For Your Eyes Only (18 page)

Soon after returning to England, he played a round of golf at Huntercombe in Oxfordshire despite a heavy cold (and Ann's remonstrances). The cold turned into pleurisy and he was admitted to hospital, to be diagnosed with a severe blockage of the pulmonary artery. He did not go
gently, telling Ann that he ‘must get back to life or else'. For a few months more he held on, and then on 12 August, the day of his son Caspar's twelfth birthday, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered another massive heart attack and died.

‘I shall use my time,' Fleming had declared, refusing to alter his lifestyle simply to extend his days. Few writers have used a little time more productively. The year after his death saw the sale of no less than twenty-seven million copies of his books in multifarious languages. James Bond had already inspired, and continues to inspire, cartoon strips, imitators and parodists, from Cyril Connolly to Austin Powers. Fleming thoroughly enjoyed the satire, knowing that both imitation and mockery are sincere forms of flattery. He even wrote his own self-parody, another best-seller, for what is
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
but a story about a man with the rank of commander and a gadget-filled car, on a mission against an evil foreign power. In the film, Commander Pott falls for a woman called Truly Scrumptious, a delightful echo of the Bond Girls' names, and his advice to his children was pure James Bond and, for that matter, Ian Fleming: ‘Never say “no” to adventures. Always say “yes”, otherwise you'll lead a very dull life.'

In another oblique compliment, critics on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain condemned Bond as an imperialist lackey, and Fleming for creating a ‘nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun'. A Bulgarian writer, Andrei Gulyashki, came up with a communist version of
James Bond named Avakum Zakhov. Here was fiction overtaking fact, the Cold War being fought out in rival novels. The language of Bond has entered everyday parlance: his catchphrases, and those grafted on to him by the films, are among the most recognisable in the world. It is almost impossible to drink a vodka martini without remembering Bond's recipe. James Bond could, and did, sell virtually anything: from tea towels to toiletries, cufflinks to chewing gum. But above all he sold an ideal sort of Englishman, the chiselled, deathless, impossibly attractive British secret agent, with a licence to kill, and to love. If the films extended Bond's world in one medium, then the continuation novels authorised by the family gave him endless life in another. The first official imitator was Kingsley Amis, with
Colonel Sun
, in 1968; between 1981 and 1996 John Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels; he was followed by the American writer Raymond Benson, while Charlie Higson successfully took on the challenge of writing the Young Bond series, and Samantha Weinberg took the myth in another direction with
The Moneypenny Diaries
. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has now joined the party, with the latest authorised Bond novel,
Devil May Care
, published to mark the centenary of Fleming's birth.

One might expect Ian Fleming himself to have become lost in the huge branding and marketing industry that is James Bond, but he is still there, in the firm jaw of his hero, the punchy prose, the style, the love of things and the sheer
craftsmanship of the original writing. He is there, too, in the peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy that is the essence of the Bond books, and the reason for their enduring appeal. Few novelists have given so much pleasure, for so long. Mention the name James Bond to almost anyone, anywhere, and they will smile. Many writers now do what Fleming first did, but nobody does it better. One hundred years after Ian Fleming's birth, James Bond is fifty-six, the precise age that Fleming was when he died, much too young. But 007 is still young, and ageless.

 

009
The Spy Who Never Dies

According to
The Times
, scientists are predicting that fifty years from now we will all be living on anti-ageing drugs and communicating with fish. This is, of course, speculation, so let me offer a safer prediction: half a century from now we will all still be watching James Bond films. And so will the fish. As long as they are British fish. And male.

Bond was born with an anti-ageing drug in his fictional veins that is unique in our culture. Sons, as they grow up, progressively decline to do things with their fathers: they grow out of the bedtime story, they would rather go to the football match with their mates. But rare is the son, aged eight or eighty, who will not agree to accompany his father into the fantasy world of 007.

The power of the shared Bond ritual offers a peculiar insight into the masculine British mind. Many women also enjoy the movies, and the appeal of Bond is global, but in
order to be both shaken and stirred by Bond (OK, that's the last of the catch-phrases) it helps to be British, male and slightly naff: interested in gizmos, sex without commitment, saving the world, clunking
double-entendres
, fast cars, drink, ironic self-mockery and, above all, embracing a particular sort of loneliness.

It matters not who Bond is, nor which generation he addresses. He may be blond or brunette, bloodless or bleeding. It makes no difference. Every Bond is outside society's rules while saving society itself; he is a stud-muffin, but essentially alone; he has signatures – cars, clothes, watches – but few personality traits or quirks (compare him, say, to the sheer oddness of Sherlock Holmes, or the flaws of Philip Marlowe). He has no politics, no friends, no family, no past (though the new movie tries to build one retrospectively) and no future. He is what many Englishmen imagine they could be, and very seldom are: the lone wolf.

This central core of male fantasy transcends the various incarnations of Bond. He is about having what you are denied in a British world of convention and order. When
Casino Royale
was published in 1953, food was still rationed in Britain and gambling illegal outside exclusive clubs: so Bond played the baccarat tables and ate beef in Bernaise sauce, now the staple of every Angus Steak House, then the stuff of gastronomic dreams. Sean Connery's cold-eyed killer and misogynist transported a generation of british boys brought up on Airfix models, marmite toast and monogamy.
Roger Moore, the most ironic Bond, took cinema-goers from grey Britain to places where the sun shone permanently and you could ski backwards firing a machinegun. Bond has a fabulous wardrobe without ever once having to go shopping – another fantasy for the average British male.

It is fashionable to declare that each generation gets the Bond it deserves. More striking, it seems to me, is just how similar the Bonds have been, which helps to explain the trans-generational appeal. The technology, girls and scenery change. Bond has survived the Cold War, the Vietnam War, two Iraq Wars and several sexual revolutions. Ian Fleming's humourless Bond (‘sex, snobbery and sadism', said Paul Johnson, back in 1958) gives way to the politically corrected Daniel Craig version, yet the character is essentially the same.

This is because Bond is a post-war British fantasy, a psychological salve for an imperial power in slow decline – again, something that preoccupies British men, in my experience, far more than women.

Bond is not a spy, in any realistic way, but a political fixer, the embodiment of the hope that Britain still plays a vital part out there, although unseen, in what is essentially an Anglo-American alliance against the evil villains. Osama bin Laden is far closer a Bond villain than more conventional state enemies: the lone billionaire with a megalomaniac plan. It is surely no coincidence that military targets in Iraq have been codenamed Goldfinger, Blofeld and Connery.

In
Casino Royale
, Bond ‘reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas'. Tony Blair could not have put it better. (Note: James Bond also went to Fettes public school, the Prime Minister's alma mater, having been thrown out of Eton after some ‘trouble with one of the boys' maids'.)

The academics have long sought to capture Bond. To the Nietzscheans he is the übermensch personified: ‘the devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice with death'. To others he is simply a marketing tool, ‘the gentleman consumer'.

I think the appeal is simpler: so far from being the ultimate British man, Bond is the opposite of most British men. Where most of us are tongue-tied, sexually timid, ill-dressed, unfit, gentle, defined by friendships and family, and generally anxious, he is violent, smooth, empty and supremely fatalistic. Nothing that happens surprises him; British men are, on the whole, allergic to surprises.

British males love him not because we really want to be like him, but because we know we never will be: the Bond model fulfils a sense of irony that is far more British, and fits us much better, than any Savile Row suit. British men and their sons will enjoy Bond together, forever, because he is not really British at all.

Lest this sound like one of those laments for masculinity, consider this: Ian Fleming wrote
Casino Royale
because he wanted to emulate his successful brother, the writer Peter
Fleming, and to impress his wife's smart literary friends, like Evelyn Waugh. Needless to say, he didn't.

The irony is that by aspiring to literary respectability – by imagining he wanted to be something that he evidently was not – and failing, he achieved something far more lasting: the ultimate un-Brit, a cultural immortal, and between male generations a lasting bond, James Bond. (Whoops, sorry.)

 

010
The thriller writer with the golden touch

A faint whiff of literary snobbery accompanied the news that Sebastian Faulks has written a new James Bond novel. ‘No one tipped the acclaimed serious literary novelist . . . to be entrusted with the latest incarnation of Britain's most famous spy,' one newspaper noted. Another sniffed that replicating Ian Fleming required an ability to write ‘bouts of genteel sex at bestseller level'.

Martin Amis, on Radio 4, noted that his father, Kingsley Amis, completed the first ‘continuation Bond' in 1965. ‘After he divorced my mother, Kingsley was so churned up emotionally that he couldn't write anything more serious than James Bond,' Amis said.

The subtext of all this was clear: the James Bond novels are not serious literature. Writers of a higher brow have always wrestled with Bond, trying, and failing, to consign him to pulp fiction. Yet nearly a century after Fleming's
birth, and more than half a century after he sat down to write, Bond remains a literary landmark of the modern age. So far from being mere adventure stories, the Bond books created an entire fictional world around a single individual, as enduring and rich as those of Sherlock Holmes or Bertie Wooster.

That a literary novelist of Faulks's calibre should take on Fleming's mantle is a fitting tribute to one of Britain's greatest thriller writers. That assessment of Ian Fleming has been, is and probably always will be hotly disputed. Many readers have been neither shaken nor stirred by James Bond in book form, but enraged and offended: by his perceived misogyny, materialism, violence and sexual coldness.

Ever since the publication of
Casino Royale
in 1953, debate has raged over whether Fleming's novels are titillating pop culture with a cruel edge, or a higher art.

During his lifetime, Fleming's detractors included the likes of Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge. The latter hammered Bond as ‘utterly despicable; obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways'. Paul Johnson, in a devastating
New Statesman
essay of 1958 entitled ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism', described
Dr No
as the nastiest book he had ever read. Fleming himself did not help matters by his diffident attitude towards his own creation: this ‘thriller thing', his ‘oafish opus', the ‘pillow book fantasies of an adolescent mind'.