BONDAGE: KEEPING IAN FLEMING IN HIS PLACE
BY LEN SOUSA
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The Man Behind Bond.
Ian Fleming enjoys a smoke.
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This year marks what would have been James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday (May 28th to be exact) and to celebrate the centenary there is a new Bond book out with an interesting quirk. It’s a novel by English author Sebastian Faulks “writing as Ian Fleming.” Titled Devil May Care, the story is set in 1967, just after the final Fleming novel The Man With The Golden Gun, and is meant to be a direct sequel to Fleming’s original Bond series. But judging from several excerpts available online (one, two, and three), the book seems to be simply one author’s caricature of another’s style—a strange choice for a literary tribute.
Now, Fleming wasn’t by any means a genre-shattering novelist. Always self-deprecating, he took joy at describing himself as a “writer” not an “author” and his books betray his journalistic origins. Bond as a character was a bit on the cardboard side with emotions at times more clinical than heartfelt, the plots were borderline silly, and unlike the films, there was little to no humor. Despite these drawbacks, they remain fun to read and are unashamedly hedonistic. Fleming focuses his British eye on the details in Bond’s life from his Bronson lighter to his supercharged Bentley and, as such, each volume reads like a how-to on living in style. But they definitely aren’t meant for a 21st century audience. The novels contain some disturbing descriptions of black people (one chapter in Live And Let Die is titled “Nigger Heaven”) and there is more than uncomfortable language used to describe the Korean character Oddjob in Goldfinger.
I don’t mention Fleming’s racism as some aberration since most western cultures shared similar views on race in that period, but it’s a clear indication that Fleming was a man of his place and time. One could go the other way and suggest the writer was cleverly injecting some social criticism into his novels, but this seems an unlikely addition to a lightweight spy story. However, it is worth noting that Fleming did spend two months every year at his tropical retreat in Jamaica, named Goldeneye, where he wrote all the Bond novels. He was clearly enamored with the local culture as it turns up in several books, most notably in Dr. No. Still, he couldn’t divorce himself from his times or the nescient culture in which he lived, and what were then commonly accepted notions of race, gender, and nationality are inevitably embedded into his novels. Bearing this in mind, the Bond books provide an intriguing peak into a particular slice of postwar British culture.
In recent years, the Fleming novels have been released in paperback with some wonderful pulp fiction covers painted by artist Richie Fahey. You can see them all on Fahey’s website. What’s great about the new cover art is that it works in two ways. First, it looks great on a bookshelf. Second, it helps compartmentalize these novels back into their original time period, unlike other paperback editions which have routinely tried to modernize them—an impossible task since, like supermarket merlots, the Bond books do not age terribly well.
Even watching the more recent 007 films, you get the sense that James Bond is an anachronism. The only time I remember this being overtly mentioned was in 1995’s GoldenEye (now you know where the title came from). In it, there’s a terrific scene between Bond and M. For the first time, M is played by a woman (the brilliant-in-all-she-does Judi Dench) and she describes the suave secret agent as “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And that’s, more or less, exactly the character Fleming created. He’s a child of the Cold War who’s never grown up. Women want to save him; men want to be him. He is untame and unapologetic. The latest film with Daniel Craig was easily the best in a long time, but it was also the least like any Bond film that preceded it. The producers’ decision to reinvent the character while still remaining true to Fleming’s vision was not only smart but a necessary shift if the character is to survive into the modern century.
But back to the books: As I mentioned, this latest publicity stunt to hire a novelist to write a sequel in Fleming’s style is a very unusual one. In simple terms, Faulks is not Fleming, nor is he writing in Fleming’s time. Things will undoubtedly have a feeling of hindsight that was impossible for Fleming and, as one reviewer has already noted, some moments inevitably come across as more parody than tribute. Other Bond books have been written, but so far as I know, none have been meant to coincide with the original Fleming series or copy the writer’s style. What seems most odd is that this imitation book was requested by the Fleming estate. While it would have been one thing to hire a writer to pen a sequel on his own terms, it’s quite another to request he do so while pretending to be another writer. I suspect the main reason Faulks was chosen was because he’s done this kind of writing before with his collection of essays titled Pistache. In it, he parodies the writing styles of people like Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde. The important distinction being that his essays were parodies. Faulks claims he got into character by following Fleming’s writing habits—writing 2,000 words a day and finishing the novel in just six weeks. While the idea is a charming one, what worked for Fleming won’t necessarily work well for another writer, and one wonders how the quality of the finished novel was affected. As always, readers shall decide, but early reviews have been mixed. One last notable aspect of the new Bond book is that it may be at least partially inspired by something Fleming worked on just before his death as this article explains.
Ian Fleming was, like many writers before him and since, very much of his time. His books can’t be easily plucked from when they were written in the ‘50s and early ‘60s and successfully dropped into any other decade. Even by the late ‘60s, Fleming’s work was falling behind the social zeitgeist. Fleming died in 1964, and this is where Bond remains frozen. Fleming’s great success was in capturing that postwar period when England was still a wounded nation and helped give it a renewed sense of cultural identity. Here was a British hero who could save the world single-handedly and on his own terms. This is likely what helped make his work so popular during his lifetime and why it’s being celebrated this year. A successful (and long) string of films has certainly added to it and one can’t claim that Fleming’s work would still be in demand without them, but his novels remain an important bit of British literary history. Still, for all the vicarious releases Fleming has given his readers over the years and the continued interest in his character, it may be that his series is best kept within the confines of its own era—a unique meeting of person, place, and time that can never be duplicated or accurately imitated.
