“I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don’t know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days.”
Those were the last recorded words of author Ian Fleming to the ambulance crew who had brought him to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital early in the morning of Wednesday 12 August 1964. After dinner with friends the previous evening at his hotel in Sandwich, he had suffered a heart attack (his second) and collapsed. He died shortly after arriving, at 1.00 am, aged 56.
Sixty years after his death, Fleming is world famous as the creator of the iconic British spy James Bond, 007. Late last year he was the subject of a new and exhaustive biographical treatment by Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, but the first study of the man behind Bond, The World Is Not Enough, had appeared only two years after his death. It was written by John Pearson, Fleming’s assistant on the “Atticus” society gossip column at The Sunday Times, who had come to know his subject well.
James Bond is now primarily a cinematic figure, the hero of 25 films made by Eon Productions which began with Dr. No in 1962. Although Fleming wrote 12 novels and two collections of short stories featuring 007, there is a sense in which he has been reduced to a branding exercise, the magic stamp of authenticity “Ian Fleming’s James Bond” appearing in the opening credits of the films. Fleming, strangely, is more part of the legend of Bond than Bond is of Fleming.
It is certainly a powerful brand. Fleming had an instinct for publicity and there is no shortage of photographs of the author, elegant in black tie, wreathed in cigarette smoke and holding a martini glass. These were no mere props: he smoked 60 or 70 unfiltered cigarettes a day, sometimes through an ebony holder, and could see off a bottle of gin in the same period. That he died in his fifties was a surprise to no-one: ”I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave”, he once wrote.
It is strange to think how little Fleming overlapped with the film franchise which his character triggered. He died five weeks before the third instalment, Goldfinger, premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square; the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, had been commercially very successful but met with a mixed reception from critics.
It was Fleming himself who was the stand-out success in the early 1960s, selling 30 million books in his lifetime, although his estate was valued at a modest £302,147 (£7,733,951 today) at his death. (He left bequests of £500 each to four unnamed friends on the condition they spend the money within 19 months “on some extravagance”.) Had he lived longer, the burgeoning success of the filmic Bond would undoubtedly have brought him substantial wealth—one wonders, though, if he would have enjoyed becoming an aged appendage to his ageless fictional secret agent.
If James Bond is a character of cinema more than literature now, there was a reminder of his origins on the page early last year. In anticipation of re-issuing the novels in April 2023 to mark 70 years since the publication of the first Bond tale, Casino Royale, it was revealed that the owner of Fleming’s literary rights, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, had commissioned sensitivity readers to review the texts for a modern audience.
The notion of bowdlerising Fleming’s books flared briefly as a battle in the culture wars, hot on the heels of a similar row over the works of Roald Dahl (who coincidentally had written the screenplay for the fifth Bond film, 1967’s You Only Live Twice). Whether you believe that an author’s text should be sacrosanct—Fleming was content in his lifetime for his novels to be edited mildly for different markets—or you think literature should be informed by an ever-changing wider context, it was a discussion worth having.
Bond as a literary figure
The truth is that, several decades on, some of Fleming’s prose is unpalatable. In Live and Let Die (1954), Bond judges Africans working in the gold and diamond trades as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much”, and the fifth chapter of the book is entitled “N****r Heaven” (altered to “Seventh Avenue” for the US market).
In Goldfinger (1959), the antagonist, Auric Goldfinger, employs a Korean manservant called Oddjob. Bond reflects at one point on the need for “putting Oddjob and any other Korean firmly in his place, which, in Bond’s estimation, was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy”, and he is described as having black teeth and a “sickly zoo-smell”.
Just as shocking to modern audiences is the sexism and misogyny which runs through the books. In the very first novel, Casino Royale, Bond imagines “seducing” his colleague Vesper Lynd, a young woman who is personal assistant to the Head of Section S (USSR) and accompanies Bond on his mission. Lynd is a reserved, private figure which seems to make her more alluring to Bond.
“The conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.”
It is hard to take that in your stride as a modern reader; equally, it is hard to imagine the average reader in 1953 was indifferent. Yet this was not a one-off for Fleming. In 1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me, the only Bond novel with a first-person narrative, a young Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel, relates how the spy arrived at a motel in the Adirondack Mountains just as she was being harassed by two mobsters. It is clear they intend to assault her sexually then kill her, but Bond’s appearance saves the day and, of course, she ends up having sex with him.
Michel’s description of their sexual encounter, as framed by Fleming, reads very uneasily and was rightly heavily criticised at the time for its allusion to wanton force and rape.
It is worth observing that Fleming’s own sexual preferences included a significant element of sado-masochism. His relationship with Ann Charteris, from an affair beginning in 1939 through their marriage in 1952 until his death in 1964, was a tempestuous one characterised by high emotion and violent arguments. Their correspondence, discovered five years ago, reveals a mutual erotic fixation with pain and cruelty. During the Second World War, Fleming wrote to her declaring “I love whipping you & squeezing you & pulling your black hair, and then we are happy together & stick pins into each other”.
It was a mutual obsession. In one letter, Ann told Fleming “I long for you to whip me because I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards. It’s very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes.” One journalist related extraordinary details of the Flemings’ home in Jamaica, Goldeneye.
“Those who were lucky enough to visit Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat, could never understand how the Flemings went through so many wet towels. But those sodden towels were needed, literally, to cool their fiery partnership, used to relieve the stinging of the whips, slippers and hairbrushes the pair beat each other with—Ian inflicting pain more often than Ann—as well as to cover up the weals Ian made on Ann’s skin during their fiery bouts of love-making.”
None of that is an apologia for Fleming’s casual treatment of rape or his attitude towards women, and the extent to which that infuses the Bond novels. It is impossible to dismiss the fact that there was a love of pain and cruelty—both inflicted and received—in Fleming’s character and this played a part in the creation of Bond’s character and the way Bond behaved.
The shocking aspects of the James Bond novels are important for our understanding of Fleming’s canon today because they are often used as a reason to disregard or downplay 007’s literary origins. If Bond is an ogre, and by extension so too is his creator, then the books can be set aside as a vaguely acknowledged wellspring of the much more dominant cinema franchise (not that the films are paeans to equality and women’s liberation). It can also be used as part of a case that the books are simply not very good and that Fleming, while commercially popular, was not a writer of any particular note.
Critics of Fleming
Fleming had no shortage of critics even when the novels were first published. The first five—Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia, with Love—were broadly well received, if hardly regarded as great literature. But in March 1958, the month that Dr. No was published, the literary critic Bernard Bergonzi published an article in the journal The Twentieth Century entitled “The Case of Mr Fleming”, which was a full-scale assault on Fleming’s work and character.
Bergonzi argued that “the erotic fantasies in which Bond is continually involved are decidedly sinister”, that Bond was a “hardened amorist” and that the books overall showed “a strongly marked streak of voyeurism and sado-masochism”. Because of this, he accused Fleming of “the total lack of any ethical frame of reference”. Widening his thesis, he stated that the Bond novels were not to be taken seriously as literature. Citing a critical review of 1954’s Live and Let Die, he noted that some had been taken in by a cheap, disposable thriller.
“It is interesting to recall that the New Statesman described this book as a ‘thriller for an intelligent audience’ and that a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘both exciting and extremely civilized’ (my italics): one would like to know what this gentleman considers even moderately barbarous.”
As demolition jobs go, it was elegantly written but very much in a long tradition of denigrating popular thrillers as lacking serious purpose or moral fibre. Even so, Bergonzi compared Fleming unfavourably with John Buchan and Raymond Chandler. (One wonders if this stung: in an article in Books and Bookmen five years later, Fleming, charmingly self-deprecating, said “while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’”, and named Chandler, who became a friend in the mid-1950s, as one of his inspirations.)
This might not have mattered much but Dr. No, published at the end of March 1958, attracted some stinging reviews. The most devastating was by Paul Johnson, writing in The New Statesman, and was entitled “Sex, snobbery and sadism”. At that stage Johnson was a left-wing adherent of Aneurin Bevan, and would not begin his long march towards the conservative right until the 1970s.
Avatar for a blighted Britannia
Johnson pulled no punches. Dr. No was, he said, “without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read”, and “by the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away”. He identified in Fleming not just a bad author and unpleasant character but an avatar of a deeper failing of the nation (this was, remember, only 18 months after the end of the Suez Crisis, which had brought down the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, exposed Britain’s post-imperial fragility and created deep divisions within society).
The novel contained, in Johnson’s splenetic analysis, “three basic ingredients in Dr. No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult”. Its moral failings were not offset by any skill or artistic merit. “The novel is badly written to the point of incoherence… Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten, in a haphazard manner.”
This framing of Fleming as commercially successful but both morally curdled and lacking any great craft has a powerful gravity today. The perennially rebarbative Malcolm Muggeridge, never a man to miss an opportunity for curling-lip disapproval, tried to fix the image only months after Fleming died. Writing in the American magazine Esquire in December 1964, he admitted that he had known Fleming a little and had bought a copy of You Only Live Twice with a view to writing about it a week before the author’s death.
Despite this blandly frank admission that he had only read one of Fleming’s books, Muggeridge felt able to characterise the whole œuvre in damning terms.
“He knew the requisite ingredients to set before [his readers] money, sex and snobbishness, beaten into a fine rich batter, with plenty of violence to make it rise in the pan; then served hot and flambé with Sade flavoring, and washed down by a blood-red wine. A true chef, he dished up himself, flushed with bending over the oven. That flush which so often comes to the rich and the avid! I suppose in poor Fleming’s case it was due to the heart condition of which he died, but somehow I always saw it as the pigment with which he coloured-in Bond.”
In his nakedly ad hominem [personal] assault—he obviously nursed a deep loathing for Fleming, despite their association—Muggeridge also underscored another criticism of the Bond books, their avowed and emphatic consumerism. The novels are crammed with brand names and firm views on taste and style, and it was part of the storytelling which Fleming clearly loved.
The most famous is perhaps the pedantic precision with which Bond instructs the barman in Casino Royale to make him a variation on a martini, which he christens the Vesper in honour of his companion conquest. Having ordered a dry martini “in a deep champagne goblet”, he suddenly has a change of heart.
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?… This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name.”
Suffocating style
Fleming, whose training had been as a reporter, was meticulous in charting what Bond liked and did not like. He washed his hair with Pinaud Élixir shampoo and shaved with a Hoffritz razor, made by Merkur of Solingen. He drank coffee from De Bry in New Oxford Street, made in an American Chemex and served in Minton china, and breakfast featured a choice of Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade, Tiptree “Little Scarlet” Strawberry Jam or Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum & Mason. Bond drove a series of customised Bentleys (the first was written off in Moonraker), and wore a Rolex Oyster Perpetual on an expanding metal strap.
It is in cigarettes and alcohol that Bond’s tastes are most pronounced and most famous. He (like Fleming) smoked unfiltered cigarettes from Morland and Co. of Grosvenor Street, made specially for him with a Macedonian blend, a mixture of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos, and decorated with three gold bands to indicated the sleeve markings of his rank as a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve.
The meticulousness of this shows Bond (and therefore Fleming) as a connoisseur, but sometimes needs must. Fleming refers to his protagonist smoking Duke of Durham King Size and Chesterfield King Size, both American brands; Shinsei, “good and sharp on the palate and lungs”, in Japan; Royal Blend, a popular local brand, in Jamaica; Diplomates, made with Turkish tobacco, when in Istanbul; Senior Service, with their strong naval connection; and Lauren’s Jaunes, French cigarettes made with Caporal tobacco, when in Paris.
Nevertheless, his broad smoking tastes are not infinite. In From Russia, With Love, Bond is travelling on the Orient Express (of course) with a supposed colleague in the Secret Intelligence Service, Captain Nash. He has become wary of Nash, actually an agent of the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation Smersh, but is trying to present a calm and relaxed demeanour. He accepts a Player’s cigarette from Nash: Bond “hated Virginia tobacco, but he was prepared to do anything to help put the man at ease”. The things a man will do for his country.
This level of what we now think of as product placement—although there is no evidence that Fleming did it for personal gain—is striking now but was revolutionary in the English novel in the 1950s. The brands were all real and generally, if not exclusively, expensive and luxurious. It is hard to imagine Gordon’s Gin or Taittinger Blanc de Blanc (“not a well-known brand, but it is probably the finest champagne in the world”) or a Swaine Adeney Brigg attaché case appearing in the work of Fleming’s friend Graham Greene, or the pioneering espionage thrillers of John Buchan or Eric Ambler.
Judging Fleming as an author in his own context
Making a balanced assessment of Fleming is difficult 60 years later. Partly we live in a society very different from the one in which he was writing, let alone the one in which he had grown up. Fleming died in the last days of the Conservative government which had come to office under Sir Winston Churchill in 1951: homosexuality and abortion were still illegal, theatres were still technically subject to the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, corporal punishment still took place in prisons and capital punishment was still available (what turned out to be the last two executions ever took place in Liverpool and Manchester the day after Fleming’s death). Many of the assumptions which informed Fleming’s world grate dreadfully on our sensibilities.
There is also a degree to which we struggle to see Fleming as a writer because of the very success of Bond. Not only has 007 become one of our dominant archetypes of the spy in fiction, but Bond’s whole milieu is now utterly familiar, often parodied and in some ways rather tired and jaded.
Decoding a spy
I think we can re-read Fleming in three ways. None of these make a conclusive argument that he was a great writer or that the Bond novels should be more highly revered in the post-War canon, but they give us a more accurate and contextual sense of Fleming as the creator of Bond and therefore a better sense of his importance. We need to consider Fleming as a craftsman in writing; the way Fleming depicts Bond as a character; and the time in which Fleming was writing and the audience to whom he was appealing.
Ian Fleming was not a conventionally academic youth. He spent six years at Eton, where he was a successful athlete and edited a school magazine, The Wyvern, but did not challenge for intellectual honours and was in the shadow of his gifted elder brother Peter, a year above him. He was restless and clashed with his housemaster, E.V. Slater, of lifestyle issues like owning a car, using hair oil and enjoying the company of women. Slater persuaded Fleming’s mother Eve to remove him from Eton a term early and send him on a crammer course to prepare for Sandhurst (where he would contract gonorrhoea and leave after less than a year in some disgrace).
In 1931, Fleming sat the examination for the Foreign Office and passed with an adequate mark, but had not shone enough to be offered a job. His mother intervened again, using her connections to Sir Roderick Jones, the chairman of Reuters, to find Fleming a position as a journalist and sub-editor. This would be critical for his career and his character: he was smooth, cosmopolitan and well-travelled, an able linguist with fluent French and German and he had a sharp eye for small but telling details and an insatiable curiosity.
In some ways we need to understand Fleming as a journalist who also wrote novels. He reported on the Moscow show trial of six British engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers in early 1933 and acquired a degree of fluency in Russian. By chance, neither The Times nor The Manchester Guardian had managed to send a correspondent to Moscow, so both relied on Fleming’s cables from the trial, expanding his audience enormously.
Although he bowed to family pressure and became a stockbroker in 1933—as which he was singularly unsuccessful—he was heavily involved in company newsletters at Rowe and Pitman, immersed himself in the social scene of the City of London and wrote occasional articles for The Times as a freelancer. After his wartime service in naval intelligence, he returned to journalism in 1945.
It was not the hardscrabble existence of a stringer. Fleming was appointed foreign manager for Kemsley Newspapers, overseeing the international correspondents of The Sunday Times. Although his generous contract allowed him three months’ leave every winter, which he spent in Jamaica, he remained active as a writer too. He produced especially fine travel reporting, including profiles of Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Chicago and New York for The Sunday Times in early 1960, followed by a series on Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo later that year. The essays were published as a book called Thrilling Cities in 1963.
Fleming’s journalism was integral to the way he wrote the Bond novels. He was fascinated by small, quirky details and had a sharp eye for local colour and atmosphere. In some ways, the novels are a series of travelogues: Live and Let Die in Harlem, Florida and Jamaica; Diamonds Are Forever in New York and Las Vegas; From Russia, With Love in Istanbul and then back across Europe on the Orient Express; You Only Live Twice in then-exotic and mysterious Japan. Although his exposition was sometimes heavy-handed, the depth of his knowledge was considerable, and the far-flung locations allowed Fleming to explore different aspects of Britain’s developing post-imperial existence and relationship with the United States.
Journalism also influenced his sparse prose. It is worth noting that only one of the Bond novels, Goldfinger, exceeds 300 pages, and most were closer to 250 pages. These were not sprawling, expansive tales—the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published the year after Fleming’s first 007 tale—but sharp, punchy tales which kept up the drama and knew how to deliver a powerful effect in a few words.
You see this in the now-legendary opening paragraph of Casino Royale:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”
That is a potent pair of sentences. It takes almost as read the glamour of a casino and immediately undercuts it, taking the audience behind the façade, into the author’s confidence. ‘I know this world’, Fleming is saying, and take my word for it, there are layers of horror beneath the glittering veneer. It makes it authentic, a quality any good journalist has to have.
The notion that Fleming was a very able writer, despite much fashionable opinion both at the time and since his death, is borne out by his depiction of Bond. We instinctively think of 007 now as a superhuman, effortlessly capable, emotionally void user of women, but the character Fleming wrote is much more complex than that.
Bond unbound
For all the deeply uncomfortable references to rape even in the first book, the relationship which develops between Bond and Vesper Lynd is not an off-the-peg Casanova-style seduction. After beating the villain, Le Chiffre, at cards, Bond is kidnapped along with Lynd and tortured, saved only by the deus ex machina intervention of a Russian agent. As Bond recuperates in hospital, Lynd visits him every day and he comes to realise that his initial planned seduction was a precursor to genuine romantic love: he contemplates leaving the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) so that they can start a life together.
Nothing in Fleming’s work is that simple, of course. Lynd is a double agent, albeit an unwilling one, blackmailed by the Soviet intelligence service. She realises she will never escape her controllers, and, leaving a note for Bond, takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. This shattering personal tragedy, in the first novel, remember, has a profound impact on Fleming’s protagonist. Bond, wounded almost beyond repair, retreats behind a cold, severe, professional persona, outwardly damning and dismissing Lynd’s betrayal. The closing words of Casino Royale are as arresting as the opening. Bond reports the status of his mission to headquarters with a callousness that shows something in him has died.
“This is 007 speaking… pass this on at once. 3030 was a double working for Redland. Yes, dammit, I said ‘was.’ The bitch is dead now.”
We come to learn that this is not the whole truth. In 1963’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming reveals that Bond travels to Royale-les-Eaux, the (fictional) setting for Casino Royale, every year to visit Lynd’s grave; and in Diamonds Are Forever he skips “La Vie en Rose” on the record player in Tiffany Case’s apartment “because it has memories for him”— it had been playing in the nightclub in Royale-les-Eaux where he and Lynd had celebrated in that first novel.
It is a myth that the 1950s were a time of total emotional repression: but feelings, especially male feelings, were expressed through gritted teeth, and as a partial admission of failure. Think of Charles Frend’s magnificent war film The Cruel Sea, released the same year as Casino Royale, and Jack Hawkins’ agonised, anguished performance as a naval officer wrestling with having caused the death of a group of sailors while on patrol. Or think a little further back, to Brief Encounter of 1945, the mesmerising David Lean/Noël Coward film in which Trevor Johnson and Celia Howard give the performances of their lives as lovers who can never be together.
Bond is suffused with that spirit of tightly wound, ruthlessly suppressed emotion. Of course he is: orphaned at 11 when his parents are killed in a climbing accident in France, he is sent to Eton (from which he is expelled) then Fettes, growing up quickly but by necessity, and is recruited to SIS a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. So he is institutionalised by one establishment after another, as was Fleming, and as were many men of his age and social class.
Throughout the Bond novels Fleming shows us an antihero who is fundamentally unhappy, wounded and almost nihilistic. Perhaps his attitude to his job and the world is shown most brutally in the short story The Living Daylights (1966), in which he is sent to West Berlin to kill a Russian sniper who, in turn, is charged with killing a British agent who is trying to escape. Before he is even briefed, Bond senses it will not be a pleasant mission.
“This was going to be bad news, dirty news… This was to be murder…. Let M bloody well say so.”
This is not a 007 who relishes killing. Indeed, as the mission wears on, Bond’s patience with his host, Captain Paul Sender of Station B, snaps, and we see for a moment Bond’s inner life.
“‘Look, my friend,’ said Bond wearily,’’I’ve got to commit a murder tonight… So be a good chap and stuff it, would you? You can tell Tanqueray anything you like when it’s over. Think I like this job? Having a Double-O number and so on? I’d be quite happy for you to get me sacked from the Double-O Section. Then I could settle down and make a snug nest of papers as an ordinary staffer.’”
This is an important and overlooked aspect of the Bond whom Fleming created. From the very first novel, for all the attractive women, glamorous travel and luxurious food and drink, 007 is imbued with an unshakeable sense of sadness. He has a lurking patriotism, though it often wavers, and a sense of satisfaction in his own skills, but there is nothing optimistic, nothing cheerful, nothing in him which suggests that the future is rosy, if it exists at all.
A vicarious audience
That glamour brings me to the last element of putting Fleming’s Bond in context. It is true that the novels are dripping with brand references and ostentatious displays of Fleming’s personal tastes and quirks: Bond’s casual hatred of Virginia tobacco in From Russia, With Love, or his dismissal of Captain Sender in The Living Daylights because his tie indicates he attended Winchester, Eton’s great rival, and behaves “like a good Wykehamist… concealed his distaste for the job beneath careful, trite conversation”.
These are not simply opportunities for Fleming to demonstrate his likes and dislikes. Partly, the precision of Bond’s habits, from the preparation of the Vesper martini to the kind of cigarettes he smokes, are a legacy of Fleming’s days as a reporter. Much more importantly, though, they are aimed at the audience of Britain in the 1950s, and calculated to attract those who wanted to see, learn about and live vicariously with luxury and glamour. It is impossible to overstate this.
This depends on the exact time at which Fleming was writing and publishing. He began writing Casino Royale on 15 January 1952 and completed the first draft, with extraordinary efficiency, on 16 February (10 days, for what it is worth, after the death of George VI). It was released on 13 April 1953. For all that the Second World War was fading from the immediate memory, and the accession of the young Queen Elizabeth II gave many a sense of progress and hope, Britain was a country still heavily marked by the conflict. Fleming may have spent his winters in Jamaica at this stage, but he knew this all too well.
One of the greatest impositions on ordinary people was rationing, and the restrictions on basic items actually grew more severe once the war had ended. In July 1946, bread was placed under rationing and would remain so for two years. Sweets and chocolate ceased to be rationed in 1949 but there was such a rush to buy these now-freely available luxuries that the government had to reintroduce rationing after three and a half months, and it would only be scrapped entirely for sweets in February 1953. Sugar rationing came to an end that September, and all food rationing was abolished in April 1954.
This was the society for which Fleming was writing. It was not just one in which luxuries like Gordon’s Gin and Dimple Haig whisky were aspirational items but in which some food items were still, when Casino Royale was published, allowed only in amounts limited and regulated by the government.
As for the far-flung locales in which so many Bond novels were set, these too were largely aspirational, beyond the reach of most readers. There was a state-owned airline, British Overseas Airways Corporation, and its smaller, shorter-range spin-off, British European Airways, and while Thomas Cook (also state-owned) was beginning to offer charter flights to international destinations, the overwhelming majority of holidays, more than nine in 10, were taken in Britain. Those who did go abroad tended to venture only as far as France or Ireland.
Even then, travelling outside the United Kingdom was not a matter of invigorating freedom. There were strict controls on the amount of money people could take out of the country, with sums carefully listed on a page of their passports, and in 1952, the annual allowance for an adult for personal travel abroad was £25: five times the average weekly wage, but less than, say, the cost of a television. So even for those very few who could afford foreign travel, it was a matter of eking out a state-imposed currency allowance and travelling on a state-owned airline, or taking a holiday organised by the state-owned travel agent.
It is easy, then, to imagine how glamorous and carefree Commander James Bond must have seemed, flying to the United States or Jamaica or Turkey with studied ease, often first-class. Not only that, he always appeared comfortable and at home in his destinations, knowledgeable and often deferentially recognised. There is Fleming’s journalistic instinct: the details mattered to an audience seeing a world they could not access.
Deserving a re-assessment?
None of this is an irrefutable case for liking Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. Much of it is subjective, and many people will still find them jarring, or dislikeable, or poorly written. I think that is unfair, and see them as carefully crafted landmarks in the development of spy literature. But I do think they can only fairly be judged in their full context and on accurate charges. Fleming took his work very seriously, even if he often hid it, but his aspirations were serious. The novels are complex, full of emotion—good and bad—deeply influenced by their author and his times, but also offering readers a degree of escape.
The literary Bond is unquestionably overshadowed now by the cinema franchise, a development which perhaps Fleming would not have minded if the commercial success was sufficiently lucrative. But the 12 novels and two short-story collections are not simply the source of a character and (decreasingly) plots and settings. They are much richer than that. Fleming gave the world a new kind of novel, and a new kind of (anti)hero, and we should remember him for that as we mark 60 years since his death.
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Av Tom Simpson.
Lisens: CC BY NC 2.0
