SPL Reads!

Last month saw the 100th birthday of Ian Fleming;  it also saw the publication of a new James Bond novel, Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks, a novelist picked by Fleming’s estate to continue the exploits of the literary British spy.  Faulks’ novel returns to the Cold War era plots and geography of Fleming’s original novels, in effect negating the many Bond novels written after Fleming’s death.

I’m probably not qualified to write about this.  I haven’t read Devil May Care and I’m also very much an Ian Fleming neophyte.  I’ve seen all the James Bond movies (what male in my marketing demographic hasn’t seen at least a handful of them?), but I always suspected that the films departed significantly from the source material of Fleming’s novels.  Maybe Sean Connery’s James Bond seemed to have too much of the actor’s own personality.  So in my recent quest to read anything that could possibly fall under the pulp fiction umbrella, I’ve come to Ian Fleming.  Sure, Fleming’s spy novels are the product of a post-pulp fiction era, they have all the earmarks of those earlier works: swift pacing, outlandish settings and characters, compact plotting that occasionally veers into the lurid, and crowd-pleasing action.  And while pulp fiction seemed to primarily be the domain of American writers (Lovecraft, Howard, et al.), Fleming’s British voice appeared to be the overseas equivalent of mid-twentieth century popular fiction that I’d been seeking.  So I picked up  Casino Royale and Live and Let Die.

Here’s the verdict.  Like a lot of the popular genre fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s that I’ve encountered, Fleming’s Bond novels are a lot better than they have a right to be.  Let me clarify that.  When one thinks of Fleming’s spy novels, probably the last things to come to mind are crisp, almost poetic prose, beautifully rendered settings, and rounded characterizations.  To be sure, the novels aren’t without their pulp cliches: spectacular violence, hard-drinking, womanizing, and improbable plot twists.  However, the literary James Bond possesses a depth of character that is somewhat muted in the films (the truest portrayal of Fleming’s Bond is probably Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, which stays fairly close to the source material, especially given the very different political backdrops in the two eras in which the filma and novel are set). 

I’m still chipping away at Fleming’s Bond novels, but I’ve already learned that the literary Bond is not even English (he’s half Scottish/half Swiss), that he doesn’t just drink martinis (he drinks everything in sight), that he’s not a wisecracking comedian (he is at times downright dour), and he possesses a fatalism mostly lacking in his screen counterpart.  None of these discrepancies are shocking;  it’s common practice that characters are altered for the big screen.  What is shocking is that most people don’t seem to know much about Fleming’s Bond.  I can’t believe that I haven’t already read these books.  I feel like they should have been a part of my adolescence, alongside books by H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. 

My advice: give Ian Fleming’s Bond a chance.  If you’re at all a fan of briskly paced action-oriented fiction or you’re simply nostalgic for a time when popular fiction wore its genre tags proudly, then you can hardly go wrong.  And if you need a recommendation weightier than mine, consider this: JFK was a fan.