Waiting for Deaver
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
James Bond fans around the country are biting their nails as they wait for the midnight publication of Carte Blanche, the latest novel to feature the world’s most famous secret agent.
The book, launched earlier today lavish in style at London’s St Pancras Station, is written by American thriller-writer Jeffery Deaver. Deaver’s stab at Bond follows on from Sebastian Faulks, whose Devil May Care was published in 2008 to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. Fleming’s original novels have been reissued several times in recent years, most recently as ebooks.
As a result of the shrewd choices made in the last decade by both the literary estate and the film-makers, it seems that Fleming’s reputation is finally being reappraised. Fleming is, after all, one of Britain’s greatest popular novelists and the creator of a globally renowned icon. During his lifetime, his work was admired by writers as diverse as Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis, but the more successful the books—and the films then adapted from them—became, the lower Fleming’s stock fell in literary circles. In 1958, Paul Johnson famously decried Dr No’s ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ in the New Statesman—a bizarre claim to anyone familiar with the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cheyney, and in 1964, Malcolm Muggeridge attacked Bond as ‘utterly despicable: obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, toward whom sexual appetite represents the only approach’.
But the James Bond of Fleming’s novels isn’t any of those things, which is perhaps unsurprising considering Muggeridge appears to have only read one Bond book. In fact, Bond falls in love, countermands orders, delights in discovering new cultures and never shows any signs of being a sadist in the novels—the latter is his enemies’ vice, as is often the case in thrillers. There are some embarrassing passages, but on the whole Fleming’s 12 novels and nine short stories hold up remarkably well as fluid, versatile and often beautifully written thrillers.
The best of them, I think, are his first novel, Casino Royale, from 1953, and From Russia, With Love, published four years later. Casino Royale is a short, sharp shock of a thriller. It follows Bond on a small-scale mission at a coastal resort in northern France, and the atmosphere is palpably sticky and disturbing—Bond is far from the superhuman he would become in some of the films. From Russia, With Love is a delectably plotted thriller set in Moscow and Istanbul and featuring one of the genre’s greatest villains, the loathsome Rosa Klebb. Fleming’s phrasing is often journalistic—he worked for The Sunday Times for several years—giving even the most implausible of scenes vividness and authority. The technique would later be developed by Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, and indeed Jeffery Deaver.
So let’s resist the temptation, on the publication of the latest James Bond novel, to mock one of Britain’s greatest exports. Let’s instead cheer on Mr Deaver, enjoy his adventure—and pay tribute to the writer who created a character still taking the world by storm nearly sixty years later.
First published in The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2011