LRB review of three reissued Bond novels
John Lanchester reviews the Penguin Classic reissue of three James Bond novels, From Russia with Love, Dr No and Goldfinger.
Simon Winder, the editor responsible for republishing all the novels (and for cheekily bringing out three of them as a Penguin Classic) has said simply and robustly that Fleming was a sado-masochist. This is a sensible way of dealing with the profoundly unsensible sexual attitudes in the novels. It is not anachronistic to find the erotic climate of the novels strange and distracting, since plenty of people were distracted by it at the time. Christopher Hitchens, in his lively introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, quotes Fleming's friend and neighbour Noël Coward on the subject of Honeychile Rider's world- famous bottom, 'almost as firm and rounded as a boy's': 'I know we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?' In a way, we are now better placed to see the sexual attitudes of the books for what they are, part of the wish fulfilment in which the Bond novels bask, in which KGB agents disguised as English gents expose themselves as impostors by ordering red wine with fish, and tough dykes called Pussy Galore secretly long to be converted from sapphism by our cruelly handsome hero. The contrast between the real woman Fleming loved, complicated and demanding and grown-up as she was, and the wank-fantasies of the novels, must have been deeply embarrassing for Ann Fleming, and it is no wonder that she disliked Bond as much as she did.
Sado-masochism permeates the whole atmosphere of the books. I had forgotten until rereading them just how often Bond gets beaten up, how long he spends recovering from it, and how a woman is usually involved in the recuperative process. The strongest currents of feeling in the novels always circulate around these sequences. It would be an exaggeration, but not all that much of an exaggeration, to say that the Bond novels are at heart a series of lavish beatings strung together with thriller elements. The first of these beatings is the most famous - that's the one in Casino Royale where Bond sits in a chair with a hole cut out of it and has his testicles thrashed with a carpet beater - but not one of the novels is without its scene of Bond in torment. The tenderest, most yearning word in Fleming's lexicon is 'cruel'.
So why bother reading the books? The answer to that is the same as it always was: because Fleming wrote so well.
Thanks to Gary from Clean Sheets for the link.
