The thriller writer with the golden touch

A faint whiff of literary snobbery accompanied the news that Sebastian Faulks has written a new James Bond novel. “No one tipped the acclaimed serious literary novelist . . . to be entrusted with the latest incarnation of Britain’s most famous spy,” one newspaper noted. Another sniffed that replicating Ian Fleming required an ability to write “bouts of genteel sex at bestseller level” - writes Ben Macintyre in The Times.

Martin Amis, on Radio 4, noted that his father, Kingsley Amis, completed the first “continuation Bond” in 1965. “After he divorced my mother, Kingsley was so churned up emotionally that he couldn’t write anything more serious than James Bond,” Amis said.

The subtext of all this was clear: the James Bond novels are not serious literature. Writers of a higher brow have always wrestled with Bond, trying, and failing, to consign him to pulp fiction. Yet nearly a century after Fleming’s birth, and more than half a century after he sat down to write, Bond remains a literary landmark of the modern age. So far from being mere adventure stories, the Bond books created an entire fictional world around a single individual, as enduring and rich as those of Sherlock Holmes or Bertie Wooster.

That a literary novelist of Faulks’s calibre should take on Fleming’s mantle is a fitting tribute to one of Britain’s greatest thriller writers. That assessment of Ian Fleming has been, is and probably always will be hotly disputed. Many readers have been neither shaken nor stirred by James Bond in book form, but enraged and offended: by his perceived misogyny, materialism, violence and sexual coldness. Ever since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953, debate has raged over whether Fleming’s novels are titillating pop culture with a cruel edge, or a higher art.

During his lifetime, Fleming’s detractors included the likes of Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Muggeridge. The latter hammered Bond as “utterly despicable; obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways”. Paul Johnson, in a devastating New Statesman essay of 1958 entitled “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism”, described Dr No as the nastiest book he had ever read. Fleming himself did not help matters by his diffident attitude towards his own creation: this “thriller thing”, his “oafish opus”, the “pillow book fantasies of an adolescent mind”.

Bond is a medical as well as a literary miracle. In our health conscious times, 007’s louche lifestyle seems more of a threat to his health than any number of SMERSH assassins. At the start of Casino Royale, Bond is tucking into his 70th cigarette of the day, while sucking down endless bottles of champagne and weapons-grade martinis made from three measures of Gordon’s gin, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet, a wincingly bitter aperitif heavily fortified with quinine. It is amazing Bond could stand up, let alone drive his Bentley.

But Bond has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for literary survival. Some of the author’s more perceptive contemporaries predicted as much. Fleming will still be read, observed Noël Coward, “long after the Quennells and the Connollys have disappeared”. (Peter Quennell was a prominent critic of the 1940s and 1950s; none of his books is in print today.) Bond has seen off every rival. Bulldog Drummond was put down two generations ago; John Buchan creaks with age; Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu has not survived the passage of time and the evolution of racial attitudes. But Bond still lives and breathes, without wheezing.

Fleming’s vivid descriptions fire off the page; his plots still cruise along at souped-up Bentley speed and he writes with a tensile beauty. Above all, Fleming’s imagined universe remains believable, though the purest fantasy. As John Betjeman wrote to Fleming shortly before his death: “The Bond world is as real and full of fear and mystery as Conan Doyle’s Norwood and Surrey and Baker Street . . . This is real art. I look up to you.”

This world – of an emotionally cauterised upper-class British secret agent – welcomed allcomers. John F. Kennedy was reading a Bond novel the night before he was assassinated; so was Lee Harvey Oswald, his killer. Bond offers escapism, but of a serious sort. To the readers of the 1950s, Bond was a promise of glamour and plenty amid postwar austerity, the thrill of sexual licence in a buttoned-up society. In our own time of uncertainty, Bond is still the man who can do anything and achieve everything, an exemplar of what Anthony Burgess called “Renaissance gusto” in a frightened age.

Raymond Chandler, the only thriller writer to rival Fleming for sheer staying power, identified the three qualities that make the Bond books “almost unique” in British writing: a willingness to experiment with conventional English, a flamboyant evocation of place and an “acute sense of pace”.

Fleming has been repeatedly emulated, parodied and “continued”, but never equalled, let alone bettered. Fleming published 14 books; some 20 continuation novels have followed. A few are good, but none quite captured Fleming’s (and Bond’s) authentic, smoky and sardonic voice. The skills for that are not those of the thriller writer or the mimic, but the more profound talents of the literary novelist, which is what makes the appointment of Faulks as the newest Bond author so intriguing, and so promising.

Even at the height of his fame, Fleming was modest about his literary accomplishments. He would have been flattered that Kingsley Amis should be his first authorised heir, and Faulks his latest, but he might not have been surprised at the homage. “I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories,” he once declared. Ten years later Fleming achieved that self-appointed mission, and wrote the spy story that has no end.

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