Creature Double Feature: James Bond Novels
Comparing two authors who took over the James Bond series after Ian Fleming’s death
Who is James Bond? Originally published in 1953, Casino Royale was the story of a secret agent hoping to bankrupt the treasurer for a Soviet-owned trade union. He drank, he gambled, he womanized, he completed his missions with proper planning and a little bit of luck, and he did it all while looking suave. These are characteristics that Ian Fleming, the original author, bestowed upon him. Another key feature of the Bond franchise that has gone unchanged for the majority of his existence has been his contemporariness. The movie adaptations of the novels began to tamper with some of Fleming’s vision: the first thing that had to go was his trademark facial scar, something too difficult to carry over from one day of filming to the next. After that went the serious tone, and eventually the directors felt obliged to keep up with new developments in technology to keep him feeling contemporary, which pushed them to make changes to the plot to accomodate these other changes. Eventually, the novels and their adaptations became totally disparate aside from a few character names and locations. Sean Connery left the project five films in, leading to George Lazenby taking over in 1969 for a year. At time of writing seven different actors have played the character across twenty-five official Eon productions. Sherlock Holmes, by comparison, is stuck in Victorian England. Any adaptation that wishes to bring him out of that era must alter the character in some way. Daniel Craig is the same James Bond as Sean Connery, who’s the same James Bond as the one in the novels.
This week, I wanted to look into this Ship of Theseus-like problem, specifically in the continuity of the two authors who took over the novel series for the most entries after the death of Ian Fleming: John Gardner and Raymond Benson. Each makes changes to accommodate audience expectations. I thought this was going to be a simple exercise to compare the three, something nice to coincide with the release of IO Interactive’s 007: First Light, but it turned out to be a doozy. The answer to what is appropriate to the character is inevitably going to be subjective depending on one’s entrypoint into the series. In most cases, this will be measured by what actor first played the role in the first movie that person saw, as few if any first got into the series through the books.
The most notable change from book to film is the expansion of Q branch. As mentioned before, this is a feature nearly exclusive to the movies. Bond gets armaments from Q branch in the books, but no single character guides him through the gadgetry in the same way that Desmond Llewelyn did. Gardner took over the series with Licence Renewed in 1981, while Roger Moore was in the middle of his run in the films. The first major alteration is the existence of Q branch, with Bond’s main contact in the department being another woman, nicknamed “Qute,” who falls victim to his charms. Bond also gets kitted out differently. Due to a real-life incident involving the iconic Walther PPK jamming during the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne, Bond has put the weapon aside in favor of a Browning 9mm. His car of choice has also changed from the Aston Martin to a Saab 900 Turbo, which has all the bells and whistles one would expect from the films. Raymond Benson carries over all these details into his continuity, but has him switch back to the Walther. His time with the series begins with Zero Minus Ten in 1997, during Pierce Brosnan’s tenure as Bond. In the gadgetry department, this Bond gets outfitted with many more personal effects, namely a plastic knife to sneak through metal detectors and a microfiche reader with maps and guidebooks. Both of these strike a balance between seriousness and camp that even some of the movies of the time fail to do. Even so, Fleming’s original Bond novels took themselves seriously.
The purpose of the novels was originally for Fleming to process the aftermath of World War 2 and his experiences in the Naval Intelligence Division. They’re political novels, but not in the way that most people nowadays think about politics. His main concern was how people who steeped themselves in this world of espionage would transition back into civilian life. Perhaps this is best exemplified through Hugo Drax, who became a British socialite after suffering and recovering from amnesia, allowing him to dodge accountability for his time in Nazi Germany. With hindsight we can look back on Operation Paperclip and call this concern prescient. From Russia, With Love begins with Donovan Grant’s backstory, covering his defection to the Soviet Union to serve as both a specialized assassin and general executioner because he enjoys the act of killing. The historian Andrew Cook claims that Goldfinger’s plot to steal from Fort Knox was based on real events during World War 1 concerning the Bank of England. The novels have these loose connections to real fears. Anton Murik, the villain of Gardner’s novel, is a Scottish nuclear physicist much closer to how Hugo Drax is played in the adaptation of Moonraker, but with more of a hands-on role in the operations. This gets so close at times that it verges on being derivative. He has this very contrived plot to blow things up in order to make the world safer from meltdowns, and he stages terrorist plots at nuclear reactors around the world in order to corner the market. I suppose that readers at the time would have connected this to Three Mile Island and similar incidents that he mentions in the book. Whether because we’ve societally gotten a handle on nuclear energy or because we’ve ramped down those facilities, these concerns have become obscure to the modern reader. Benson, on the other hand, hits it in the opposite direction. There are some plot elements we shall get to in a moment that prevent me from discussing the specifics of Benson’s villain, but the plot is over-reliant on real-world events. Here, the central conflict concerns Hong Kong’s transfer of power from England to China. Benson emphasizes over and over that the Chinese pledge to maintain “one country, two systems” is a total farce, and that they’d welch on the deal at the drop of a hat. I’m no geopolitics expert, and I’m sure opinions differ, but 30 years on they’ve upheld their promise.
Despite popular perception, James Bond isn’t a spy. His job title is “secret agent” and his responsibilities are as a counterspy, someone who quashes leaks and prevents spies from learning England’s secrets. The movies mostly abandon this, but Gardner sticks to it. Benson is another story. For most of Zero Minus Ten, there are two candidates that the reader may believe detonated this nuclear weapon in the Australian outback mentioned in the opening: Guy Thackeray and Li Xi Nan. One candidate drops out about halfway through, and another one is a late player, and I can’t tell you who is responsible without spoiling the plot. This is very unlike Ian Fleming. The only twist villains that come to mind across the whole series are Vesper Lynd and Krisatos, and that’s really stretching the definition. The movies have those as well as Mr. Big, Willard Whyte, Oberhauser, and you can even count Trevelyan, as well as others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Benson’s presentation of the twist villain recategorizes this book from a spy thriller or an action novel to a political mystery. There is action, but there’s all this cerebral stuff going on that makes it feel less like James Bond.
As far as vices go, both authors make Bond drink adequately, although I don’t think either gives him the opportunity to imbibe as much as either Fleming or the films. Both novels feature moments of gambling as well: Benson’s game is Mahjong, while Gardner has him bet on the horses. I really liked the use of the racetrack in Licence Renewed. It comes up briefly in Diamonds are Forever, but not long enough to really feel like Fleming got everything out of it that he could have. It provides an interesting way for the reader to compare Bond’s skill and intuition with Anton Murik’s certainty in his endeavors as well. The Mahjong scene in Zero Minus Ten is comparatively a total mess. Benson has good intentions to teach his readers about the rules of the game (which I still do not understand), but the way it’s presented makes the passage terribly clunky. Fleming’s prose is famously economical, and a good reader can finish his books in an afternoon because of how tight he keeps things. Neither author lives up to this standard, but the mahjong is really notably bad at this. All the scores are effectively repeated in order to make sure the reader knows both the points system and the monetary exchanges taken on. What’s more is Bond is described as being out of his element and also must compete with a cheating host, and then wins anyway. It’s very unlike Bond to go into a situation unprepared like that and to rely on a contrived system of signals to cheat back. I would have preferred he lose this game and find some way to get the money back.
So where do we draw the line as far as fidelity goes? Which of these departures from the source material are within the confines of poetic license, and which are a bridge too far? Is it okay to maintain a certain set of core characteristics, like his fanciful travels and his desire to protect his homeland no matter who he has to lie to? Can we change his age, his dress, and even his name (Connery, Brosnan, Craig) and still see him for who he is? Yes, at some point these questions stopped being about James Bond and they started being about the Odyssey discourse again. I think it’s fair to draw these parallels: the “historical” Odysseus would have fought in the Trojan war hundreds of years before the version of the Odyssey we ascribe to Homer was first sung. Changes came about through oral tradition to make the people of the Iron Age understand a Bronze Age warrior. That’s before we talk about the issues of translation. If we learned that some older poem about Odysseus existed in Linear A that recontextualized something about “polytropos“ or “nostos“ or “metis“ or a hundred other terms, would it be right to change that in future translations of the Odyssey, even if it wasn’t Homer’s original vision? Would we have a greater responsibility to correctly portray Odysseus than to accurately translate our version of Homer? There isn’t really a right answer to this or to the question of who James Bond is. Legally, the character belongs to the Fleming estate, and any alterations to the character that they approve of are faithful. On the other hand, Casino Royale was published the same year as the polio vaccine was developed. Who is James Bond? The answer is, it’s complicated.
I would read both of these authors again. I struggled through a lot of Benson’s writing because of the aforementioned departures from Fleming’s vision, but ultimately he pulled it off in the last act. Still, I would have preferred that he dropped any connections to the character and presented this as its own story. Some of the racial stereotyping pushes a boundary in a way that is faithful to Fleming’s time, but is incredibly out of date for the late ‘90s. As for Gardner I felt he stuck a little too close to the source material, and I was left with the feeling that I’d read a worse Moonraker, which is not altogether an insulting comparison.