Bonding With Bond

I love this headline: “The Spy Who Didn’t Suck.” In fact, I’d steal it in a New York minute, had Bookslut not just used it to crown a quite wonderful essay by Clayton Moore, in which the critic discovers that fictional British secret agent James Bond isn’t a one-dimensional figure who appeared in novels by Ian Fleming that are all but unreadable today. In fact, writes Moore, contrary to the contemporary zeitgeist that would have us believe that Fleming’s protagonist is a rather embarrassing leftover from another era, “maybe James Bond does still matter.” He opines further:

The general feeling, especially among those for whom Bond is a purely cinematic creation represented only by Sean Connery’s mushy delivery, is that 007 is an anachronism, a fleeting souvenir of the long-dead Cold War. With his penchant for multiple vices and an almost preening arrogance, it’s difficult to take Bond seriously in an age when magazine-wielding robots like Jason Bourne are kicking ass across a gritty European landscape far different than the sun-kissed scenes in Cubby Broccoli’s movies.

So it was an odd thing to rediscover the world’s most famous spy as a literary entity, spun from thin cloth by Ian Fleming and the other writers lucky enough to take a shot at him. Reading his debut, it was fascinating to remember what a bastard Fleming’s Bond really is. He’s a cold enough fish in the opening chapters of Casino Royale, reeking of smoke and vodka, his dead eyes scanning the baccarat tables. He’s even more brutal on the final page, reporting on the death of Vesper Lynd: “Yes, dammit, I said ‘was.’ The bitch is dead now.” I’m happy to give Sony my money if they make Daniel Craig deliver that line, but I doubt the post-modern world is ready for it.

That’s undoubtedly correct. The coming movie remake of Casino Royale, while it will supposedly give us a darker version of Agent 007, is still likely to polish off some of the original character’s rougher edges. We may be ready to rediscover Bond, as Simon Winder does in an intriguing new book called The Man Who Saved Britain, but we’d prefer to do so on our modern moral and social terms, not his.