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James Bond Vs. The Devil With Thick Spectacles

Ian Fleming and the Conquest of the Irrational

Hello! That's fantastic. Read it very fast, but will return to savour. Wasn't quite sure what the focus was entirely - things, surrealism, the future? Architecture as a battleground in the spy genre? - but fascinating, well-written, well-researched, widely researched, thought-provoking (though I never read Steve Champion as an ageing Bond it's a very interesting idea) and more besides. More of this sort of thing, please.

I concur. Extremely meaty and thought-provoking. Fascinating.

Splendid work Mr Arthur. Well done, CBn. An appreciated and substantive new direction.

Regarding Arthur Rowe's concern in THE MINISTRY OF FEAR that he is being 'directed, controlled, moulded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination', I think this is actually a major theme in the genre: see THE PRISONER for one of the clearest examples. But other points of reference that occur to me off the top of my head are the novel THE CIPHER by Alex Gordon, filmed by Stanley Donen as ARABESQUE with Gregory Peck; THE KOBRA MANIFESTO, part of the Quiller series of novels by Elleston Trevor, in which Quiller steps into the wrong office to be briefed and takes half a chapter to realise it; the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE TV series, which was very fond of latex masks (although perhaps that's not quite on the same lines); NO WAY OUT and the novel that inspired it; David Mamet's SPARTAN; A DANDY IN ASPIC; and more besides.

Oddly enough, I don't think Ian Fleming ever presented the secret service as a surrealist agency in the same way Greene, Deighton, le Carre and others did - I think we are meant to believe in it. Perhaps it is only the villains who are surreal. 'We' are rather solid. In the others I've just mentioned, Western intelligence agencies are seen as very strange environments that we're not quite sure whether we can take seriously or not - perhaps if we came back with friends the next day we'd find them gone, too. I wish I could find it now, but there's a moment in the film of THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1966), script by Harold Pinter, in which two senior British intelligence officers discuss the death of an agent in Berlin as they eat game. One interrupts the other to ask how his pheasant or whatever is. 'Rather good,' says the other, and then they continue discussing the fate of the agent gunned down by the opposition in Berlin. It's a prototypical moment that could have appeared in pretty much any novel by Greene, Deighton or le Carre - but not Fleming. In fact, there's something pretty similar in Greene's THE HUMAN FACTOR, in which the surrealism of the office environment is highlighted by referencing James Bond ('we never get invisible ink' and so on), which also of course makes the setting rather more believable. In Deighton's AN EXPENSIVE PLACE TO DIE, the unnamed protagonist is handed a dossier by his contact and told to read it on the spot and hand it back, not because it's especially secret but because the Xerox machine has packed up and they couldn't make more copies. In a later scene a fight breaks out in a bar when a drunk English writer starts pontificating about James Bond being a 'violent everyman in a humdrum but violent world.'

So I would say Fleming presented espionage as a fastastic realm; others have tended to present it as a surreal one.

A fascinating read, I will definitely have to go over this in more detail when I have time!

Excellent work!!

Good read.

This is an excellent article, so full of thought-provoking ideas that one reading cannot possibly do it justice. I will need to revisit it several times to gain a full appreciation of all of the author's insights.

Great stuff, old chap.

It is indeed a fantastic article and all the more enjoyable and interesting because one read through does not do it justice.

finally got round to reading it, and my god is it brilliant, brilliantly written and, as others have said, though provoking.

Good read, very extensive. Interesting to know those blatant 'missing frame' cuts in the early Bonds were intentional. Indeed the Bonds have always been fantastical at heart no matter how realistic their ideas. The conquest of the irrational is like Fleming's own 'improbable but not impossible' idea.