Books & Poetry

Did Ian Fleming model James Bond on himself? Was M based on Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, Fleming’s boss when he worked in Naval Intelligence? Did he name Blofeld after China scholar John Blofeld, who was a member of his club, Boodle’s, and whose father was called Ernst? Does any of this actually matter?

Sadly, it’s much easier to get kids’ attention by amplifying spurious pseudo-correspondences than by alerting them to the pitfalls of biographical fallacy. This tie-in with the Imperial War Museum’s shamefully lightweight new exhibition has been conjured by journalist Macintyre from various Fleming biographies, Bond companions and, presumably, his research notes for his excellent ‘Agent Zigzag’ (about the real-life WWII double agent Eddie Chapman, whose playboy lifestyle anticipated Bond’s). Macintyre calls the book a ‘personal investigation into the intersection of two lives, one real and one fictional’, but it isn’t really: it exists to promote an exhibition which exists to triangulate Fleming, the Bond novels and the Bond films simply because, well, it would be a laugh, wouldn’t it? People would like that, wouldn’t they?     

To be fair, he writes knowledgably and well. His portrait of Fleming does potted justice to the writer’s strangeness and complexity, and he even risks scuppering the whole project at one point when he concludes: ‘There is no definitive answer to the question, who was “the real Bond”, since, as he is a fictional creation, there was no such thing.’ (I nearly cried with relief when I read that sentence.)

Visually, some of the archive material – manuscripts, childhood photos – is fascinating, but it’s padded out with film stills, Ken Adam production sketches and photos of props such as the helmets worn by Drax’s men in ‘Moonraker’, a film which must have had Fleming spinning in his grave.