`The Man Who Saved Britain` book review (The Times)

THE MAN WHO SAVED BRITAIN - Simon Winder

Most heroes of what Orwell called Good/Bad fiction (Sherlock Holmes is the obvious example) grow on the reader. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is an exception. Bond, the nominal subject of The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder, is at his best in the first book in the series, Casino Royale, which was published in 1953. There is one location, one villain, one chase and one girl. There are no gadgets. Though Bond is often described as “quintessentially English” (nothing is more quintessentially English than assuming that this is an insult), the tone of Casino Royale and its celebration of gambling, fast cars and sex make one think of Roger Nimier, Pascal Jardin, or Françoise Sagan - reports The Times.

Bond himself is a cruel, but tragic, figure. He has killed men in cold blood and his views on sex are summed up in words that could come from a late Beckett monologue: “the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears”. Bond’s appeal in Casino Royale comes largely from the fact that we know so little about him. Soon, however, we know too much. His cover – that he works as a salesman for Universal Export – is all too convincing. One can imagine the dread that fills anyone sitting next to him on a long-haul flight as they endure the endless recital of Bond’s opinions and as they learn, with foreboding, that his principal interests are cars and golf. Like many men who never cook, Bond is faddy about his food – you could create a novella just by stringing together all the descriptions of how he likes his breakfast.

The best feature of Casino Royale is its ending – shocking to readers at the time because it broke with the gentlemanly conventions of Buchanesque writing and shocking to us now because (fed on a diet of Bond films) we expect all the Bond adventures to finish with some Carry-On-esque double entendre on a space ship. The ending is what Fleming gets wrong in all the subsequent books. Some of them have wonderful beginnings, but they all end up with lazy and improbable denouements. Bond’s very indestructibility becomes annoying – what is the point of all this violence if you know that the hero is always going to be saved by a well-placed cigarette case or the sudden arrival of Felix Leiter? Bond comes back from the grave with wearying predictability. Back after being stabbed with Rosa Klebb’s poison-tipped blade and back again after M writes his ludicrous obituary in The Times. Bond even outlived his creator. After Fleming’s death in 1964, manuscripts that had wisely been left in the drawer at Goldeneye, his Jamaican house, were dug out and published. Most of all, Bond was reborn as a film character. The producer Cubby Broccoli bought the rights and churned out a film every couple of years, long after his team had exhausted every plot that bore any resemblance to anything that Fleming had written. Bond even survived being played by Roger Moore.

Casino Royale was published when Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. Twelve years later, Fleming died, just in time to spare him the sight of Harold Wilson entering Downing Street. In the interim, almost every British Imperial possession had been abandoned – a process presided over by Iain Macleod – who, as a bridge-playing, Fettes-educated Scotsman who had had a good war, bore some odd resemblances to Bond.
All the well-known English obsessions are in the Bond stories. Sex and snobbery are so close to the surface that they jump off the page. References to the Second World War, and Bond’s distaste for Germans, permeate the early novels. All this means that the books are an object of fascination to historians. David Cannadine and Jeremy Black have both devoted substantial essays to the subject. Sometimes I wonder whether Fleming was deliberately teasing academics by creating such an obvious piece of source material. In You Only Live Twice, Bond concludes a rather laboured discussion of Britain’s decline with the words “Let’s leave that to the political historians”, and in The Man with the Golden Gun there is a nice passage about a louche retired Regius Professor of History from Oxford who writes reports for M.

The Bond books contain numerous throw-away references to Britain’s retreat from Empire – in Suez, Kenya and Cyprus. In Moonraker, patrons at Blades look at Bond and imagine him to be the kind of chap “who was attached to Templar in Malaya”. In fact, Bond’s only encounter with Imperial authority, when he drinks port with the Governor of the Bahamas in “A Quantum of Solace”, is not a comfortable one. His natural hunting ground is Europe – particularly the region around his mother’s birthplace of Geneva. Buchan’s heroes (though not Buchan himself) had lived in an Empire of open frontiers in which everything was up for grabs. For men of Fleming’s generation (those born around 1908), and even more for those of Bond’s generation (he is always about thirty-five and, therefore, in his earliest incarnation, must have been born in the early 1920s), this kind of Empire no longer existed. Only children in the seven blissful, barefoot years before prep school found India or Kenya to be exciting places. Grown-ups spent their lives as glorified filing clerks in a society where the most rigid social and racial distinctions were enforced. Indeed, Bond’s horror of gentility (note his aversion to tea) is very much to do with a rejection of Late Imperial Simla and Cheltenham.

If the Bond novels are useful to historians, then it is as a source about the social decline of the upper middle class rather than the decline of Britain as a Great Power. In many ways, Fleming/Bond are similar to that other odd couple of British letters – Eric Blair and George Orwell. Orwell, like Bond, is a dramatized version of his creator. Orwell wrote of the humiliation that came from knowing how to hunt and shoot but realizing that one would never have the means to do these things. Bond belongs to an epoch when this dilemma touched ever larger sections of the British upper-middle class. Bond’s own financial circumstances and family background are a bit confused – sometimes he has a small private income, and sometimes he lives off his salary, but he is always aware of having, as he puts it himself, “not quite enough” money. You could escape this world (as Orwell did) by sinking out of the middle class, or you could escape (as in the Bond novels) by living the high life, courtesy of a Secret Service expense account. I suspect that the single line that excited British readers most in the Bond novels occurs in Moonraker: “When he was on a job he could spend as much as he liked”.

What of Bond’s attitudes to women? He uses the word “suffragette” as a term of abuse, nods sagely when his Turkish friend says that every woman wants to be carried to a cave and raped, and accepts it as no more than his due when Pussy Galore says that she has been “cured” of her lesbianism by contact with a “real man”. Perhaps critics who throw up their hands in horror at all this should allow for the possibility that Fleming, and perhaps even Bond, had a sense of humour. During a tedious official dinner, Bond says that his ideal woman would be an air hostess, while thinking privately how much he would hate living with such a “insipid slave”. The real Bond girls are tough – on two occasions they save his life. The image of Bond as the sexual conquistador belongs to the films. In the books, Bond is given to wistful fantasies about seductions in French country hotels, but he is often unsuccessful.

Simon Winder’s fashionably genre-bending book mixes history with a succession of literary essays, but mainly it is a work of oblique autobiography about the relationship that Winder himself first formed with Bond, whilst eating an Old Jamaica chocolate bar and watching Live and Let Die as a ten-year-old in 1973 in a suburban cinema. Childhood (boyhood to be more accurate) is the great unspoken theme of the Bond books. There has always been an odd interchange between Bond and children’s fiction – Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Roald Dahl wrote the film script for You Only Live Twice. Bond’s own childhood is intriguingly evoked in snippets. He does not like drinking pastis because it reminds him of liquorice, and at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he surveys the beach at Royale-les-Eaux and thinks (with complacency or regret?): “How far he had come since the freckles and Cadbury milk chocolate flakes and the fizzy lemonade”.

For Winder, Bond is a kind of anaesthetic fantasy that eases the pain of Britain’s transition from Great Power to small nation. But it is more complicated than that. Bond belongs to the trente douleureuses of British history that followed the Second World War. In the mid- 1970s, however, things began to change. Airey Neave (a man with close links to the spooks) managed Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party. Whether Thatcher reversed Britain’s economic decline is going to be a moot point for many years. It is certain, however, that she reversed the decline in the living standards of the English upper middle class. Suddenly, public-school boys who wanted to drive fast cars, wear flash suits and gamble with other people’s money could do so in real life: they just joined corporate finance departments. In The World Is Not Enough, Brosnan’s Bond infiltrates a smart party by pretending to be a specialist in “hostile take-overs”. Fleming’s own relatives were big winners from the city boom: they sold out the family bank (Jardine Fleming) to Chase Manhattan in 2000 – at the very top of the market.

The new confidence among the rich was reflected in the derision with which almost all Oxbridge undergraduates greeted attempts to recruit them into MI6. A friend told me how his supervisor at Trinity tried to entice him with the promise that “they will find you a nice wife”. The Man Who Saved Britain evokes all this, in a book of eccentric brilliance that covers everything from Jamaica as lieu de mémoire to the sexual magnetism of General Nasser.

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