This awesome literary endeavor from my friend Seth Madej is worth reading even if you aren’t a James Bond fanaticbagger. When you’re done, you can read about PONIES.
via sethmad.com
I READ ALL 3000 PAGES OF IAN FLEMING’S GROOVY 007 OEUVRE
by Seth Madej, September 3, 2013
In May of 2012, I finished a five-month stint of watching all the James Bond movies in order. When I was done, I somehow found myself no less unemployed than when I’d started, so I opted to rectify that the only way I knew how: by reading in order all of Ian Fleming’s 007 books – 12 novels and two short-story collections. It took me over a year, a rate of about one book per month.
I’d read two of Fleming’s stories before – Casino Royale 12 or 13 years ago, and Goldfinger when I was a teenager, from which for some reason I’ve always remembered the sentence, “Bond felt the skin-crawling tickle at the groin that dates from one’s first game of hide and seek in the dark.” — long enough ago that I didn’t know what to expect in terms of quality, theme, character, or anything else.
As for the former, it’s kind of remarkable how, as different as the Bond novels are from the movies, they parade over the same range of quality. A few are excellent; a few I can still smell on me. While none are true masterpieces, some are truly awful, or at least awful-adjacent. The first several books strangely alternate from great to lousy, one after another. This might be a sign of Fleming searching around for what works/sells, or it might be an early indication of a phenomenon that becomes crystal clear in Fleming’s later work: the reader can tell when Fleming’s bored with the character and subjects of the series he’s buried himself under, and his writing suffers. When he finds new ways to interest himself — short stories, pushing Bond out of the way as in The Spy Who Loved Me, or marrying him off in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – you can all but see the author sitting up in his chair and leaning into his typewriter with a forgotten cigarette burned down to its twigish holder.
The first car James Bond drives in Ian Fleming’s novels, a 1930 Bentley 4.5-liter “Blower.”
When it comes to theme, character, and the rest, I can and should confirm what anyone with more than a passing interest in 007 has heard: with few exceptions, Fleming’s novels have very little in common with the films they inspired, and some of the books and their cinematic counterparts share nothing but a title. Everything that the movies’ devotees love about James Bond came from Fleming — his casual sophistication, his lady-parts-liking, and his both epicurean and gourmand tendencies1 — but the literary 007 psychologically most resembles the recent onscreen incarnation that longtime fans tend to complain about.
Ian Fleming’s James Bond is cold. He is more angry than witty. He considers himself a paid murderer and broods intently about it. He floods that anguish, and his frequent boredom, with an inhuman alcohol intake, piles of food, and sex. He loves women as vessels to physically insert himself into, which occasionally evolves into some weird perversion of love, but otherwise he is unquestionably a misogynist. He hates homosexuals even more, though to be fair he considers himself to be superior to most everyone. He is fiercely loyal to the rest,2 and will die for them. He’s a good guy to have on your side, but most anyone meeting him today would think he’s a dick.
Bond’s second car, a 1953 Bentley Mark VI.
The author’s tone starts out mirroring that character. Fleming’s debut novel, Casino Royale, is blunt, ugly, and great. One of Fleming’s greatest strengths was his ability to relate the extraordinary world of a secret agent as completely straightforward and unremarkable; the reader feels like the author’s seen all of this chasing and killing and fucking before and has forgotten that some of it might seem exciting to us.
After a few books, Fleming’s love of detail and his own strange personality combine with the sense of freedom brought on by his success and breed what becomes the greatest quality of his writing, the one that makes him unique among spinners of spy thrillers: Ian Fleming’s stories are weird. Actually, that’s not really true; his stories are usually pretty ordinary, but they’re folded in with dark, lathery weirdness. From Russia With Love’s Colonel Rosa Klebb makes an attempt to seduce Tatiana Romanova so grotesque that the girl runs screaming from the room. Thunderball devotes a chapter to transcribing the thoughts of a pilot while he betrays and murders his crew. The villain of You Only Live Twice hides out in the center of a magnificent garden populated by hundreds of species of deadly plants, built as an invitation for any disconsolate locals to come kill themselves (which they do, by the hundreds). These kinds of monstrosities flesh out Fleming’s work and, as much as anything else he did, inspired the characteristics of the James Bond movies that’ve kept them going for 50 years.
My approximation of Bond’s third car, a “Bentley Mark II Continental.” No such model actually existed, so it’s assumed that Fleming is referring to a Bentley R-Type Continental. Bond’s coupe has a custom body, shortening the cabin and removing the backseat. He also upgrades the engine to a supercharged 4.9-liter, against the protests of Rolls-Royce.
So: should you read the books? If you’re not a Bond fan, or just as a casual one, it’s certainly worth picking up Thunderball or From Russia With Love as a beach diversion or even just as an exercise in cultural literacy. If you are a Bond fan,3 there’s a great joy of discovery to be found in Fleming’s work. I reveled in the bits of 007′s life that never made it off the page, like the play-by-play of his Monday office routine in Moonraker. At the very least treat yourself to a few of the nine short stories in For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which feel like thumbing through a lost family photo album.
As for me, and I’m not sure what comes next. I’ll definitely read the first 007 novel not written by Fleming, Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun (originally published under the pseudonym Robert Markham) and Amis’s preceding analysis of the character, The James Bond Dossier. I’m less excited to explore John Gardner’s series that came along in the Eighties. I hear that, even though it numbers two more books than the original, it combined isn’t worth one of Fleming’s. That said, over the last two years I’ve come to like having James Bond around as a foil to my extraordinarily ordinary life. It’s inevitable that at some point I’ll pick up the rest of the books as a way to ask him to come back and kick some shit around.
Now here are some lists, with links to some of my reviews for the exceptionally rapt.4
My Five Favorite Ian Fleming 007 Books (in order of preference)
1. Thunderball
2. From Russia With Love
3. Casino Royale
4. Octopussy and The Living Daylights
5. For Your Eyes Only
The first half of From Russia With Love is the best thing Ian Fleming ever wrote and one of the few bits of the Bond canon that can be considered classic outside of its own world, but the novel falls apart by the end. It typifies the disappointment that lingers over Fleming’s work: he was never able to write one perfect Bond novel.5
My Five Least Favorite Ian Fleming 007 Books (in no particular order)
• Live and Let Die
• Diamonds are Forever
• Doctor No
• You Only Live Twice
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ian Fleming had a strange relationship with race. A privileged white Englishman, he wrote all of the 007 books in newly independent Jamaica. He was a racist in so much that he stereotyped by race, but in a neutral way, without hate. It permeates much of his work, most notably his worst novel, Live and Let Die. That book’s saturation with hackneyed ideas about African-American culture make it extremely unpleasant.
My Favorite First Edition 007 Cover
This was a tough choice, because most of Fleming’s Bond books were given beautiful painted covers by Richard Chopping, a Colchester artist who hung around with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.6 Chopping was the Maurice Binder of literary Bond, and he returned 17 years after Fleming’s death to illustrate the cover for John Gardner’s first 007 novel, Licence Renewed.
- Ian Fleming loved writing about food and did it as well as anyone. For proof of that, wipe my drool off of my post “James Bond, Fatty.” [↩]
- To M more than anyone else. [↩]
- Which if you’re not I’m not sure why you’re still reading. Is it 4am and the Zzzquil’s not working? [↩]
- All 14 of my reviews cant can be found under the tag “007,” along with a few other bits of interest to Bond-likers. They’re also on Goodreads. [↩]
- Though an argument could be made that “The Living Daylights” is the perfect Bond story. [↩]
- You can see all the covers paired with my book reviews. [↩]
