On My Shelves: James Bond

Bond. James Bond. Agent of MI6, British spy, with the number of 007 – the 00 prefix meaning that he has a literal License to Kill. The secret agent who set the standard against which all others – even those written better, even those more accurately researched – will be compared. Described in the books as handsome but with a cruel edge, something like Hoagy Carmichael (a well-known songwriter and actor of the 1930s-40s), Bond has of course been played in film by multiple actors ranging from the inimitable Sean Connery to Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan.

It is, of course, the films that are best-known today, and they have long since acquired their own style and set of memes, leaving the specifics of their originating novels behind. This is not terribly surprising, of course, as there were only twelve Bond novels (and two short story collections) written by Ian Fleming, and there are now considerably more films, spanning seven decades. The original novels, drawing on Fleming's own intelligence experience for background, were written over a 14 year period starting in 1953, and so even the most recent is fifty years old.

(I always am amused to note, as a side point, that Ian Fleming is famous for one other novel, in a completely different genre, which was also turned into a fairly well-known movie: the children's book Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, about a magical motorcar.)

Recently I have been re-reading the novels and felt they were worth reviewing. One of the first things to strike a modern reader is that these are short novels, somewhere around sixty to seventy thousand words each. To an extent this probably explains one of the reasons they were attractive to movie producers; they're action-adventures that are short enough to require relatively little trimming, as opposed to modern novels which are typically between a hundred and a hundred twenty thousand words. They are very quick reads, written in a straightforward, clean prose style that makes them easy to read.

The character of Bond is very different from his usual movie versions, although a few – such as Dalton and Craig's versions – have come somewhat closer. Bond is a man of tension, of loyalty that binds him to the Service and for which he sacrifices pretty much everything else, and the pain that is generated by these sacrifices. He is a sincere believer in his basic mission, in the justified patriotism of his cause, but is subject to significant trauma, doubts of his capability, and cumulative punishment (both physical and mental) that pushes him to the edge of, and sometimes over the edge, of a breakdown.

He is also often not a very nice man. The film Bond can be charming, sympathetic, and sophisticated; for the novel Bond, these are often mere veneers over a focused, calculated killer, a man who has a nasty job to do and is going to do it. But he does show a softer side, most frequently with regards to women but by no means exclusively so, and is capable of warmth, humor, and even an occasional one-liner that presages the later overuse of such things in the movies.

By far the hardest parts of the novels to deal with is their unabashed bigotry – in the form of casual racism, jingoism/Western Exceptionalism, sexism, and so on. It is unsurprising, of course, to see the Soviet Union and its satellite states portrayed as almost unvaryingly villainous in a novel focused on espionage in the middle of the Cold War. Rather less easy to dismiss is the treatment of minorities – ranging from people of color to gays.

At times, Fleming includes casual evaluations of entire "races" which would have been at home in something written 50 or more years earlier than he was writing. Bond himself is a quite unselfconscious sexist, although he does develop some during the course of the novels (in the first novel he's quite consciously explicit in his thoughts about the "place" that women should occupy in a man's life; this changes to a significant degree as his career wears on).

The novel version of Bond is also far less reliant on high-tech gadgetry than the movie version. While Major Boothroyd and others will help to equip Bond, the number and type of devices he's given are probably an order of magnitude less than seen in most of the movies. Bond relies far more on his native instincts, fast reflexes, and careful pre-planning than he does on some new bizarre gadget.

This does tend to mean that he gets put through severe physical and often psychological torment. Fleming is not graphic about injuries and torture very often, but he's very clear about just how very savage the adversaries of a man like Bond can, and will, be in order to achieve their goals. Bond is formidable – it's explicit that he is in fact the very best shot in the entire Service, and he demonstrates he's quite capable in hand-to-hand – but is far from the strongest or toughest or most skilled combatant he ever encounters. He suffers numerous vicious beatings, to the point that even he occasionally muses on how much longer it will be before his body refuses to recover, and is often in the position of being half-dead while trying to finish his mission.

Overall? These are still fast-reading novels of adventure with excellent pacing. For a modern reader, they are filled with problematic imagery and language, and given their length are relatively sparse in the character development area. The power of the concept of James Bond remains, and it is easy to see why Mr. Bond captured the imagination of filmmakers… and why that realization of the idea has still continued to capture the imagination of filmgoers over many decades.

Still, they are extremely dated, and those unfamiliar with, or made too uncomfortable by, the casually extreme racism present in this and other types of novels of earlier eras may wish to avoid reading them. But for those who find themselves able to get past these flaws, they remain quick and exciting reads and vastly important literary landmarks in the annals of adventure fiction.