007 in JamaicaThe origins of James Bond are fairly murky, being as he was the product of a Scottish father, a Swiss mother, and a peripatetic upbringing only dimly illumined by the Bond novels Ian Fleming wrote.
Much more is known about the origins of Bond as fictional construct; this new book by Matthew Parker puts it all together by paying special attention to the tumultuous tropical setting where 007 was conceived and nurtured.
For seasoned Bond readers like myself, associating Bond with Jamaica comes naturally. Three Bond novels and three more short stories are set there, making Jamaica one of the series' most familiar locales. A little research shows why the place kept popping up: Fleming wrote a goodly part of his Bond novels in a vacation home he had built on Jamaica's northern coast which he dubbed "Goldeneye." Over the course of Bond's many adventures, both in and outside of Jamaica, a tropical mixture of beauty and danger Fleming's readers would associate with the island became a regular part of the 007 cocktail.
"All writers possessed of any energy annex some corner of the world to themselves, and the pelagic jungle roamed by ray and barracuda is Mr. Fleming's," was the way noted author and Bondophile Kingsley Amis once put it, as quoted here by Parker.
According to Parker, the name "Goldeneye" came from an operation Fleming had conceived for the wartime defense of another island possession of Great Britain's: Gibraltar. As laid out in Goldeneye, Fleming's interest in Jamaica began in 1943 when he visited Jamaica on assignment for British intelligence. As his friend Ivar Bryce later recalled, Fleming decided on the flight back that he would someday return to Jamaica, find a spot where he could enjoy its tropical splendor in peace, and write books.
The great thing about Parker's book is the way he connects the dots between the Bond books and the island where Fleming made his second home. On an early foray through St. Mary Parish, the Jamaican province where Goldeneye was built, Fleming ran into an ancient couple who served him an afternoon cocktail they called "Vespers," a name which became that of the mystery woman at the heart of Bond's first adventure, Casino Royale. A local Jamaican became the model for Bond's recurring black friend, Quarrel. An enthusiastic scuba diver, Fleming befriended an octopus who became the title of his last Bond story, "Octopussy."
"What I endeavor to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism," is how Fleming described his approach to Bond. It was evidently that very same "disciplined exoticism" which Fleming found so appealing in Jamaica.
Fleming in Jamaica was a character of contrasts, exemplified in the house he had built there to his specifications. At Goldeneye, Fleming left the beauty to God and focused instead on utilitarian design, "a cubist arrangement of concrete surfaces," Bryce called it. It employed primitive plumbing and barracks-room decor. Fleming even eschewed glass for his windows, preferring jalousies to let in the warm Caribbean breezes as well as local fauna like mosquitoes and ants.
Noel Coward, Fleming's famous friend, had choice words for Goldeneye after his first stay there, noting the house was carefully situated in such a way as to just miss the magnificent sunsets, and that "the long window-sills had been so cunningly designed that they entirely cut off the view as you sank into a sofa upholstered with iron shavings...All you Flemings revel in discomfort." Yet Coward left Goldeneye so impressed that he went back to Jamaica and bought land not far from Fleming's, where he built a home so ugly it made Goldeneye look palatial by comparison.
A major focus of Parker's book is the artistic community of English expatriates which Fleming and Coward helped form. Largely homosexual like Coward, yet at the same time politically conservative like both Coward and Fleming, they bespoke an attitude of both Anglo privilege and adventurous spirit upon which the Bond myth could take flight. Parker spends a good deal of Goldeneye examining the racial dynamics at work in this subculture, and how it in turn informs the Bond novels.
For me, this became a bit of a downside the more Parker harped upon it. One can't ignore the fact James Bond is an offshoot of white imperialism and that Jamaica was a land of former slaves where white people still held the whip hand just decades before Fleming arrived. But the dogmatic approach Parker sometimes takes to bringing out the idea of black suffering feeding the Bond narrative seems tendentious and, like the homosexuality of Coward and other English ex-pats who came to Jamaica which Parker keeps returning to, a point designed more to display the author's 21st-century attitudes than anything else. [Parker even presents Katharine Hepburn's lesbianism as an established fact rather than a minority view.]
If Parker wanted to play up a kinky angle to the Fleming story, he had ample opportunity for it but left it alone. According to Andrew Lycett's definitive biography, Ian Fleming, Fleming had a corporeal attitude about the privileges of marriage, often beating his wife Ann English-boarding-school style to their mutual pleasure. Parker quotes some correspondence between them that backs this up, but says no more. The whole Ann side of the Fleming story is only tangentially dealt with in Goldeneye, perhaps because she came to loathe Jamaica and rationed her visits there to the point Ian felt entitled to openly take up with a mistress, Blanche Blackwell, the mother of the man who later would introduce another Anglo-Jamaican icon named Bob Marley to the rest of the world.
Parker did have a chance to interview the centenarian Blackwell for his book, one of many local voices incorporated into his narrative. They help paint a picture of Jamaica before it became a haven for crime and tourism. Fleming came to loathe Jamaica in its modernized form, using his later Bond books set there as platforms for denunciation. Fancy hotels and lotion-lathered tourists set his teeth on edge, especially when the latter came from the one country Fleming could not countenance.
"Sometimes Fleming's anti-Americanism even trumps his anti-communism," Parker writes. "The greatest threat to his Jamaica was not the Soviet Union but Uncle Sam."
It was ironic then how much Americans took to James Bond. Even before the movies, President John F. Kennedy famously listed From Russia With Love as one of his ten favorite books. Parker explores this dichotomy at some length, suggesting the same contrast between privilege and adventurism that fed Fleming's Bond vision and his interest in Jamaica kindled similar sensibilities in a country just beginning to flex its own geopolitical muscles.
Jamaica would gain her independence in 1962; the same year Bond took flight on screen in Dr. No. Filmed in Jamaica, with Fleming himself in attendance, Dr. No began a long series of Bond movies that continue to this day. Dr. No also fed Jamaica's tourism industry, which by 1962 had already seen a fourfold increase in its number of hotel beds in just 12 years, but even that couldn't dampen Fleming's ardor for his home away from home. Coward tried to sell off his Jamaican estate, and Ann all but abandoned her husband near the end to be free of the island, but Ian remained an enthusiastic ex-pat Jamaican until his sudden death in August, 1964.
While the focus of Goldeneye is strongest on Fleming, I found myself at times more interested in the bits of political intrigue and social scandal that pop up around the book's periphery. Jamaica's fascinating backstory makes for a worthy secondary subject to this examination of a man's relationship to the place where he found himself as a writer. If you are someone like me who finds James Bond a subject of stubborn fascination, you will likely discover in Goldeneye a book that connects the dots between fantasy and reality in a satisfying way.
For seasoned Bond readers like myself, associating Bond with Jamaica comes naturally. Three Bond novels and three more short stories are set there, making Jamaica one of the series' most familiar locales. A little research shows why the place kept popping up: Fleming wrote a goodly part of his Bond novels in a vacation home he had built on Jamaica's northern coast which he dubbed "Goldeneye." Over the course of Bond's many adventures, both in and outside of Jamaica, a tropical mixture of beauty and danger Fleming's readers would associate with the island became a regular part of the 007 cocktail.
"All writers possessed of any energy annex some corner of the world to themselves, and the pelagic jungle roamed by ray and barracuda is Mr. Fleming's," was the way noted author and Bondophile Kingsley Amis once put it, as quoted here by Parker.
According to Parker, the name "Goldeneye" came from an operation Fleming had conceived for the wartime defense of another island possession of Great Britain's: Gibraltar. As laid out in Goldeneye, Fleming's interest in Jamaica began in 1943 when he visited Jamaica on assignment for British intelligence. As his friend Ivar Bryce later recalled, Fleming decided on the flight back that he would someday return to Jamaica, find a spot where he could enjoy its tropical splendor in peace, and write books.
The great thing about Parker's book is the way he connects the dots between the Bond books and the island where Fleming made his second home. On an early foray through St. Mary Parish, the Jamaican province where Goldeneye was built, Fleming ran into an ancient couple who served him an afternoon cocktail they called "Vespers," a name which became that of the mystery woman at the heart of Bond's first adventure, Casino Royale. A local Jamaican became the model for Bond's recurring black friend, Quarrel. An enthusiastic scuba diver, Fleming befriended an octopus who became the title of his last Bond story, "Octopussy."
"What I endeavor to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism," is how Fleming described his approach to Bond. It was evidently that very same "disciplined exoticism" which Fleming found so appealing in Jamaica.
Fleming in Jamaica was a character of contrasts, exemplified in the house he had built there to his specifications. At Goldeneye, Fleming left the beauty to God and focused instead on utilitarian design, "a cubist arrangement of concrete surfaces," Bryce called it. It employed primitive plumbing and barracks-room decor. Fleming even eschewed glass for his windows, preferring jalousies to let in the warm Caribbean breezes as well as local fauna like mosquitoes and ants.
Noel Coward, Fleming's famous friend, had choice words for Goldeneye after his first stay there, noting the house was carefully situated in such a way as to just miss the magnificent sunsets, and that "the long window-sills had been so cunningly designed that they entirely cut off the view as you sank into a sofa upholstered with iron shavings...All you Flemings revel in discomfort." Yet Coward left Goldeneye so impressed that he went back to Jamaica and bought land not far from Fleming's, where he built a home so ugly it made Goldeneye look palatial by comparison.
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| A recent photograph of Goldeneye shows how little it has changed from Fleming's time there, retaining its spartan design amid bucolic surroundings. [Image from the James Bond 007 Museum website, http://www.007museum.com/] |
For me, this became a bit of a downside the more Parker harped upon it. One can't ignore the fact James Bond is an offshoot of white imperialism and that Jamaica was a land of former slaves where white people still held the whip hand just decades before Fleming arrived. But the dogmatic approach Parker sometimes takes to bringing out the idea of black suffering feeding the Bond narrative seems tendentious and, like the homosexuality of Coward and other English ex-pats who came to Jamaica which Parker keeps returning to, a point designed more to display the author's 21st-century attitudes than anything else. [Parker even presents Katharine Hepburn's lesbianism as an established fact rather than a minority view.]
If Parker wanted to play up a kinky angle to the Fleming story, he had ample opportunity for it but left it alone. According to Andrew Lycett's definitive biography, Ian Fleming, Fleming had a corporeal attitude about the privileges of marriage, often beating his wife Ann English-boarding-school style to their mutual pleasure. Parker quotes some correspondence between them that backs this up, but says no more. The whole Ann side of the Fleming story is only tangentially dealt with in Goldeneye, perhaps because she came to loathe Jamaica and rationed her visits there to the point Ian felt entitled to openly take up with a mistress, Blanche Blackwell, the mother of the man who later would introduce another Anglo-Jamaican icon named Bob Marley to the rest of the world.
Parker did have a chance to interview the centenarian Blackwell for his book, one of many local voices incorporated into his narrative. They help paint a picture of Jamaica before it became a haven for crime and tourism. Fleming came to loathe Jamaica in its modernized form, using his later Bond books set there as platforms for denunciation. Fancy hotels and lotion-lathered tourists set his teeth on edge, especially when the latter came from the one country Fleming could not countenance.
"Sometimes Fleming's anti-Americanism even trumps his anti-communism," Parker writes. "The greatest threat to his Jamaica was not the Soviet Union but Uncle Sam."
It was ironic then how much Americans took to James Bond. Even before the movies, President John F. Kennedy famously listed From Russia With Love as one of his ten favorite books. Parker explores this dichotomy at some length, suggesting the same contrast between privilege and adventurism that fed Fleming's Bond vision and his interest in Jamaica kindled similar sensibilities in a country just beginning to flex its own geopolitical muscles.
Jamaica would gain her independence in 1962; the same year Bond took flight on screen in Dr. No. Filmed in Jamaica, with Fleming himself in attendance, Dr. No began a long series of Bond movies that continue to this day. Dr. No also fed Jamaica's tourism industry, which by 1962 had already seen a fourfold increase in its number of hotel beds in just 12 years, but even that couldn't dampen Fleming's ardor for his home away from home. Coward tried to sell off his Jamaican estate, and Ann all but abandoned her husband near the end to be free of the island, but Ian remained an enthusiastic ex-pat Jamaican until his sudden death in August, 1964.
While the focus of Goldeneye is strongest on Fleming, I found myself at times more interested in the bits of political intrigue and social scandal that pop up around the book's periphery. Jamaica's fascinating backstory makes for a worthy secondary subject to this examination of a man's relationship to the place where he found himself as a writer. If you are someone like me who finds James Bond a subject of stubborn fascination, you will likely discover in Goldeneye a book that connects the dots between fantasy and reality in a satisfying way.
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