Candia Mcwilliam

A bumper crop of Bondage

Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: ‘The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards.’

Over 50 years later (Casino Royale, the first Bond book, was published in 1953, its author born in 1908) what is the verdict? That highly accessoried and fetishistic sex in the novels is rather unpenetrative by comparison with thriller-sex now; it is too ultra-romantic, of course, in the mean-keen/ luxe-location mode. The sadism is beating away in the heart of the novels, not to be minimised but nothing like as sub- cutaneous as what you might now find at the cinema in a film categorised PG. There is no question that the vulgarity of money for its own sake in the world without the fictionalised world of novels has quite outglared anything to be found within their pages. As for standards, Bond has them. He has them about everything, from the material world, where he is a famous fusspot about the details of his drinks, his scrambled eggs, his clothes, and women’s too, to the world of manners, which in the old days constituted the silken armour that manifested the real spirit of the man within — patriot, spy, loner, orphan.

‘Innocence’, wrote Ian Fleming in those notebooks of which Henry Chancellor makes splendid use in James Bond: The Man and his World (John Murray, £20) and that are germane to the imagined world he made in his novels,

is appealing but it isn’t interesting. It belongs to flowers and vegetables and tadpoles only. The guilty are interesting because they have lived in the world we know, which is a guilty place full of guilty people.

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