Bond books: ages 8 and up?
If it’s true that books we read as children influence us for the rest of our lives, then Thunderball, which I first read when I was eight years old, has a lot to answer for.
Years before it was socially acceptable for adults to be seen reading books written ‘for children’, the gay poet, Martini-expert and James Bond fan W.H. Auden came to their defence, stating that “there are no good books which are only for children”. However, he prefaced his remark with the caution: “There are good books which are only for adults”.
I would imagine Auden would include Ian Fleming’s Bond novels in the ‘only for adults’ category. Although they are essentially escapist fantasies, they contain many ingredients which make them ‘grown up’. Of course there’s the sex, violence and swearing, but there’s also addiction to various substances and most forms of bigotry, including misogny, racism, homophobia. Not, most would argue, the most edifying material for a growing mind.
Perhaps I had been ‘primed’ for the darker side of the written word by an addiction of my own: to Roald Dahl. I didn’t know about Dahl’s own Bond connection at the time. I had seen his name on the credits of You Only Live Twice but thought it must be another person called Roald Dahl who was responsible for that film’s screenplay.
I read everything by Dahl I could get my hands on. George’s Marvellous Medicine is still one of my favourite books (definitely in Auden’s ‘too good for it to be just for children’ pile). Maybe it was Dahl’s death, near the end of 1990, that pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me seek out something different to read. I felt Dahl’s death hard. I vividly remember a conversation with my mum in the kitchen on the day Dahl’s death was announced. I was clearly fighting to hold back the tears. Her words stay with me to this day: “If a writer I admired had died then I would be upset too.” I went upstairs and wrote in the inside covers of each of my Dahl books a brief inscription, memorialising him. And then, as was my habit even then, I took solace in a new book.
I’m immensely grateful to my parents for not only teaching me to read before I went to school but encouraging me to read anything I wanted to. Even so, I’m quite surprised, in hindsight, that they didn’t even raise an eyebrow when eight year old me selected Thunderball for my school reading book.
I was a huge fan of the Bond films by that point but this would be my first Bond book. I remember spending an age choosing where to begin, running my fingers backwards and forwards across the brightly coloured paperback spines. I wanted to start with Dr. No because that was the first film, but my dad didn’t have that one any more. He’d read it as a teenager and then given it away. He’s the least materialistic person I know. Fortunately, he’d kept hold of several of Fleming’s books. I was dimly aware that the Bond films were shot in a different order to the books but another one we didn’t have was Casino Royale.
In the end, I judged a book by its cover. And what a cover, with two ‘bullet holes’ which I could just about fit my fingers though. The bullet holes appeared to be puncturing someone’s back. Little did I know, but the original cover (by Raymond Hawkey) was intended to be even more risque: instead of a photograph of a man’s back it was his muscled, hairy chest. If the publishers had been brave enough I daresay I would have thought twice about taking the book into school. The ‘gay’ comments were already flying thick and fast. The last thing I’d have wanted was to give the bullies more ammunition.
Who knows what my Year 5 teacher thought when she saw me get my dad’s old paperback out of my rucksack. Who knows what she’d have thought, and done, had she read even the first page.
The novel opens with Bond full of self-loathing. He has spent the night gambling, losing 100 pounds. Although I didn’t understand the concept of ‘inflation’, I was aware from the Bond films - and my dad - an expert in accountancy - that the cost of things went up over time. The ransom Blofeld hopes to extort from the world powers in the film of Thunderball seemed ridiculously small even when I was reading the novel in 1991 and would be exaggerated to comic effect in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery later that decade (“One million dollars!”).
So I could understand why Bond was annoyed: he’d lost a lot of money. What I didn’t understand was why he had decided to drink eleven whisky and sodas. That sounded like a lot of alcohol. And soon we learn he’s downing half a bottle of spirits a day. When I saw Bond drinking alcohol in the films he never felt bad about it.
The novel of Thunderball begins not with a daring escape via jetpack as in the film, but with Bond trying to outrun a massive hangover.
He’s also beating himself up for smoking so much, has cut himself shaving (although I didn’t know what a ‘styptic pencil’ was I could guess) and is calling himself a “stupid ignorant bastard”. And that’s just the first page. At the top of the second page, he explains why he’s dreading going into the office: his usual secretary is off sick with the flu and has been replaced with an “ugly bitch”. You’re such a charmer James.
Things ramp up rather quickly with M telling him Bond he needs to see him urgently. 007 is hoping for a mission to shake himself out of his self-recriminating lethargy. Unfortunately, M has other plans and wants to send Bond off for a couple of weeks to get his health sorted out. He’s just as concerned about 007’s health as eight year old me was.
Re-reading this now, as someone who has done a lot of work on staff well-being for my own organisation and the government, I find the scene very comical. I can imagine someone from the MI6 HR team summoning the courage to have a long overdue word with M regarding the low life expectancy of his staff.
‘James Bond walks into a health spa...’ sounds like the setup for a joke, and Fleming is clearly in on it. Later, he refers to the action that takes place there as a “rather childish test of strength” in “bizarre surroundings”. Perhaps this first sequence was something his collaborator, Kevin McClory, was more interested in having included in the story. Thunderball, as is well documented, began life as a screen treatment, the ramifications of which plagued the ‘official’ Bond film series for years, resulting in the competing film production Never Say Never Again.
I don’t recall eight year old me finding this opening especially funny. I imagine the jokes at the expense of the health spa’s other patrons, Fleming’s deft excoriation of Middle England, flew completely over my head. I was also getting quite impatient at, what I do remember feeling at the time, was a slow beginning to a Bond story. It’s hardly ‘slow’ of course. Any adult with a reasonable reading ability can comfortably breeze through these first forty pages in one sitting. But most eight year olds struggle to work out the meanings of words such as ‘surfeit’, ‘benign’, ‘palpable’, ‘fibrositis’, ‘abstemious’ and ‘embrocation’ - and they’re just from Thunderball’s first three pages.
It wasn’t just the vocabulary I found challenging. I didn’t really understand why Bond needed to go to this health retreat. The film gives him a fresh injury to recover from, having been beaten savagely with a fire poker (by a Spectre agent in drag no less). This doesn’t happen in the book: the injuries are mostly internal. As an eight year old, I was already becoming an expert in self-loathing, but I didn’t grasp the connection between your mental state and self-destructive behaviour - in the forms that Bond displays at least.
Although several of the films show Bond drinking to alleviate tension after a particularly brutal fight, the books push this to extremes. When I first read Thunderball I didn’t know that the destructive lifestyle Ian Fleming describes here was very similar to his own, a lifestyle that was to kill Bond’s creator only three years after finishing this novel, aged just 56.
The first chapter ends with a joke about spanking Moneypenny which is quite similar to the film and, blatant sexual harassment aside, she gives as good as she gets. Things get considerably weirder in the next few chapters. Bond is driven to the Shrublands treatment centre by a young mod with which he strikes up a rapport due to their shared love of driving like lunatics. When I re-read this now, it sounds like Bond is imagining what his life would have been like if he’d been born a few decades later. The man is carefree, financially solvent and unattached romantically. The tone is wistful, regretful. Because of the references to weekend trips to Brighton and his speech patterns I can’t help but cast Phil Daniels’s character from Quadrophenia in the version playing in my head.
Bond enters Shrublands in the affronted manner of a husband being dragged along by their wife to a health spa. On our fairly infrequent visits to such places I’ve seen many fragile men frightened that a little self care will somehow result in the loss of their masculinity. We get another big dollop of misogny when Bond sees “frumpish” middle class women for who the only crime is wearing “unattractive quilted dressing gowns”.
Fortunately, there’s a pretty young damsel to rescue in the form of Patricia, employee of Shrublands. When he plucks her out of the way of a speeding car and places her back on her feet we learn “his right hand held the memory of one beautiful breast”. But Bond’s eyes are soon drawn to another beautiful person, and this time it’s a man. Count Lippe has a mouth “women kiss in their dreams”. Bond’s ardour for Lippe’s lips is only dimmed by his bigotry. Bond tries to work out his “Spanish or South American blood”, settling on Portugese with his “turned up eyes” revealing “a dash of Chinaman”. A mixed heritage in the world of Bond, usually means you’re a wrong ‘un, especially if you’re a man who wears bright clothing. Lippe wears “a gay windcheater”, the word probably not chosen to imply Lippe is homosexual, although this meaning was creeping into the vernacular when the novel was written.
Indeed, Lippe turns out to be up to something. When he finds out Bond is on to him, he waits until Bond is strapped to a spinal treatment machine and then pushes it to dangerous limits. The pain of ‘The Rack’ makes Bond feel like he’s been reduced “something lower in the scale of existence than a handful of grass in the mouth of a tiger”. Although not in the way Bond thought it might, Shrublands has attached his masculinity. We are treated to a rambling internal monologue in which a “hysterical” Bond berates M for sending him to Shrublands. He briefly considers M to be a “danger to the country”. He remarks to himself that the “hero of a hundred combats” (how he thinks of himself) has been reduced to “quivering jelly” and can only feel better about himself by dealing with Lippe “man to man”. But this isn’t before he’s taken the opportunity to cross the line with the lovely Patricia while she treats his back. Bond claims to be relieved to find Patricia on duty rather than “some hairy H-man [Health-man] waiting for him with flexed muscles”.
What my eight year old self thought about all this anyone’s guess. I was only nascently aware that I was ‘different’ to a lot of other boys and I’m sure Bond’s way with women led to me feeling inadequate and shameful when I read particular passages. I’m relieved that it didn’t turn me into a misogynist. And the novel’s highly questionable treatment of race didn’t rub off on me, aside from a pretended dislike for the French when I came to learn their language in secondary school (entirely to do with my frustrations at learning irregular verb endings and nothing to do with French people in the slightest).
A bit later, when I was in Year 7, I remember having a discussion with my maths teacher about Bond. She was a brilliant, strict teacher who progressed to Legend status when she started up Gameboy club. Once a week I would be saved from having to go outside on the playground at lunchtime, avoiding taunts and footballs. The only problem was, she hated James Bond. She said he was sexist. I politely argued (I was THAT sort of child), that he wasn’t sexist, that he loved women. She patiently put down her game of Tetris and took the time to explain why I was so utterly wrong. It’s amazing the influence teachers can have. I immediately started to see Bond in a different light.
That didn’t mean I started to dislike Bond. I just started to be more critical. After all, Bond couldn’t be right about everything. I could pick and choose which parts of his character I liked. I warmed to some and steered around others, trying not to be too judgemental. I learned a valuable lesson: some things are products of their eras, a lesson many are only too content to forget from time to time.
Sometimes it’s the little things that jumped out at me. All of the ways that Bond himself is very different, and recognises himself to be different. The Bond of the books, and especially Thunderball, is quite self-aware. On my recent re-read, there were several lines which brought on full-on Proustian rushes to nearly thirty years ago when I first read them in my Year 5 form room. One of the earliest ones is ”Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses”. The line clicked with me. I didn’t, of course, notice the allusion to Karl Marx (intended ironically for James Bond, the adversary of Communism?). But I had recently started to prefer coffee over tea - another thing probably not suitable for eight year olds - and was on my way to becoming addicted. Maybe, I thought, I’m not so different from James Bond after all.
People often ask me to recommend books their children might like. I’m only too happy to oblige. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve told people to buy their children the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz or the Young Bond books by Charlie Higson. Both share the same 007 DNA, even if only the latter carries his name. I have never recommended the original Ian Fleming books for anyone under the age of 12 though. And even then I’ve only done so if a reader is very advanced - not in terms of vocabulary but whether they are the sort of reader who has the capacity to be critical of some of the more ‘problematic’ content they encounter.
The Bond novels are wonderful adventures and I’m so glad my parents allowed me to read them when I was younger. I’ve devoured each one several times since, enjoying them more each time - and being more critical each time. It is possible to both love something AND be critical of it. This is something we should be teaching all children when we are developing their reading habits. The Bond novels are a great place to start. Maybe wait until they’re a bit older than eight though.
