MoviesEarlier this year I gave my film students a new lecture I had written up on Pierce Brosnan as diasporic film star. Having filled their minds with smart ideas drawn from ethnicity studies and identity politics, I invited them to respond in kind.
Within minutes the erudite tone of the lecture had been replaced by a new enthusiasm for peer-to-peer engagement. Connery for best Bond! Goldfinger for best pre-title sequence! Why Drax shouldn't have hi-jacked the shuttle! The decline of the series after Moore! What we all thought of a blond Bond, and why we all thought Clive Owen was a dead ringer for Britain's best-known spy.
I ought to have known better. Only a year before I had tried to give a lecture on James Bond and the decline of the British Empire, drawing the group's attention to Umberto Eco's seminal structuralist essay on Ian Fleming's spy fiction. Exactly the same thing happened. Indeed, exactly the same kind of student took part - the quiet young man who had apparently not had an opinion worth voicing on any other aspect of my lectures to date; in the meantime, his female counterpart whiled away the class texting her friends.
Simon Winder, author of The Man Who Saved Britain was, I am sure, a good student. He is an erudite writer who knows a great deal about Britain's shameful imperial past.
Much of the first part of his book is a smart and smarting description of how his country firstly annexed and then lost much of the globe; Bond, he writes, was a dream conjured up by an ageing alcoholic to propagate a fantasy of continued colonial empowerment. Tracing Britain's decline from the end of the second World War, through the great Labour experiment and on to the dreary flag-waving of that last gasp of imperialism - Thatcherite enterprise culture - Winder sees in Fleming's gentleman-hero, "the most all-pervasive wistful alternative, a sort of vulgar threnody on ideas of Britishness, the ultimate ersatz for compromised, difficult reality".
Of course the real threat to Britain during these years was not the evil empire of the USSR but its preppy nemesis, the US; hence Fleming and Bond's shared contempt for the world of Felix Leiter and his blasé confession that, "mostly here we sleep in the raw". Words such as these, Winder proposes, sent mighty blasts of wind through "the whole British world of pyjamas, slippers and chilblain creams".
It was only during Suez that the Americans displayed their true perfidy, an occasion for which they compensated in the Swinging Sixties by becoming the greatest fans and consumers of British culture; Bond's fame, it is often claimed, became truly transnational when John F Kennedy named From Russia, With Love as one of his top 10 favourite books.
It is only fair to quote from The Man Who Saved Britain in detail since its author turns a phrase with relish. His is the wry tone of the minor British public school boy and Oxford graduate; someone for whom patriotism is at once an embarrassment and a way of life. He is a literary Hugh Grant, self-deprecating and innocently priapic. Thus, his first encounter with the world of Bond on screen is forever linked in his memories with the sickliness of the melting jumbo bar of Old Jamaica chocolate that sent him rushing to the toilets as the crazed natives cavorted around their screaming white woman prisoner. Later in the dorm at night he and his chums re-enacted their favourite Bond moments, preceded by a troupe of their less well-developed juniors who obligingly danced naked in the torchlight to throw silhouettes against the wall.
Personal memory and public history increasingly intertwine as Winder muses on a life of fandom. Like every good fan, he is faultlessly discerning; books and films alike are weighed up and judged according to the cunning tricks of their villains, the cruel tortures suffered by Bond, the memorability or otherwise of the Bond girl of the moment, the score, the pre-credit sequences, even the body doubles. Ken Adams's sets are the subject of several expansive pages, with Winder persuasively arguing that the opulence of their design made the real sets seem artificial by comparison.
With the latest Bond slated for pre-Christmas release, The Man Who Saved Britain is just an early harbinger of many, many things to come. Among the cereal box giveaways, the trick cigarettes, the invisible ink, and the giant squid underpants, Winder's book has staked an early claim for the more erudite fan's wallet. My money is on the quiet young man at the back of the class enjoying this very much; whether or not he can persuade his female counterpart to share the pleasure is another matter.
Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures and Film at UCD. Her most recent book, Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell, has just been published by Irish Academic Press
James Bond was the antidote for a country in terminal decline, argues Simon Winder The Man Who Saved Britain By Simon Winder Picador, 323pp. £14.99