Bond is Back!

So, I acted like a tart. And not for the first time. I blamed the weather. I blamed my lack of emails. I blamed work. The reality was that it had all been Gabby’s fault.

‘Look at this,’ she’d said over breakfast yesterday. She had her finger on an article in her copy of The Telegraph. It was about Sebastian Faulkes writing a new James Bond novel.

I skimmed the beginning of the piece, not particularly interested because – I’ll be quite honest – writing a new Bond novel was always something I’d wanted to do myself. I love the books in a way that I’ve ever really loved the films. When I’d heard that the Fleming estate had asked a ‘significant modern writer’ to pen a new adventure last year, I had expected it to be somebody in the tradition of Fleming. Freddie Forsyth would have been my number one choice, though I doubted if he could really catch the Fleming prose. That’s why I really hoped it might be John le Carre. The choice of Faulkes had come as a huge disappointment to me. I couldn’t think of a writer less suited to the honour.

I was about to make this point when Gabby jabbed her finger onto the page, pointing to a paragraph lower down:

Faulks, who finished the book in six weeks, said he was surprised to be picked for the task but was happy to follow the Bond style with exotic locations, glamorous women and larger-than-life villains.

‘Six weeks,’ she said. ‘Six weeks! If he can write book in six weeks, why, Chippy do you always take so long? It sometimes takes you months!’

What could I say? What answer could I give to satisfy my little Romanian slave driver? The question bothered me all day and accounted for my gloom.

Today, I’m feeling better. And why, I hear you ask, do you feel better, oh Chip Dale, our favourite Thonglateer? Well, I feel much chirpier because of the following picture.

The man on the left is the creator of James Bond. The man on the right. Well… He has a perm.

And that, when it comes down to it, is something we should all remember when talking about writers. Some of us are born to the thong, so to speak, and the rest of you struggle to fit into a pair of large sized underpants. In other words: try as much as you like but you’ll never be what you’re not.

The fact that Faulkes finished his novel in six weeks will have no bearing on my review of the book. I will judge it on its merits. But the fact that he felt compelled to reveal this little fact suggests that he appears to lack the due reverence for Fleming’s books. Perhaps he doesn’t see them as real literature. They are a bit of work to be brushed off as the indulgence of six weeks. Yet perhaps he is also admitting that he’s not Ian Fleming and never could be. He's playing a part, acting out a role, enjoying it as a game to be enjoyed before getting back to his 'proper' writing.

As everybody know, Fleming had been in Naval intelligence during the war. He wrote about a world he knew and finished the Bond books in hot exotic Jamaica, sitting at his desk, sipping martinis, and wearing nothing but a thong.

The Chipster's Film Review: Casino Royale

Mutterings & Meanderings suggested in the comments that I might just be a woman given yesterday’s posting about my eating chocolate and reading books. At first I felt insulted. Then I had a warm flush and had an unbearable desire to do some ironing. Such an assault on my masculinity called for immediate action. I settled down in front of the TV and watched the latest James Bond film.

None of the reviews I’ve read do ‘Casino Royale’ justice. This is a total makeover of the Bond franchise, with the producers cutting away every ounce of flab that it had gained up over the years. It lost the love of bad gags it found during Roger Moore's tenure, and also move away from the GQ magazine Bond that Brosnon brought to the series. It even lost Connery’s superhuman toughness.

What it introduced was violence towards Bond. Some say it’s too violent, but Bond has always been about violence. And masochistic violence at that. It was Roger Moore who seemed to turn them into camp comedies. Everything here feels loyal to the source material. Even the changes are true to the tone. The torture scene is far less violent than Fleming wrote it but it shows enough of Bond’s willingness to absorb pain to make us begin to understand the what drives him. This is a lean Bond, with more of an edge of realism than it’s ever had before. The stunts are as crazy as ever, but are kept within the realms of what’s possible. There is nothing that defies reason, or detaches us from what’s happening on screen. Even Judy Dench works better as M. She’s more cold hearted, meaner, yet more in keeping with the original M of Fleming’s imagination. Her relationship with Bond is an intriguing one as she’s the person who facilitates his apparent death wish and yet is the closest thing he has to a friend on screen. It’s a relationship I finally look forward to watch its develop.

The only criticisms I have are minor ones. At the end, Bond remarks to M that ‘The bitch is dead’ (the last line of Fleming’s novel). It leads Dame Judy to give a small speech reminding Bond why his cold heartedness is uncalled for. The speech coming howling from the vacuous cavity of some screenwriter’s liberal conscience. It is so clearly directed to the slower members of the audience who can’t see that this line as one of Bond’s stock defences and that, internally, he’s emotionally flatlining.

I’m also unsure about Eva Green as Vesper Lynd. I might well come to love her character the more times I watch the film, but for the first hour of the film her accent grated on my nerves. If she was attempting to portray a gratingly overconfident member of David Cameron’s inner circle, then she did a good job.

Daniel Craig is better than I could imagine at portraying this vulnerable Bond. He’s built like a gibbon, as though he’s spent too much time building his upper body strength. It has left him looking oddly top heavy. However, his bruises, cuts, and hurts are real enough and that, in the end, is what makes this the best Bond I think I’ve ever seen. And by the time I finished watching it, I was determined to buy myself a new tuxedo and learn some unarmed combat. I felt like a man again.