of the Bond books when they were not fashionable to appreciate and it was not the done thing to try to understand their structures. Amis wrote a number of supplementary works on Bond, from essays about how the books worked in a ‘dossier’ to a humorous guide (again under an assumed name) on how one might become one’s own 007: presumably — I’ve not read it — from boardroom to bedroom and everywhere in-between.

Amis was thus one of the people closest to being an ‘expert’ on the Bond effect (aside from a bunch of loser nerds who couldn’t write) — and it was no time to nap. The films were already being made at a steaming pace; the sales of the books grew following their endorsement by John F. Kennedy; there was money to be made, a lot of money, if the pace that Fleming had kept up (a book per year) could be equalled. But it could not, not entirely. In fact, there was a gap between the untimely death of James Bond’s creator and the picking up of the pen by a continuation author. Legal troubles, no doubt. They might also have been stylistic. The book itself is not really Bond — not in the Fleming style. But for all that, it is not bad.

What Amis produced feels, almost instantly, somewhat off. This is not because he is too highbrow and snobby to satisfy those things which make the genre hum and keep its engine ticking over. He does most of them. Amis’s Bond is as violent as Fleming’s. He sleeps with at least as many women as Bond would have done in a novel by his originator. He does quite a lot of the globe-trotting. He faces off a fiendish villain. And there is international intrigue and a race to save the world — or a large part of it — from communism or badness generally. As usual, Bond’s enemies are swarthy foreigners or corrupt military men or mincing pederasts and so on. All of this is grist for the mill.

There are even a couple of scenes of torture which are genuinely quite sickening. It’s excellent. For a Bond novel — which were always unjustly accused of sadism and being essentially morally unhealthy — to have scenes of grotesque violence which make the reader feel unsettled is a big bonus. It’s exactly what Fleming would have done; what he would have wanted. In one fabulous moment, a character whom I will not describe tells Bond about what it was like to be in the presence of a man who has been recently deprived of his eyes. The barbarous coldness of the language, how pseudo-scientific this sick freak manages to sound — it is genuinely impressive. No wonder the words have been heavily pilfered by others — turning up, more or less unedited, in the 2015 film Spectre, where they stand out in a movie whose dialogue is fairly ordinary for their gleeful nastiness.

So all of these elements are in operation. Why is the book not a smash? Why not a rave from this reader? I will say that these things are, of course, matters of taste. They are matters of sensibility. Does Amis, as Markham, sound like Fleming?

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Some of the plotting is very sub-Fleming, at least so far as the novels go. Fleming’s novels really moved.    They had no downtime, no sitting around. Amis’s dawdles a little. That the central action of novel largely takes place along a series of sea-side resorts around an Aegean island is a bit of a rejection of what made Fleming great. The action had to end up somewhere — and in one definite, particular place. We go there via other places, all of them flecked with light. In this book, the place where the action ends up is the far end of nowhere.

On style: Amis writes grammatical sentences which mostly read well, but sometimes he hits what seems like a bizarre snag. He cannot get through a gap he must traverse, narratively speaking, or plotwise, with agility. He must bulldoze through a wall, or pave over a narrow stepping-stone path across a rough river. It sometimes appears almost as if he is not trying.

This is not true, of course. Instead, Amis had a very difficult job. As ghostwriters know, it’s hard to be someone else. And the better you are at the day job, the more famous your work and persona, the more distinct your own identity, your own skills, the harder it is to hide all of that light under a bushel.