Weird Bond.
Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Ian Fleming seemed to tire of his literary creation quickly. After three novels presented almost exclusively from James Bond’s point of view, he is absent from the first chapter of the fourth, the first ten chapters of the fifth, and the latter – From
Russia, with Love (1957) – ends with him dying at the hands (or, rather, the foot) of Colonel Klebb of the Soviet Union’s SMERSH. Bond was resurrected in
Dr No (1958), but there were a series of departures and experimentations after
Goldfinger (1959):
For Your Eyes Only (1960) is a collection of five short stories;
Thunderball (1961) is Fleming’s novelisation of a screenplay, which he wrote with four collaborators;
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) is written in the first person, from the point of view of a Canadian woman, with Bond appearing only in the final third;
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) ends with Bond being married and immediately widowed; and
You Only Live Twice (1964) ends with Bond
en route to the Soviet Union where – we imagine – imprisonment, torture and death await. The remaining two books were published after Fleming’s death. Bond was resurrected for the second time in
The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), but Fleming had completed only a first draft by the time of his death and the novel is slim and unsatisfying.
Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966) is a collection of four short stories, two of which are very short indeed. I cannot recommend any of the fourteen books because although Fleming was a master storyteller whose clean, crisp prose is reminiscent of Hemingway, the narratives all betray implicit and explicit racism and homophobia and a misogyny that borders on sexual sadism. I mention them, however, because of the “SPECTRE Trilogy”, which comprises
Thunderball,
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and
You Only Live Twice. The trilogy provides the most comprehensive portrayal of Bond’s private life, fleshing out his personality beyond his profession as an authorised assassin. It also stretches the espionage thriller genre to its very limits, spilling over into speculative fiction.
These days there is nothing unusual about mixing crime, thriller and mystery fiction with horror, fantasy or science fiction, but the elements of strangeness stand out like a sore thumb in Fleming, whose success was built on a hard and fast realism authenticated by his service with Royal Naval Intelligence during the Second World War.
Thunderball introduces the SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE) and its sinister head, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The novel begins with an incredible and unlikely coincidence that turns out to be entirely supplementary to the central narrative. Bond just happens to be recuperating in the same spa as an undercover SPECTRE agent at the same time as SPECTRE launches its first global operation and the feud between the two men, which is unrelated to the subsequent search for nuclear missiles, occupies the first third of the story. Coincidence is central to the narrative of
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The novel opens with Bond fed up with his failure to find Blofeld. He happens to have a fleeting romance with Teresa di Vincenzo, who happens to be the daughter of the head of the Unione Corse (Corsican mafia), who happens to be one of the only people in Europe with the resources Bond requires. The conclusion is even more unlikely. After Bond and his criminal cronies destroy Blofeld’s Alpine retreat, he arranges to meet Teresa in Munich, where they intend to marry. Blofeld and his sidekick-cum-lover Irma Bunt not only escape, but decide to flee to Munich as well and – in a city with a population of more than a million – just happen to bump into Bond on the street. The surreal, strange and coincidental reach their apotheosis in
You Only Live Twice. The novel opens with Bond on his last legs professionally, bungling jobs as he pines for Teresa. In an act of kindness, M sends him on a diplomatic mission to negotiate British access to a Japanese cipher machine. The head of the Japanese secret service agrees to provide access if Bond performs a service for him. That service is the assassination of a man who has established a garden of death – containing deadly plants, insects and fish – where hundreds of forlorn Japanese have flocked to commit suicide. In the most incredible coincidence of the entire series, the gardener – the ludicrously-named Guntram Shatterhand – turns out to be Blofeld in his third incarnation, complete with Bunt in tow. As if this wasn’t fantastic enough, Fleming saves the most surreal part until the end: Bond becomes an amnesiac, Bond fathers a child with Kissy Susuki, and Bond leaves Japan for the USSR.
Thunderball (1965, directed by Terrence Young) was the fourth Bond film and was followed by
You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) and
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969, Peter R. Hunt). The film version of
You Only Live Twice bears little resemblance to the novel, conforming to what had already been established as the template for the series: Bond discovers the lair of a supervillain, Bond infiltrates the supervillain’s lair, Bond and his allies battle the supervillain’s army, and Bond saves the world from (usually nuclear) destruction. The villain in this case was indeed Blofeld and the battle set in Japan, but he is holed up in a volcano attempting to provoke World War Three by interfering with US and USSR spaceships. Sam Mendes’
Spectre actually has much more in common with Fleming’s novel, which is why I have described the SPECTRE Trilogy in so much detail.
Casino Royale was the first Bond novel (1953) and twenty-first film (2006). Director Martin Campbell took advantage of the coincidence of the prototypical title with Daniel Craig’s first appearance as Bond to reboot the Eon Production series. The series was also revitalised by presenting
Casino Royale as the first half of what appeared at the time to be a two-part narrative:
Quantum of Solace (2008, directed by Marc Foster) begins minutes after
Casino Royale ends and sets the new Bond up against a new enemy, a mysterious organisation called Quantum. While the third Craig film, Mendes’
Skyfall (2012), appeared to return to the previous standalone format, it also emphasised a monumental change in the series since the Roger Moore films of my youth. Yes, directors were making Bond more palatable to contemporary audiences, but the quality of the films was almost incomparable. Take the cast of
Skyfall as an example: Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris, and Ralph Fiennes – it is no exaggeration to say that all six of these are great actors. And that ignores Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw, and Rory Kinnear in supporting roles.
Skyfall turns attention to Bond’s aging, exploiting Craig’s aging in real life (potentially problematic for the physicality with which he plays Bond) and the four year interval between the second and third instalments of the reboot to the director’s advantage. With aging comes reflection and, in a similar manner to the SPECTRE Trilogy, the audience discovers a great deal about Bond and his childhood. As
Spectre will show,
Skyfall is not in fact a departure from the Quantum narrative, but a setting up for the final instalment, where Bond will be faced with a battle that is personal rather than professional.
Spectre offers us even more information about Bond’s childhood: we already know he is an orphan; now we find out that his parents died in a climbing accident and that an Austrian man named Hannes Oberhauser became his legal guardian until the death of Oberhauser and his own son, Franz, in an avalanche. One is immediately struck by the weirdness of
Spectre – weird as in strange and fantastic like
You Only Live Twice, but also weird in the speculative fiction sense, specifically China Miéville’s definition of the weird in terms of the cephalopod nature of its monsters (set out in his essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire”, published in
Collapse IV in 2008). Quantum is revealed to be cover for a more pervasive and powerful organisation, SPECTRE, and in the opening scene the emblem of this organisation is disclosed as a seven-tentacled octopus. The title sequence, a significant part of the film series since it began, features giant black octopuses, sucker-studded tentacles, and cephalopod ink bullets. In an interview about his creation, title designer Daniel Kleinman said:
“I thought the bit with the lovers and the octopus’s arms coming ’round them just had the right level of sensuality but creepy weirdness to it.
” Creepy weirdness is right and continues long past the credits as it becomes evident that this film is not about Bond’s professional endeavours, but about the personal battle between Bond and Franz Oberhauser (played by Christoph Waltz). Franz, Bond’s childhood companion, faked his own death in the avalanche and recreated himself as Blofeld, soon to be head of SPECTRE. Oberhauser/Blofeld has in fact orchestrated all of the key events of not only this narrative, but the entire reboot and has been enjoying tormenting the child he hated for becoming the cuckoo in the Oberhauser nest. Reciprocally, we discover that Oberhauser/Blofeld actually killed his father out of jealousy, in consequence of which the young Bond literally created his own archenemy.
In
The Weird and the Eerie (published in 2016), the late Mark Fisher describes the weird as
“a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete
”, producing feelings of both disapproval and pleasure in the audience.
Spectre is, in this sense, essentially weird, staging such encounters on both the dramatic and thematic levels: the Secret Intelligence Service, run by M (played by Fiennes) is about to be absorbed into a new National Security Service, to be run by the current head of the Security Service, C (played by Andrew Scott); and Bond’s entire career with the Secret Intelligence Service is exposed as nothing more than the pursuit of his adopted brother, whose career in organised crime and terrorism was inadvertently initiated by Bond himself. Aside from the ever-present symbol of the octopus, there are several more subtle allusions to the weird: the man without a face motif; the rats in the walls in Tangier (or, rather, one very important mouse); the reminder of cosmic indifference in the meteorite display; and the surreal sequences in Blofeld’s North African lair. The film is also striking in two other aspects. First, the number of cinematic references to previous films.
Spectre manages, in one way or another, to provide visual quotations of the majority of its twenty-three predecessors, perhaps even all of them. (The most obvious sources being
You Only Live Twice,
Live and Let Die and
The World Is Not Enough.)
Spectre also references the SPECTRE Trilogy, reproducing the novels’ shift from professional and public to personal and private, from Bond with free agency to Bond’s life as determined by destiny, and from hard-bitten realism to fully-fledged fantasy. The second aspect is, once again, the quality of acting and actors – if anything, an improvement on
Skyfall as Craig, Fiennes, Harris, Wishaw, and Kinnear are joined by Waltz, Scott, Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci. My single reservation about
Spectre has nothing to do with the film itself. Craig is returning for the as-yet-unnamed
Bond 25, which was being directed by Danny Boyle until he withdrew from the project earlier this month, and is due for release late next year. The reboot has told the new Bond’s story from recruitment to retirement, but now he’s back. Will there be a rehash of previous recalls from retirement, cinematic and literary? If so, that will be disappointing given the ingenuity and innovation that have characterised the reboot so far – an achievement all the more impressive for being based on novels that have been past their sell-by date for more than five decades.
*****
