We need to do something about this James Bond fellow. Let me explain what I mean. Because I’m not saying it in a fun way, like maybe I’m pretending to be Goldfinger, having an incredible time on a private jet with my golden finger.No, I’ve been reading Ian Fleming novels. I started with Dr. No, moved on to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and have just finished Casino Royale, the first installment in the series. You don’t have to read the books in order. No one checks. I started reading them in the first place because I saw one in the New Fiction section at the library. Dr. No wasn’t new, but it had been reprinted, so, close enough, I guess. I thought if I checked it out I might have a good time reading a book. I thought it could be a reading adventure, like what those kids have on Superwhy whenever they read books.I had, also, been thinking about James Bond. I had been comparing him, in my mind, to Ethan Hunt, the hero of the Mission Impossible films and TV show.When I compare any two characters in my mind—which I do only on occasions that demand it, as it is a laborious process that leaves me exhausted for days afterward—I shut my eyes as tightly as I can and picture one of the characters. Then, with great concentration, I imagine the image of the other character, some distance from the first, for safety’s sake. Through painstaking mental effort, I pull the first character closer to the other, and then do the same with the second, until finally they are side-by-side, no space between them at all. This can take hours, and someday it will kill me. But it’s the only way to go about this work that I know of.In the end, I felt like Ethan Hunt was a much more interesting character than James Bond. He just seems like he does more things. He climbs, he runs, he puts on masks. He’s usually dressed for movement, and he’s good at pretending to be people he’s not. What does James Bond do? Well, he looks good in a suit. He’s particular about how he likes his martinis to be served—so he has the formidable trait of being finnicky about drinks.He doesn’t wear disguises, that I can recall. He rarely uses an alias. In fact, one of the things this international superspy is most famous for is the way he tells people his actual name, repeating his surname so as to give it extra emphasis and make sure everyone remembers to call him James Bond, which is his real name. It’s an intriguing quality to have, when you’re an agent of something called the “secret service.” I went into reading Dr. No, the first 007 novel I picked up, with an open heart and an open mind. I wanted to have fun. I think it was printed on the back cover that none other than Raymond Chandler said Ian Fleming was the best suspense writer around. That’s quite an endorsement.Raymond Chandler wasn’t wrong. Ian Fleming knows how to show readers a good time. The pace of his novels is consistently high. His hero travels to exotic locations. He eats great food and drinks a lot. The drinks are always good, and so is the food. He has hot sex with beautiful women to whom he is not attached in any way. They’re either provided to him by the secret service, as colleagues that he then sleeps with, or they appear out of thin air, like the woman whose name I forget from Dr. No. Bond arrives on the shore of an island, near Jamaica, where he suspects Dr. No has built his secret hideout. As he plans his next move, a woman walks over to where he is. She is startled to see him. She is beautiful and not wearing any clothes.Now that I’ve read three Ian Fleming novels, it seems to me that the appeal of James Bond is that he’s a man who has everything handed to him. He messes up fairly consistently. He gets his friends killed, he gets captured, and he loses at baccarat when it’s his mission to not lose at baccarat. But somehow, by god, he wins, usually thanks to someone else intervening on his behalf, and in the end M begrudgingly congratulates him. 007 has done it again! The women he falls in love with, and to whom he comes around to feeling he could perhaps actually devote himself to, conveniently die, so that he never has to follow through with being tied down. The novels are a breeze to read, and it’s fun to read a breeze. But let’s face it: as a character, James Bond kind of sucks. To illustrate how much he sucks, let me cite a couple of passages from Casino Royale.In this first one, Bond has learned that Vesper, the woman who was assigned to aid him on his current mission, has been kidnapped, and is likely being used as bait to get to him:This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get ...
