The spy who kitsched me
We had a fleeting spy season recently, and most of the initial television reports about Madhuri Gupta couldn’t resist adding a bit of Bond music in the background. For that matter, all it takes is a man in a black turtleneck to set the tune playing in your head. Of all spies, Ian Fleming’s James Bond is the one we know best, whether or not we are fans.
Even in my green days, when I thought Roger Moore the epitome of manly good looks, I could not actually sit through a Bond movie without tuning out during car chases and the sillier episodes. (Now I step out altogether to sauté onions or bring in the laundry.) But when I first picked up an Ian Fleming novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the writing.
I was not shaken, or stirred, or anything like that. There were still plot holes you could hang-glide through. There was an insufferable certainty about the good guys and the bad. For an entire chapter M and Bond argued over a gun. Villains implausibly held forth for pages on why they were about to unleash mayhem. The Brits were always showing the Americans how things were to be done.
But the spy in the book was more real. He seemed to get bruised when someone attacked him, not infinitely roll with the punches, tumble off cliffs and emerge with tux unruffled. And Fleming’s treatment of women was better than I expected. In the movies, Bond beds women, but in the books he actually seemed to love them, one after another.
The prose was dry, in the refreshing sense. There were no purple passages, just an occasional description of a violet shadow that hit the spot. And there was humour enough, just the way I liked it — black, no sugar.
Fleming died nearly 50 years ago, so it was inevitable that he would attain respectability beyond bestseller lists. In the 1980s, we laughed at literature students who studied crime fiction, but those pioneering academics are now bearded and tweeded and tenured at the best colleges. I found a sober Penguin edition of Fleming some time back, containing three novels and an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Sean Connery on the cover, apparently straightening his tie, no gun in hand, no babe draped round his leg, looks less like Bond and more like a bond salesman. It was the kind of volume I could safely carry on a train trip without dimming my highbrow aura. For the first time in my life I paid money to own a James Bond book.
But this time the insides disappointed. Fleming is not just racy, he’s shockingly racist, even for an author of his time.
His unthinking condescension toward browns, his unconcealed horror of blacks, his gratuitous homophobia, all put his prose well past its expiry date, no matter what kind of spin an academic might put on it. And there’s something creepy about naming women Pussy and Honeychile. Fleming thrills, but still.
I have another Bond book, a copy of Live and Let Die, with a pithy intro by the crime writer Louise Welsh. She talks of the sensuality of food and drink in Fleming’s writing. British readers suffering under post-war rationing were as likely to drool over Bond’s sumptuous breakfast as over visions of deep cleavages, she suggests.
My Live and Let Die is also a Penguin, but part of a set printed with covers that imitate the original ones. Three different typefaces are used. There is a clumsy collage of a skull, a voodoo effigy, a hand with a gun, gold coins, a big black villain, and a woman wearing only a bracelet and lipstick. One presumes that this time around the covers no longer signify kitsch, they express postmodern irony. Or maybe someone decided the outside really should match the inside.
(Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad)