GUEST REVIEWER 007 ANALYSED

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30793, 3 July 1965, Page 4

GUEST REVIEWER 007 ANALYSED

[By DAVID HOLLOWAY in the “Daily Telegraph,’ London] The James Bond Dossier. By Kingsley Amis. Jonathan Cape. 159 pp.

The success of the James Bond saga has been a phenomenon of post-war British publishing. More than 16 million copies of paperback versions have been printed in this country and the number grows by the day. Indeed the Pan paperback version of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” published this month had an advance printing order of two million.

What is even more surprising and much more interesting is the passions that these rather low-grade thrillers inspire. They have their almost frenzied devotees, and they are regularly denounced from all sorts of different points of view. Now the first tolerably serious critical book—there have been numerous articles —has been published.

I say tolerably serious advisedly, for though Kingsley Amis has written a perfectly genuine critical work—footnotes and all, though regrettably no index —I have a feeling that the whole thing is something of a jape at the expense of the intellectual snobs against whom Mr Amis has been campaigning for years, and quite rightly too. He is, by the way, not alone in this, for there is a splendid send-up by David Ormerod and David Ward, two lecturers at the University of Malaya, in the current edition of the

“London Magazine.” They have a whale of a time tracing every conceivable possible myth and symbol as being represented in the Bond saga, having taken as their text some psychoanalytical treatise which asserts that “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a symbol of menstruation.” Mr Amis’s main intention in “The James Bond Dossier" is to clear away some of the critical and other underbrush that has gathered round James Bond, and to prove that the books are ordinary superior thrillers written to a formula, and that most of the charges against Mr Fleming do not stand up. Bond, he argues, is less violent than Bulldog Drummond, and the sadistic set-pieces like the fight in the gipsy encampment in “From Russia With Love.” though slightly reprehensible, do not compare with the real thing in the works of Mickey Spillane. This seems to me a weak defence of nastiness.

Where I think that Mr Amis is on stronger ground is when he defends lan Fleming against Bernard Bergonzi’s charge that there is a “total lack of any ethical frame of reference" in the James Bond novels. Any story that has a British secret agent as the main character must be chauvinistic to some degree or other.

Fleming, Mr Amis says, is better than most. Certainly there is no anti-semitism, as there most assuredly is in John Buchan and Sapper. There is also no feeling that all foreigners are necessarily bad, though none of Mr Fleming’s villains are British —Sir Hugo Drax in “Moonraker” is really a German. Fleming is very clever in suggesting that only some foreigners are bad. He exploits to some extent racial prejudice, but Mr Amis is right in asking who can resist the urge to have a ChineseNegro villain. But then some of Bond’s best friends are coloured. It should be pointed out, too, that Fleming started with largely Russian villains and in the later books changed to an imaginary set of international thugs. Mr Amis disapprbves of Bond-baiting—the combing of the canon to seek for errors in expertise. Of course, Fleming invited this sort of investigation by his very omniscience and the casual way in which he threw out tit-bits of information on esoteric subjects. The counterargument in “The James Bond Dossier” is that this does not matter; a lot of the information is right; a lot is amusing, and the pace of the books is such that one is way past before one is worried by any error In particular the use of trade-names does give an immense feeling of identification and verisimilitude. Mr Amis perhaps plays down the errors too much. He does not quote from an article written by an American in the “New Statesman” some years ago showing how limited Fleming's acquaintance of American “mores” was. His knowledge of drink, too, had gaps in it, and apparently so had his knowledge of gun-holsters. This. I believe, was because Fleming’s information on many of these subjects was that of a journalist. He was immensely fluent, and like most good journalists his knowledge was wide and accurate, certainly so far as general impressions went. But when statements on specific subjects were examined by someone who had spent a lifetime on the subject, mistakes could be found.

Mr Amis also points to weaknesses in plotting, like the putting of a vital message under a lavatory seat in “Goldfinger.” It would have been found in seconds. Obviously he forgets that strange injunction in railway lavatories; “Gentlemen lift the seat”—perhaps gangsters never do.

In the “Dossier" there are lengthy analyses of the heroines, the villains and Bond’s associates. These are valuable in showing how mechanical the whole operation was. The girls with their fancy names and the villains with their special physical characteristics are almost interchangeable between the books. Truth to tell, Fleming took a moribund form of writing, the secret agent chase story, and revitalised, it, gave it an immensely glossy finish but did not improve it in any way. Mr Amis would disagree with this verdict. He prefers to say: lan Fleming has set his stamp on the story of action and intrigue, bringing to it a sense of our time, a. power and a flair that will win him readers when all the protests about his supposed deficiencies have been

forgotten. Time will tell. Will the Bond saga hold their popularity as have the Sherlock Holmes stories? I wonder. Mr Amis thinks that one day Fleming’s novels may be setbooks for an English examination. Maybe. Certainly more fun than “Silas Marner.”