Junk Bond

You now need to be in your mid-sixties or older — a chilling thought — not to have lived your whole life in the shadow of James Bond. In 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation and the conquest of Everest, Bond announced his arrival with the words, ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’, the opening line of Casino Royale.

His creator was Ian Fleming, a cynical, not-very-clean-living newspaperman with a chequered career behind him, who wrote the book to take his mind off ‘the agony’ of getting married for the first time. Even Jonathan Cape, his publisher, thought the book ‘not up to scratch’, but brought it out in a modest print run as a favour to Fleming’s then better-known brother Peter, among other things the Spectator columnist ‘Strix’ for many years.

Now, more than 60 years later, and more than 50 after the death of his creator, 007 is in the news again, as we learn that Daniel Craig may or may not sign up to play Bond for the fifth time. Sir Roger Moore, who played Bond in all of seven movies between 1973 and 1985, says gravely that ‘He is the incumbent actor in the role, until he says otherwise.’ But Craig seems to be suffering from Bond fatigue, and has reportedly said that he’s ‘done’ with the part. Some of us will sympathise, having been done with Bond a long time since.

Even so, ‘Bondage’ has been a most revealing phenomenon; it’s not too much to call it an episode in cultural and social history. As the books became more popular, they attracted notoriety, scolded by critics for their ‘vulgarity and display’, their air of dissipation, and for the sex, or the kind of sex, well before the present age, when everything about them offends against contemporary canons of correctness, from Bond’s 70th cigarette of the day to ‘the sweet tang of rape’.