Ian Fleming’s legendary spy, James Bond, brought a dash of bright colour into Fifties Britain, and continues to thrill readers to this day, says Alan Judd.
Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale (2006)
In 1953, when Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was published, meat was still rationed and most British households did not have a car, a telephone or a television. Many cities, especially London and the ports, were cratered with bomb-sites, crumbling buildings and rampant willow herb. The Soviet Union remained on a war footing, occupying half of Europe and threatening the rest. The Korean War was in progress, a grim and bloody affair that seemed to herald an expansionist Communist China. Newly invented nuclear weapons threatened universal annihilation.
True, there were outbursts of colour and national rejoicing: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the conquest of Everest and, in May the following year, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. But daily life for most people was a struggle for pounds, shillings and pence against a background of chronic housing shortage, limited diet, hand-me-down clothes and, internationally, the management of economic and political decline. Few could afford wine, let alone champagne, and most had never travelled abroad, unless to fight.
In this context, Casino Royale must have stood out like a trumpet call. It heralded the birth of an element of national – and later international – mythology as enduring and almost as credible as the real coronation, climbing Everest or the four-minute mile.
It may seem odd to talk of James Bond in terms of reality, given the lurid fantasy exploits that later developed – particularly in the films – but there’s a lot about him that is grounded in the everyday. The background that most informs Casino Royale is that of the Second World War and Fleming’s role as a naval officer working for the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI). Fleming was not a spy or saboteur; rather he was a headquarters man who helped to devise operations and use the intelligence that came in from the field. His view of intelligence operations was very much that of the action side rather than that of the intelligence-gatherer; in other words, more SOE (Special Operations Executive) than MI6.
That is why Bond is not really a spy. As a rule, he doesn’t discover intelligence and report back or recruit agents to ferret out secrets for him. He conducts assassinations (something not done by British intelligence agencies in peacetime), acts as a saboteur or, as in Casino Royale, seeks the downfall and death of an enemy. He is a high-profile operator, a licensed hitman whose approach may be clandestine but whose operations become public.
Full story at The Telegraph
Full story at The Telegraph