An obsession with Bond

Fleming had flirted with writing and literature while at Eton and, afterward, read widely among leading British and continental literary magazines. It's unsurprising, therefore, that the novel he produced, like its successors, slipped neatly into a serious -- though entertaining -- genre that the British invented early in the 20th century. What we now call espionage or spy fiction begins with three great English novels -- Rudyard Kipling's "Kim" (1901), Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands" (1903) and Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" (1907). All three authors were from the periphery of the Empire and profoundly concerned with questions of identity -- Kipling the Anglo-Indian, Childers the Anglo-Irishmen, Conrad the immigrant. Their concerns would predominate in a field of literature whose greatest practitioners -- Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Maugham, Len Deighton and others -- all would be British. Their subject would be identity and loyalty in a century in which ideology's demands obscurely challenged, indeed subverted, older, more traditional bonds. Fleming's Bond is untroubled by all that ambiguity, but he confronts profound questions of identity in distinctly midcentury, post-war fashion. He's an unself-conscious patriot but deeply conflicted by the nature of his work, its demands and by the necessity of defining himself though his work. Very much in the mode of his time, he also defines identity as style -- one that quickly made its way into the consumer economy as, for example, a penchant for casual, short-sleeved shirts, dry martinis and Rolex watches.

Coming to Fleming's utterly masterful Bond novels fresh after many years, one is surprised to find just how tough-minded and extraordinarily well written they are. (It's easy to see why John F. Kennedy so admired them, a taste that was instrumental in winning Bond's first American audience.) Fleming was a taut and propulsive stylist with a deep gift for characterization. Perhaps because we now see Bond through the gauzy scrim of affable, slightly preposterous films with inevitable political and sexual happy endings, it's easy to forget that the Bond of Fleming's books was, in many cases, an unlovely character, often described as "cruel," his relations with women often aggressive and forthrightly exploitative.