Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (25 page)

But M’s suspicions about Drax are aroused by his cheating at cards, and after Drax is bested by Bond in a game of bridge, M sends in his operative to investigate Drax’s establishment on the white cliffs of the south coast of England.

Bond eventually discovers that Drax is an ‘enemy within’, a Nazi set on achieving revenge for Britain’s victory in the war by destroying London, with the help of a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead.

With only days to save millions of lives and ‘British civilization’, the plot is exciting and fast-moving, but the doomsday scenario, so inflated compared to the previous books, strains believability. The home setting doesn’t help. In the exotic badlands of the Caribbean, anything seemed possible, but the familiar ground here adds to the reader’s incredulity. The setting also contributes to a feeling of imperial contraction. The British, or at least the part of the population that included Fleming, had believed they were a great people because they had an empire. Now, in
Moonraker,
that empire seems to be on the wane. Drax tells Bond that the British are ‘Useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your bloody white cliffs while other people fight your battles. Too weak to defend your colonies, toadying to America with your hat in your hands.’ The details of defence establishments in Kent, both modern and ancient, are a reminder of threats very close to home. At Manston, previously the forward aerodrome of the Battle of Britain, it is American jets writing ‘white scribbles in the sky’.

In the place of empire,
Moonraker
is a hymn to England. Even Krebs, Drax’s Nazi sidekick, is moved by the sight of the Kentish countryside, and Bond and his heroine Gala Brand are brought together by a shared appreciation of the view from the iconic white cliffs: ‘where Caesar had first landed two thousand years before … a panorama full of colour and excitement and romance’. Bond even calls English cooking ‘the best in the world’. Under threat from the Moonraker rocket is ‘the Palace. The nursemaids in the park … the softly beating heart of London.’ In an essay for the
Spectator,
Fleming later wrote that
‘of course I have the affectionate reverence for Sir Winston Churchill that most of us share’. The icon of Britain’s moment of glory in 1940 is similarly idolised by Gala Brand as the voice of every important moment in her life, even though – at the time of writing – Prime Minister Churchill, after several strokes, was doing his best to hide the collapse in his health and vitality.

Much later, Fleming would describe Bond as having only two virtues, patriotism and courage. In
Moonraker,
this patriotism has a distinctly naval feel: nowhere else are we reminded so many times of Bond’s preference for navy blue clothes. When Bond contemplates a suicide effort to stop the atomic bomb hitting London, he declares, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck. I’ve wanted to copy him since I was five.’ But it is clear from the story that the power of the Royal Navy, the bedrock of British imperial glory, is a thing of the past, and not just because of wartime losses and budget cuts. Missiles such as the Moonraker have made ships obsolete. What’s more, the atomic age has produced a new threat against which no destroyer can operate: ‘the most deadly saboteur in the history of the world – the little man with the heavy suitcase’. It is a melancholy picture for Fleming’s England.

Moonraker
is also unique in that, for once, Bond doesn’t get the girl. Before he meets Gala Brand, he knows her ‘vital statistics’: ‘Height: 5ft 7. Weight: 9 Stone. Hips 38. Waist: 26. Bust: 38. Distinguishing marks: Mole on upper curvature of right breast. Hm! Thought Bond.’ Ian had asked Ann for the ‘perfect measurements’ for Gala Brand, but apparently she got it wrong. ‘Fortunately,’ Ann wrote to her brother from Jamaica, ‘Noël brought a Mainbocher [couture] saleswoman for a cocktail and all is well.’ Even in this least Caribbean of the books, Bond and his heroine come closest to union while swimming: ‘At once nothing else mattered but the velvet ice of the sea and the beauty of the patches of sand between the waving hair of the seaweed.’ Bond even catches a lobster on the English coastline. But there is a new
sourness to his relations with women: we learn that he spends his evenings ‘making love, with a rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women’, and that ‘Marriage and children and a home were out of the question if [he was] to be of any use “in the field”.’ In fact, while attempting to make Bond a less ‘cardboard character’ than in the previous books, what emerges is a distinct portrait of the ‘sleek bachelor’ of Fleming’s pre-wedding days.

Bond triumphs over Drax, of course, but what results is a huge cover-up of the whole episode. ‘What’s the alternative? … War with Russia? Lots of people on both sides of the Atlantic would be only too glad of an excuse,’ says M, worried about the current bellicosity of the Americans. In the summer of the previous year, Fleming had been in the United States and had found, seemingly, the whole country, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, obsessed by ‘anti-American activities’. In November 1953, in one of his first columns for the
Sunday Times’
Atticus, Fleming had written that this ‘prairie fire of fear, intolerance and hatred [and] atmosphere of purge and persecution’ were ridiculous. There is even a suggestion that the Cold War had made the United States as dangerous as the Soviet Union. For his next novel,
Diamonds are Forever,
Fleming would step back from both the apocalyptic threat of
Moonraker
and from the Cold War.

Unlike all the other 1950s Bond novels, the villains of
Diamonds are Forever
are not working directly or indirectly for the Soviets, as Bond acknowledges: ‘What’s [M] so worried about?’ he asks. ‘It’s not as if this was Iron Curtain business.’

Instead, Bond’s mission is a rather grubby one. Diamond smuggling from the British colony of Sierra Leone is causing a fall in income for the Treasury in London. M outlines the issue: ‘Seems that most of what they call “gem” diamonds are mined on British territory and that ninety per cent of all diamond sales are carried out in London.’ It’s the ‘biggest dollar-earner we’ve got. So when
something goes wrong with it, the Government gets worried.’ So Bond is sent, effectively, on an economic mission for hard-pressed Britain, a need Fleming acknowledges when he writes in his
Spectator
article that ‘we cannot afford to eat forever on borrowed money’. M seems almost embarrassed by the profit extracted by his country, telling Bond: ‘Don’t ask me why. The British got hold of the business at the beginning of the century and we’ve managed to hold on to it.’ The unspoken coda is ‘for now’. By 1955, Sierra Leone was well on the way to self-government and independence. By the time Fleming was writing
Diamonds are Forever,
there was nothing ‘forever’ about the Empire in Africa (the Gold Coast would lead the way, achieving independence as Ghana in 1957).

There is also an implication in M’s comment that Britain has no real right to these riches. In
The Diamond Smugglers,
a collection of essays for the
Sunday Times
that would be published as a book in 1957, Fleming is similarly shamefaced at the situation in Sierra Leone, describing the colony as underfinanced and ‘pretty near the bottom of the pile’ of British priorities. The British local expert he interviews even declares that ‘One’s almost ashamed of it being an English possession.’ The root of the problem of smuggling, he explains, is ‘the general idea among the illicit miners that the soil of Sierra Leone belongs to the Sierra Leoneans’.

There’s nothing so subversive in the novel itself; but the plot does highlight Britain’s parlous economic situation, and the lack of sympathy forthcoming from the United States, where the smuggled diamonds are being sold. For the Americans, this is only a very small part of the fight against the Mafia, so the FBI, M confirms, ‘won’t be much help to us, I’m afraid’. Moreover, M doesn’t want to hand the case over to the FBI and have the Americans ‘pick Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire’.

Bond’s journey to the US, as he infiltrates the diamond smuggling pipeline, gives Fleming the chance for plenty more sneering about
America and Americans. Local smoked salmon is ‘a poor substitute for the product of Scotland’. The scenery around Las Vegas is ‘a blasted Martian landscape’ where the heat ‘hit Bond’s face like a fist’ (the heat in Jamaica, in contrast, is described as ‘sticky fingers’ that ‘brush Bond’s face’). The mountains, unlike Jamaica’s ‘soft green’, are ‘streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth’. (Recovering from a beating at the hands – or, more exactly, feet – of Spang’s heavies, Bond wishfully dreams he is back in Jamaica.) The strip is ‘ghastly glitter’. And Leiter, conveniently now privately employed by Pinkerton’s detective agency so he can help Bond without official involvement, tells him that the country is utterly crime-ridden: ‘Now the hoodlums don’t run liquor. They run governments. State governments like Nevada.’ The villains have protection from corrupt politicians and officials in Washington. Once again, it takes Englishman Bond to sort it all out: ‘Maybe you can strike a blow for Freedom, Home and Beauty with that old rusty equalizer of yours,’ says Leiter. Bond has no respect for American gangsters, ‘only contempt and dislike’, and feels huge relief when he boards the
Queen Elizabeth,
the (actually much-subsidised) symbol of British maritime excellence, and ‘the great safe black British belly’ of the ship.

There are some excellent set pieces in
Diamonds Are Forever
– the drive-in, the mud-baths, the racetrack at Saratoga (where Bond appreciates ‘the extra exotic touch of the negroes’), but the story misses the crazy central megalomania of the villains of the previous two books. The ‘knowing looks’ to the reader – ‘He had been a stage-gangster, surrounded by stage properties’; ‘Mike Hammer routine. These American gangsters were too obvious’; ‘That was quite an exit. Like something out of an old Buster Keaton film’ – feel more tired than arch. ‘For Bond it was just the end of another adventure,’ Fleming concludes, his weariness palpable.

Fleming would later explain his annual cycle of writing in Jamaica, editing and checking proofs in England in the spring and then, in the
autumn, beginning the hunt for ideas for the next book. For him, this was the most difficult, often ‘heart-sinking’ moment. After
Diamonds are Forever,
he felt wiped out, writing to his friend Hilary Bray: ‘I baked a fresh cake in Jamaica this year which I think has finally exhausted my inventiveness as it contains every single method of escape and every variety of suspenseful action that I had omitted from my previous books – in fact everything except the kitchen sink, and if you can think up a good plot involving kitchen sinks, please send it along speedily.’ Peter Quennell, who was in Jamaica for the creation of the last two novels, believed that, ‘As early as 1955 [Ian] was already growing tired of Bond.’

Meanwhile,
Moonraker
had been published to a number of good reviews, the
New Statesman
commenting: ‘Mr Fleming is splendid, he stops at nothing.’ In the
Spectator,
John Metcalfe wrote: ‘It is utterly disgraceful – and highly enjoyable,’ but also said that it was not Fleming’s best. The
TLS
called it a ‘disappointment’.
Diamonds are Forever
had a similarly mixed reception when it was published in April 1956; the ability of the British Fleming to write convincingly about America was much praised, but the
TLS
called it Fleming’s ‘weakest book, a heavily padded story’. By then Fleming had completed his next novel to first draft and was seriously considering killing off his hero.

Apart from the somewhat guilty colonial exploitation and the ‘therapeutic anti-Americanism’, perhaps what is most interesting about
Diamonds are Forever
is the love interest, Tiffany Chase.

She is gorgeous, of course, her ‘brazen sexiness’ introduced when Bond first sees her, sitting half naked astride a chair like the famous Keeler picture taken by Lewis Morley seven years later. It gets better when Bond discovers she is an accomplished card sharp and a heavy drinker and smoker – abstinence, like that of Rufus B. Saye in this novel, is a sure sign of villainy in the Fleming universe. She and Bond seem made for each other.

The book ends with a long coda aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
that is more than anything a discussion of marriage. Earlier Bond had felt ‘they had all the time in the world’ (a favourite expression of Fleming’s that is also used during the torture scene with Le Chiffre), and that ‘they both knew the answer to the big question’. By the end of the novel, ‘Bond knew that he was very close to being in love with her’.

But Bond’s bachelordom is, in the end, unassailable. He says he can handle life better on his own and tells Tiffany that marriage subtracts rather than adds to two people. He doesn’t want to be in the role of ‘healer’, dealing with a ‘patient’. If he married, it would involve the horror of ‘handing round canapés in an L-shaped drawing-room. And there’d be all those ghastly ‘Yes, you did – no I didn’t” rows that seem to go with marriage. It wouldn’t last. I’d get claustrophobia and run out.’ After that, he changes the subject. It’s hard not to wonder what Ann made of this, although she claimed not to have read the book.

The troubles of their marriage had a lot to do with the self-centred personalities of both Ann and Ian, which made them, as Noël Coward had accurately predicted, unsuitable for matrimony and monogamy, but also with Goldeneye – Ian’s bachelor space – and with Bond. Ann originally thought she had married a newspaperman, as she done before, but now found herself partnered to a popular genre novelist. Ian had written to Ivar Bryce in late 1954:
‘Live and Let Die
has the wind under its tail and Annie is horrified that I may be becoming famous which has upset all her calculations.’ For Ann, Bond was an embarrassment. To her friends, she now referred to Ian’s books as ‘horror comics’ and ‘pornography’. In public she would decry ‘these dreadful Bond books’.

When Coward read
Moonraker,
he noted in his diary: ‘It is the best he has done yet, very exciting and, although as usual too far-fetched, not quite so much so as the last two and there are fewer purple sex passages. His observation is extraordinary and his talent for description
vivid. I wish he would try a non-thriller for a change; I would so love him to triumph over the sneers of Annie’s intellectual friends.’