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Literary Review
PERSONALITY
Licence to thrill
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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Ian Fleming’s James Bond books articulate the beliefs and fears of post-war Britain.
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The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
Casino Royale
(1953)
In my book that was enough. Let’s go.
Octopussy
(1966)
These are the first and last lines of a set of 14 books that changed pop culture significantly. Ian Fleming might have borrowed the name, James Bond, from an ornithologist but the name and the number 007 translates to a licence to thrill. Now the British postal service, Royal Mail, is launching a series of stamps featuring the covers of the novels. The stamps will go on sale in January 2008.
With the release of the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No”, in 1962 a worldwide hysteria, which overshadowed the books, was unleashed. While successive films claim a return to the roots, they cannot completely do so as James Bond’s print avatar is very much a man of his time: post-war Britain.
So it is only right that novelist Sebastian Faulks, who has been given the job of writing a new James Bond novel to mark Fleming’s birth centenary on May 28, 2008, sets Devil May Care in the late 1960s. In the books, Bond is very much the man of the moment, up to date with the latest technology and cars of that era. Transplant him to this millennium and he is a dinosaur, much like his Cold War enemies the Russian secret service, SMERSH.
Personal quirks
Ian Fleming wrote 12 full-length novels, and two collections of short stories (For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy) at his beloved Caribbean getaway, Golden Eye, during his two-month annual leave from his job at The Times. There is a lot of Fleming in Bond. Apart from Scottish roots, both seem to have followed similar education and career paths (Bond, like Fleming, studied at Eton and served as Commander in Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War).
There are personal quirks; both the creator and his creation have a weakness for narrow ties and dislike tea. In “Goldfinger”, Bond says: “I don’t drink tea. I hate it. It is mud. Moreover it’s one of the reasons for the downfall of the British Empire.” And in Thunderball, Fleming writes, “Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat soft, time-wasting opium of the masses.” In an interview to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Fleming admits: “Tea I regard as a factor in the downfall of the British Empire.”
While these are harmless quirks, Bond has some truly incendiary views on homosexuality, racism and women’s liberation. These reveal the time warp the books are in. As always, pop culture is an accurate mirror of the times and James Bond is only articulating the beliefs and fears of the time.
Fleming wrote Casino Royale on the eve of his marriage to Anne Rothermere and the Bond novels are peopled with the most memorable women — from the unfortunate Vesper Lynd to the imperious Countess Tracy who Bond briefly marries; from the bewitching Tatiana Romanova to Kissy Suzuki who bears Bond a child. While the novels sizzle with sexuality, Fleming never used the four-letter word, which he attributed to “some streak of my Scottish puritan forebears”.
As important as the women and locations are, Bond’s adversaries are crucial. Though Fleming in conversation with novelist Raymond Chandler says: “I find it extremely difficult to write about villains”, he has created some truly terrifying baddies. The most horrific has to be the shape-shifting Blofeld with Klebb, Mr. Big and Dr. No coming close behind. The least impressive villains are Fleming’s American ones — from the Spang brothers to Pistols Scaramanga.
Masochistic
And with the villains comes the incredible punishment Bond takes, which prompted critics to condemn the books for sex and sadism. However, Fleming with typical dry wit tells Chandler: “Bond needs to suffer before he gets his prize. What do you do? Dock him his income tax?” Though he never intended Bond “to be a hero. I intended him to be a blunt instrument wielded by a government department”, he has become the ultimate hero. While Fleming might modestly say “I am not in the Shakespeare stakes”, (in a BBC interview) his books are a limitless source of pleasure.
Remember “He disagreed with something that ate him?” from Live and Let Die? Where else could one find such biting macabre humour but within the pages of a James Bond novel?
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