Prasanth M M থেকে Тресковщина, Belarus
This is quite a fun book and has some interesting information in it but Simon Winder can't decide what sort of book he is trying to write. He is a serious and knowledgeable student and fan of Ian Fleming and the Bond books, but he also wants to send them up and show that he does not take them too seriously. Unfortunately his comic interventions to my mind fall flat. And although his book is short it could do with some editing because there are many sentences which you feel he was undecided about what was the best way of expressing something and ended up putting them both in even if they largely say the same thing. He also reverses his earlier condemning of the films since by the end he is highlighting their best points and follows convention by declaring that Connery was the best Bond and the early films were great and then everything went over the top. He is also trying to make a serious point about how the Bond phenomenon coincided with the "retreat from Empire" and found its audience among those people who thoroughly regret this and view Britain as being in decline. This is an interesting thesis and Winder makes much of the impact of the change in Britain's world role which maybe has been under appreciated in literature or social study. It was the Empire which made Bond such a global figure at ease anywhere in the world, and Winder maybe right to say that only a British spy could be "at home" in the world the way Bond was. That said a number of other countries lost Empire in the 20th century (Turkey, France, Portugal, Belgium, Holland to name five). Admittedly Britain's empire had the widest spread and deepest roots (Canada, Australia and New Zealand being populated largely by Britons), but who knows if these other countries have not produced similar characters who maybe are not so well known because they were not written in English. Tintin for one seems to have a comparable globetrotting appeal. It does suggest that one of the ways Bond is now very old fashioned is that when sports figures, film stars, pop musicians have global presence, a lone British spy no longer has the unique appeal that they would have had in the fifties and sixties. There is an interesting point to be made about the impact of "losing" the Empire which is often referred to as being the source of British dissatisfaction in the post-war period - of having "lost an Empire and not found a role." And the extent of this sense of loss is much debated. Was it a dramatic shrinking of the horizon for a major cross section of society or just a relatively small selection of civil servants and businessmen? Britain certainly seemed to take longer to adjust to the post-war world than other countries. Simon Winder is the same generation as myself and one of the points of interest for me was that I remember the same stuff. Like him "Live and Let Die" was the first Bond film I saw. Like him I remember when the major reading of British schoolboys was war comics. I also remember the Sunday Express having two page broadsheet tales of wartime adventure every week, with artists illustrations. The depths of this obsession was really brought home to me in 1996 when England hosted the European championships and a number of tabloids indulged in juvenile German-baiting and war-dredging, with "Achtung" in headlines and pictures of the editors in Tommy-style WW2 tin helmets. Germany and the rest of Europe, and to be fair many English people including the English team, just looked bemused and embarrassed by all this and I can't help thinking that these particular tabloid antics did a lot to end the era of war reminiscence. The book is interesting but disorganised. Many of the same points crop up again and again throughout. And he never dwells too long on a point. One minute he is talking about Suez and the next he is talking about sex. Oddly he talks very little about the music - aside from a small section on John Barry. The title songs get very little mention even though a large chunk of Bond's enduring appeal is the great songs and singers particularly of the early Bonds. These songs still sell on Bond soundtrack albums and the choice of "Bond song" is as interesting to many people as the choice of "Bond girl." Winder is probably right to say that a lot of the appeal of Bond, and especially the books, is the "knowledge". Bond had the knowledge, of drinks, of meals, of clothes, of guns and of girls. This was irresistible to adolescent males but does not explain the broader appeal. The only members of the James Bond fan club (whose magazine was called "Bondage" if I remember correctly) I ever met were female. I have more time for the Roger Moore films than Winder, but like him have no interest in the Dalton and Brosnan eras. The one thing I will say about Daniel Craig is that he has made Bond films more interesting. When watching the early films again I am always surprised by how ridiculous and implausible the films were and also how violent. They are still fun to watch but not as fun as they used to be. I only spotted one error in the book which was when Winder cited the heroine of "The Spy Who Loved Me" - probably the oddest of all Bond books - as English when of course she was French Canadian. The book's bibliography has some titles on the "end of Empire" and they definitely sound worth following up on for anyone interested in that argument, which Winder is right to say is a much cited but unexplored area of British social history.