James Bond in Paperbacks

During the late fifties and throughout the sixties I was an inveterate reader of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.  So was John Kennedy.  I thought about that recently during all of our remembering about what we were doing when we heard that our 34^th President had been assassinated.  Where was James Bond (or more to the point, Felix Leiter) when we needed him?

It was an irreverent thought but it just happened that, this past November, I had begun reading Solo by William Boyd.  Boyd was the author chosen by the Ian Fleming estate to write the latest installment of 007’s adventures.  I struggled a bit to get into the book and couldn’t help wondering if JFK would also have had trouble with this latest Bond adventure.

About two chapters in, I decided to put the book aside and re-read one of the originals.  It happens that we have the complete set of Fleming’s Bond books – given to us by Lawrence Lessard when he moved away from the Peninsula twenty plus years ago.  I chose randomly:  You Only Die Twice.

I thought I would just read four or five chapters to see if Boyd’s 007 character really matched up with the original – a double-check on my aging memory.  What I found surprised me but, as I thought about it, made perfect sense.  I had as much trouble getting into Fleming’s book as I had had with Boyd’s. Too much narrative.  Too little action.  Bond was too introspective.  Not the Bond I thought I knew.

And then it hit me.  For fifty years the Bond I’ve grown most accustomed to is the 007 of the silver screen.  Sean Connery as Bond. George Lazenby as Bond.  Roger Moore as Bond. Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig as Bond.  Once, even the urbane David Niven as Bond.  But perhaps even more important than the actor is the action which seemed to ramp up from movie to movie.  That is a major part of what was different about the books – both of them.

As it turned out, I read both books all the way through.  While the original Ian Fleming story did not come up to my obviously movie-tainted memory, it was still a much better read than Boyd’s book.  I took a look at a few reviews and was gratified to find that I was not alone in my reaction.  In a review of Solo for the New York Times Michiko Kakutan wrote:

Of course, Mr. Boyd is working without the tools that filmmakers have at the ready: that atmospheric, instantly recognizable theme music; the razzle-dazzle car chases and explosions; and, most important, the talents of Daniel Craig or Sean Connery, the two actors who have come to embody James Bond so thoroughly on screen. Mr. Boyd’s hero lacks the psychological detail and taut existentialism of Mr. Craig’s Bond, and he lacks the tough savoir-faire of Mr. Connery’s…

The Latest Bond Book

Mr. Boyd’s Bond drinks whiskey and soda, beer, bourbon, brandy and wine more often than his famous martinis. The car he covets is not the famous Aston Martin, but something called a Jensen Interceptor. And he sets off on his mission without his trusty Beretta or Walther PPK, armed only with some knockout drugs disguised as after-shave and talcum powder. There is little of the original novels’ pulpy energy or the movies’ inventive fantasies here — not to mention less humor, and no glamour whatsoever….

            All in all:  Bummer!