Tag: James Bond

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

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This was the first biography of Ian Fleming, published in 1966 two years after his death. Pearson had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times. The great advantage of this is that Pearson was able to interview in person most of the people who had known Fleming at the various stages of his life. Much of what they said is quoted in direct speech, bringing Fleming vividly to life.

The slight disadvantage is that Fleming’s widow Anne was still alive when Pearson was writing the book and certain details of Fleming’s private life had to be left out.

It is a fast-paced, gripping read and Pearson never gets bogged down in the detail, evoking the various worlds that Fleming moved through without boring the reader. It is not like the modern style of biography, more dependent on archive material, that never quite comes to life.

In proper journalistic fashion he answers the questions that the reader might have about some of the more mysterious episodes in Fleming’s life. For example, just how was it that a former journalist working as a city stockbroker was appointed to a senior position in naval intelligence at the beginning of the second world war? You will find the explanation here. Where did Fleming’s interest in underwater swimming that found its way into the Bond books come from? That, too, is explained.

Pearson takes the view that the Bond Books were a sort of fantasy projection of Fleming’s own character and pre-occupations. It is Fleming’s friend Robert Harling who recalls him saying “I’m going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

The long, slow process of turning the Bond books into best sellers is described, with Anthony Eden’s stay at Goldeneye being a key event that brought Fleming’s name to a wider public. It’s fascinating to learn, by the way, just how primitive the accommodation at Goldeneye actually was.

In the end, the film deal that made Bond a household name came too late as by then Fleming’s health was in decline and he couldn’t really enjoy the success he had worked for.

Pearson looks at Fleming’s attitude to money as the second son of a wealthy family whose widowed mother controlled the purse strings. It is suggested here that M was what the Fleming children called their mother. I would have liked a bit more about Fleming’s relationship with his mother, perhaps the source of his rather odd attitude to women.   

This is not really a critical biography, but what Pearson does have to say about the Bond books is shrewd and interesting. He considers Casino Royale to be the best, but that Fleming put so much of himself into it that he couldn’t repeat it. He suggests that Fleming rather lost interest in the later books and he has less to say about those.

Almost hidden away in here is some fascinating stuff about the origins of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I didn’t know that Fleming had been a keen skier in his youth and was actually buried in an avalanche in Switzerland. He brought home a Swiss fiancé but his mother vetoed the marriage. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that Fleming wrote quickly like Rider Haggard and with the same direct access to his subconscious. There was a later girlfriend, not named, who was killed in the blitz. Are we looking at the real-life equivalents of Vesper Lynd and Tracy here? Years later the Flemings went on a nostalgic skiing holiday, just before Fleming wrote the book. Perhaps there was as much of Fleming in this book as in Casino Royale.

Despite later biographies, the reputation of this one has remained high. All in all, a fascinating and highly entertaining read for anyone who likes the Bond books.

 

James Bond returns: Win, Lose or Die by John Gardner

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James Bond goes back into the Royal Navy in Win, Lose or Die, the eighth in the series of  Bond continuation novels by John Gardner, published in 1989. Near the end of the cold war, a secret superpower summit is to take place aboard a navy ship in the Mediterranean. Bond must foil the terrorist group who plan to attack and disrupt it.

There’s plenty of action along the way. Bond engages in air-to-air combat, flying a sea harrier, and dodging a missile. There’s an assassination attempt at a villa near Naples, and a final confrontation with the head villain in the tunnels beneath the rock of Gibraltar. This is a fast-paced thriller written in Gardner’s fluent and elegant style,  and as usual with his take on Bond there is much to enjoy.

There are two women, one in the navy and one in the secret service, but which of them is not quite what she seems? Bond doesn’t find out until near the end. M’s elegant country house, Quarterdeck, makes a re-appearance and there’s a neat reference to Bond having been secretly involved in the Falklands war. The villain is motivated by greed, rather than the cause that his agents think they are fighting for.

I have a couple of minor quibbles, that I wish I could edit out. Bond is promoted to captain. Yes, I know captain is a higher rank, but commander just sounds so much better, doesn’t it. There is also another woman who is introduced merely to sleep with Bond before getting herself killed.

The Fleming estate chose well when they approached Gardner to revive Bond in 1981. He was already an established spy thriller writer. Before that he had served in the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm. His brief was to bring Bond into the 1980s, so M and Bond remain about the age they were in Fleming’s books, but must deal with the geopolitical realities of the new era.

Perhaps the best of them, certainly of the ones I have read, is The Man From Barbarossa, published in 1991. In this book, Bond works with a Mossad officer to collaborate with the KGB, and the assignment takes him to Russia. A terrorist group is threatening the Russian government in an attempt to bring soviet war criminals of the second world war era to justice. But what is behind it? This is set at a very specific historic moment, just before the Gulf war, when the hardliners were trying to regain control of the soon to be extinct Soviet Union. All of this comes to an action climax when Bond goes up against the Spetznatz, or Russian Special forces.

It’s slightly untypical of the series as it’s more like a serious spy novel with a character called James Bond in it. It was reportedly Gardner’s favourite among his Bond novels. I read it in  a state of trepidation, because I was enjoying it so much I was worried that something would go wrong before the end, but I am pleased to say it did not. Certainly, it’s the only Bond continuation by any author that I did not find fault with and that I would put on the shelf next to Ian Fleming.

Other Bond authors have stuck to the original timeline, and this can create problems.

Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis starts brilliantly, with the kidnapping of M, then continues well with a night time fight on the slopes of the acropolis in Athens. But as it goes on, the pace slackens; it’s like a balloon deflating.

Something similar happens with Solo, by William Boyd. It starts strongly, with Bond’s awaking from a dream of being back in the commandos. It was also a good idea to send Bond to Africa, something I believe Fleming was contemplating. Here, he is caught up in something like the Biafran war. But again, the novel slows down alarmingly in the second half, to the point of actually becoming quite boring when the scene shifts to America. There is also too much explaining of the villain.

Anthony Horovitz fell into a couple of traps with Trigger Mortis. He states very specifically that this story takes place just after Goldfinger, yet it is riddled with anachronisms. Again, there is far too much of an attempt to justify the villain psychologically. The modern political sensibility that, for me, mars Horovitz’s TV dramas, is also present. His second attempt, Forever and a Day is much better, but something of a missed opportunity, I feel. This is the Bond “origin story” and takes place before Casino Royale. But surely the Bond origin story that remains to be written is his time in the commandos in the second world war and his transition from that into the secret service? That is the story Boyd hinted at.

The spy novelist Anthony Price did something along those lines when he showed the main character of his espionage series, David Audley, as a young tank officer in Normandy who becomes involved in behind the lines operations in The ’44 Vintage.

Sebastian Faulks had a go with Devil May Care. A title worthy of Fleming, and there’s a neat joke at the beginning when Bond drives up the King’s Road and smells marijuana smoke. It’s a good read, but a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, in that it seems to be assembled from left over parts of Fleming novels. For example, Goldfinger’s cheating at golf becomes cheating at tennis here, with a remote control adjustable net. One can’t quite escape the feeling that Faulks thought the task was beneath him. On the cover it said “Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming”, in case anyone should mistake this for one of Faulks’ more serious productions.

It was Gardner, with his thriller writer’s imagination, who came closest to carrying on what Fleming had started. It was the more literary novelists who came a cropper. There’s a lively debate about his Bond novels on the internet, which suggests that they are still being read and enjoyed today.

 

 

Age shall not weary them, but perhaps it should

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I once read in an interview with Agatha Christie that she felt she had made a mistake with Poirot and made him too old. He had already retired by the time of his third appearance, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). I suppose it never occurred to her that the demands of the public and her publisher meant she would be writing about him for the next fifty years. Poirot therefore had to be permanently suspended in late middle age, while the world he moved through changed around him. This is quite effective; the books set in 1960s England are very different to those set among international travellers in the 1930s.

There are occasional references to his age, though. At the beginning of Five Little Pigs (1942) his would-be client looks at him quizzically. Poirot realises that she thinks he is too old for the job. He explains that the “little grey cells” are still working perfectly. Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) begins with Poirot reflecting on what is now his greatest pleasure, the dining table, and lamenting that there are only three meals in the day. But Christie could never have aged him realistically; He was a first world war refugee, after all, and Captain Hastings was recovering from wounds when Poirot met him. Even if he was only in his forties then, Poirot would have been in his nineties in the books set in the 1960s.

Poirot contrasts sharply with John Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay, who made his first appearance in The Thirty Nine Steps in 1915. He ages realistically over the course of his five adventures and in the last, The Island of Sheep (1936), he has been knighted, become an MP and his teenage son takes an active role. This may have something to do with the fact that in the books set in the first world war, Hannay gains promotion, ending up as a senior officer. You can’t really have a character who progresses up the military hierarchy without them ageing. We can see this in C S Forester’s Hornblower series, where Hornblower starts as a midshipman and ends as an admiral. He must therefore age. Of course, both Hannay and Hornblower are parents, so if they did not age, their children could not, either.

The characters that Christie did age realistically, in a similar fashion to Hannay, are her detective duo Tommy and Tuppence. They first appeared as a pair of bright young things in Christie’s second novel The Secret Adversary (1922). Their final appearance as a married couple of mature years was in the last novel she wrote, Postern of Fate (1973).

John Le Carré had a Poirot-like problem with George Smiley, in that he had been very specific about his age in his first book, which made him a bit too old for the later books. In Call for the Dead (1961), we are told Smiley went up to Oxford in 1925, so he would have been born around 1907. Smiley leaves the secret service at the end of that book; we assume he has returned, because he appears as a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965).

He becomes the central character in Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974), but Le Carré had to change Smiley’s past and knock some years off his age to fit him into that story. Smiley had to be much closer in age to the generation who were at Oxford in the 1930s and still young enough to be forced into premature retirement in the early 1970s. That also made him vigorous enough to appear in the next two books of the Karla Trilogy. Again, one has to assume that when Le Carré wrote Call for the Dead, he did not imagine Smiley as the central figure in a much longer and more complex novel that he would write almost fifteen years later.

Perhaps Ian Fleming came up with the best solution to this ageing problem. James Bond always seems to be about the same, unspecified age; mid to late thirties perhaps, old enough to be experienced and confident but young enough to be fit and tough. But the books link in to one another, with a consistent cast of characters. There is a chronology, and Bond is scarred by his experiences, but he is oddly ageless.

This can be seen particularly towards the end of the series. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) opens with the hunt for Blofeld, the criminal mastermind behind the atomic bomb plot in Thunderball (1961). At the beginning of You Only Live Twice (1964), the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have left Bond a broken man, on the point of being dismissed from the service; by the end, he is missing in Japan, presumed dead. The Man With The Golden Gun (1965) opens dramatically with the brainwashed Bond returning to try and assassinate M. He is then given a dangerous mission to redeem himself.

Fleming was careful never to pin down Bond’s exact year of birth. In the (premature, as it turns out) obituary in You Only Live Twice, M writes that Bond became a commando “in 1941, claiming an age of 19”; that would make Bond’s year of birth about 1923 or so. So, if we do apply realistic time, he would have been in his early forties when he turns down a knighthood at the end of The Man With The Golden Gun, the last Bond book.

Sooner or later, Fleming would have had to solve the problem of how Bond should age, and it’s interesting to speculate what he might have done. Perhaps he would have inserted an earlier adventure into the timeline, as Conan Doyle did with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, Fleming died at the comparatively young age of 56. Like his creator, Bond never had to cope with old age.