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Also Today Best of Bond Ian Fleming's 007 is often most memorable when he's most offensive. By Emily Jenkins Bondage and rumination James Bond expert James Chapman talks about the enduring allure of Agent 007 and the sexual ambiguity of Ian Fleming's creation. By Maria Russo Book Information: Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films By James Chapman Columbia University Press, 315 pages Nonfiction On Her Majesty's Secret Service By Ian Fleming Fine Communications Fiction You Only Live Twice By Ian Fleming Fine Communications Fiction Doctor No By Ian Fleming Fine Communications Fiction Casino Royale By Ian Fleming Fine Communications Fiction Diamonds Are Forever By Ian Fleming Fine Communications Fiction

Fleming's Bond is often frightened. Though you never see it in the films, the text tells us his heart is pounding in fear, his breath sounding in his ears: His "stomach crawled with the ants of fear and his skin tightened at his groin." Rather often, too, he is embarrassed or emasculated. For example, when "pimping for England" in Russia, he wonders whether the defecting spy he makes love to in exchange for an enemy cipher device has found him too rough in bed. Near the end of "You Only Live Twice," he is an amnesiac living in a Japanese fishing village, frustrating Kissy Suzuki because he has forgotten "how to perform the act of love." (Never fear: She solves the problem by buying him a pillow book, and -- virility restored -- Bond begins to remember that he is a superspy.)

In "Doctor No," Bond is nervous about keeping his job, having flubbed his assignment in "From Russia With Love" by failing to recognize an obvious trap and by losing a fight with an elderly woman who injects him with nerve poison. Physically depleted, Bond is given a minor job investigating a personnel problem in Jamaica because M. feels it will allow the spy to get some R&R. In "Thunderball," he has once again been judged weak by the Secret Service and is forced by M. to renew himself in a spa, dining on weak broth and submitting to numerous physical examinations: "He had a permanent slight nagging headache, the whites of his eyes had turned rather yellow, and his tongue was deeply furred. His masseur told him not to worry. This was as it should be. These were the poisons leaving his body. Bond, now a permanent prey to lassitude, didn't argue. Nothing seemed to matter any more but the single orange and hot water for breakfast."

Though he'll call a woman a bitch and doesn't hesitate to forcibly kiss his massage therapist, Bond is still a sensitive guy. He is unbribable, says SMERSH's dossier, but has a weakness for the ladies. On-screen, that weakness translates as a strong sex drive and roving eye, but in the books it is his genuine failing as a spy -- a susceptibility, an almost needy urge, to drop everything for love. "Your brother was killed by Largo, or at least on his orders," he tells Domino, the Italian mistress of the villain with the giant hands. "I came here to tell you that. But then ... you were there and I love you and want you. When what happened began to happen I should have had the strength to stop it. I hadn't." After she saves his life in an underwater battle, he awakes, weakened and disoriented, in a hospital room. All he can think about is Domino, and the book ends with a cuddle: He finds her in a neighboring ward and collapses in exhaustion on the rug beside her bed, "with his head cradled on the inside of his forearm."

Of course, Domino is gone and forgotten by the start of the next novel, but the point is that Bond's character features the alluring mix of hard and open that typifies the heroes of romance novels. He's not a womanizer in any calculated way: He feels a rush of emotion, lust and affection when a woman touches any of his few soft spots; he tries to protect whoever it is, but she usually rejects his efforts and rescues herself (as Honey and Domino both do) or rescues him (as Domino and Kissy do).

More important, the Fleming novels do something the films cannot possibly do: They put us inside Bond's body. We're not looking at the well-dressed Timothy Dalton driving a sleek car through an action-packed chase; we're in the driver's seat with Bond, with his aching head and multiple scars, his stomach tightening with the ants of fear, his job on the line because of some recent failure and part of his mind on a woman he'd be better off leaving alone. Fleming lets us in, and the movies do not.

When I read those books in seventh grade, I was James Bond. They elicited in me a kind of transvestite empathy that transcended whatever unarticulated problems I may have had with their politics or values. Bond is the spy of all spies not because he's the hero of the most popular film series ever made, not because he knows what to drink, loves 'em and leaves 'em and never bats an eye, but precisely because he does not do these things. Before I moved on to "Still Life With Woodpecker" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Bond gave me a sense of the mysterious anxieties of the macho psyche -- something I urgently wanted to understand.
salon.com | May 1, 2000

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