Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I think it’s the best of them, and it’s wonderful because it reveals what I think is the essential Bond. The film Bond is very, very different from the character that Ian Fleming invented. The real character was unknowable. There’s something rather creepy and peculiar about the original James Bond. There are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it’s Fleming’s best writing. It wings along – it’s very hard to stop reading.
OK, on to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, then. Why that one?
I think it’s the best of them, and it’s wonderful because it reveals what I think is the essential Bond. The film Bond is very, very different from the character that Ian Fleming invented. The real character was unknowable. There’s something rather creepy and peculiar about the original James Bond and you get that in buckets in Casino Royale. He’s a tough man and he’s absolutely ruthless. He’s a rather distant character and when Vesper commits suicide at the end, he feels nothing. He says: ‘The bitch is dead.’
It was 1953 and it was very remarkable for the time, because Bond was so cruel. He’s horribly tortured in the book and there are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it’s Fleming’s best writing. It wings along – it’s very hard to stop reading. It’s also brilliant at place. He manages to summon up the smoky stench of a casino in a way that no one else has ever managed to do. And it was incredibly glamorous. Here was Britain emerging from the depredations of war in a time of great austerity and here was a character on an apparently limitless expense account, having guilt-free sex and ordering dry martinis in the most glamorous places. It was a wonderful bit of escapism for the time. It’s a tour de force and by far his best novel.
Now all these books are about British spies. Is there an equivalent catalogue of great American spy books?
I don’t think the Americans do it nearly as well as we do. Yes, there are lots, but they’re all fairly derivative and I don’t think they have the same psychological depth. The British are particularly good not just at spying but at writing about spying. I think it’s to do with the natural theatricality of the British character and also a public-school system that for many generations encouraged a covering-up of what you really felt and thought. Hidden homosexuality, hidden feelings about loneliness. The British class system encouraged a certain amount of subterfuge.
I think there’s an imaginative flair too. If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the more elaborate ruses that have been pulled off are British. Nobody does it better.
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Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large and Associate Editor on The Times and writes a weekly column on history, espionage, art, politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of seven non-fiction history books, including his latest, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that changed the course of World War II. Here he tells one of the great unsung stories of WWII: after cracking the Enigma code, the British knew when virtually every single German spy was coming. ‘They were all picked up and offered a pretty stark choice between collaborating or execution. The unlucky 14 chose trial and execution. The rest all agreed to be double agents, and this was a critical part of the war.’
