The cars, the girls, the locales, the eye-popping gadgets — for a generation of fans, James Bond embodied the quintessence of British savoir-faire: the civil servant with a license to kill, the secret agent who saved civilization from a series of nefarious villains while staying in the world's fanciest hotels and romancing a bevy of beauteous babes.
In the entertaining and very funny new book The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder — publishing director at Penguin — gives us a rollicking tour through Bondland, even as he artfully deconstructs the appeal of Agent 007. His central argument is that Bond arrived to uphold the British ego at the very moment when Britain's planet-spanning empire was breaking up and the once-great power was trying to come to terms with its diminished post-World War II role.
While Britain was coping in the 1950s and 1960s with unemployment, inflation, strikes, and demoralization, and making the humbling transition from empire to welfare state, "a solitary Englishman" — who embodied the old-fashioned belief that a single individual could save the day through sheer guts and expertise — was almost single-handedly maintaining "the country's reputation."
While "the magic, the romance and the often squalid reality of dominion over the world which had animated millions of emigrants, sailors, soldiers, traders, journalists for so many generations came to an absolute, unrecoverable, bewildering end," Winder writes, somewhere on the globe, in a luxury hotel, one man was secretly "slipping a .25 Beretta automatic into his chamois-leather shoulder holster, examining his rather cruel mouth in the bathroom mirror, putting on his dinner jacket and going out into the night to save their world."
Winder's thesis is hardly an original one — academics and journalists alike have made similar arguments many times before — but he explicates it with uncommon wit and elan, joining the pantheon of scholars and well-known authors (including Umberto Eco, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin) who have found a multiplicity of literary and philosophic meanings in Ian Fleming's debonair creation.
An anomalous melange of cultural history, memoir, and criticism, The Man Who Saved Britain is at times repetitious and overly discursive, but it vividly evokes the bleak, gray world that Britons inhabited in the postwar years, a world in which Bond's international travels and casino visits "must have seemed derangedly heady to the book's first readers." And it expertly captures the knowing blend of nostalgia, sophistication, and plain absurdity that made the Bond books (and later the movies) such a hit in the 1950s and 1960s.
Curiously, the book contains no pictures of Bond or his nemeses or his gizmos: certainly a missed opportunity given the wealth of images from some 20 movies that span more than four decades.
Winder examines the roots the Bond books had in "Imperial Leather" pulp fiction (like H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines) and works by writers like John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler. He provides a lively sketch of Fleming's wartime service, which helped inspire the novels. And he pelts the reader with a small hailstorm of Bond trivia. Like the fact that Barry Nelson played an American spy called Jimmy Bond in a 1954 television adaptation of Casino Royale. Or his observation that the famous Bond theme "began life as a sitar-backed song" from an abortive musical based on V.S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas. In addition, Winder provides some very tart assessments of the Bond movies, from the early Sean Connery films through the increasingly ridiculous ones starring Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan.
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