Is James Bond a good spy? Is he at best competent, and often quite inept? Does a dumber 007 make for a better reading experience?
These questions kept popping into my head as I read again this brilliant, poignant but somewhat perplexing novel, the one in which Bond goes head-to-head with the greatest villain of the series and becomes the willing prisoner of a woman he loves.
For action and suspense, it is hard to beat On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, though it works very well as an emotionally driven character piece, too. Ian Fleming sets up one of his most brilliant plots, executed with violence and cunning. Yet when it is over, the resolution of Ernst Blofeld’s latest fiendish scheme is not what you are left thinking about.
It begins quietly and contemplatively, in the same fictional French beach town where the series began ten years before:
The five-mile promenade of Royale-les-Eaux, backed by trim lawns emblazoned at intervals with tricolour beds of salvia, alyssum and lobelia, was bright with flags and, on the longest beach in the north of France, the gay bathing tents still marched prettily down to the tide-line in big, money-making battalions.
With few exceptions, Bond’s point of view is always with us. Quite a contrast from the last novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, where Bond was viewed exclusively through the eyes of a woman he was rescuing. Bond is again trying to save a woman here, but Fleming takes no chances cheesing off fans. We are locked into Bond’s viewpoint, his impressions, even his boyhood memories. This is Bond up close and personal.
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| "If you could lay your hands on a good alp, which Blofeld had somehow
managed to do, you really had it good." To stop the global criminal, Bond visits Switzerland undercover. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the second of three novels focused on Bond's hunt. Image from https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/where-are-the-swiss-alps.html |
It is here I began wondering about the man’s professional competence. We see him on a beach, deliberately hidden from view as he keeps an eye on the woman who the night before told him to “treat me like the lowest whore in creation.” An air of doom hangs over her. He senses danger, yet all the while completely ignores the two men in raincoats staring at them from a sidewalk table. They are in plain view, but Bond never notices them until they are on top of him brandishing guns.
Sure, Bond’s focused on the woman. But shouldn’t a life of danger have conditioned him to keep a better lookout?
As it turns out, this is not a fatal mistake. He makes much worse ones in this book. Yet in the end, these flaws do not lessen the quality of the novel. In fact, they only magnify the suspense.
Bond in the novels was never as cocksure and suave as the other fellow in the movies. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he is more nakedly vulnerable than ever. At the start, he is contemplating resignation from the Service after months of fruitlessly pursuing Blofeld’s phantom. Later in the novel, Corsican crime boss Marc-Ange Draco presents a diagnosis that could apply to Bond:
“You know that this can happen, my friend – to men and to women. They burn the heart out of themselves by living too greedily, and suddenly they examine their lives and see that they are worthless. They have had everything, eating all the sweets of life at one great banquet, and there is nothing left.”
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| By the time they got around to making a Bond movie based on On Her Majesty's Secret Service, it was 1969 and the series had just lost its star, Sean Connery. Special as Connery is, it's hard to see him playing 007 as emotional and vulnerable as he is in the book. Unknown Australian actor George Lazenby filled the role this one time. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Her-Majestys-Secret-Service-Poster/dp/B07BDQ4VMV?th=1 |
Bond overcomes his bout of apathy and gets back to work stopping Blofeld, but only in fits and starts. And he keeps doing odd things along the way. After getting into Blofeld’s hideout undercover, Bond flirts shamelessly with the mysterious women who share Blofeld’s Alpine lair, has sex with one of them, and drags out his stay for what turns out to be a perilously long time. He gathers details on the criminal’s latest doings, rather than just get back home and raise an alarm.
For all its incongruity, this idyll in Blofeld’s lair is one of the best extended sequences in a novel stuffed with engaging setpieces.
Bondophiles like me appreciate the deeper profile we get of 007, including a newly revealed Scottish heritage. [What prompted Fleming to add that in 1963?] He visits the grave of Vesper Lynd and contemplates life, all the while reacquainting himself with Switzerland (a country Fleming knew well) and alpine skiing, a skill which proves necessary during a harrowing escape from Blofeld’s redoubt at Piz Gloria in the book’s second half.
His encounter with Tracy, a beautiful bird with one or two wings down, brings out his compassion, a quality he has had little use for in his past. It creates a rare crisis in sexual confidence after a night of lovemaking leaves her feeling no better:
Harshness would do no good with this girl. She had had it, somehow, somewhere – too much of it. He went off down the corridor, feeling, for the first time in his life, totally inadequate.
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“Everything’s between you and me from now
on.” Lazenby and co-star Diana Rigg do especially well in presenting the
romance of Bond and Tracy, the relationship which makes up the humane if tragic
centerpiece of the novel and film. |
Tracy, and not Blofeld, turns out to be the major supporting character of this novel, even if she spends nearly as much of it out of sight as Ernst does. Fleming deploys her strategically throughout. She is indeed damaged goods, having lost any sense of self-worth in her clouded past. After beating Bond in a white-knuckled road race, Tracy explains his weakness was that he simply cares too much about living.
Meanwhile, Blofeld found himself a woman, too. And what a woman! Irma Bunt sparks one of Fleming’s most pungent characterizations:
She looked like a very sunburnt female wardress. She had a square, brutal face with hard yellow eyes. Her smile was an oblong hole without humour or welcome, and there were sunburn blisters at the left corner of her mouth which she licked from time to time with the tip of a pale tongue.
Bunt’s role in the operation is to shepherd ten beautiful young women around Piz Gloria. Bond is told Blofeld is treating them for assorted food allergies. “He has special theories,” Bunt says. “One day the world will be startled when he reveals his methods.”
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| "Bond’s right flashed out and the face of the Rolex disintegrated against
the man’s jaw." Bond in a pinch utilizes his trusty wristwatch as a makeshift knuckle-duster while escaping from Piz Gloria. Image from https://www.jamesbondwatchphotos.com/category/literary-2/ian-fleming/on-her-majestys-secret-service-ian-fleming-1963/ |
Bond’s undercover role has him pretending to research Blofeld’s ancestral line to investigate a claim of a noble title. Blofeld’s appetite for world-ending destruction is rivaled by his social pretensions, so he invites a representative of the College of Arms to trace his roots. Bond takes the job under the assumed identity of Sir Hilary Bray.
He first spends some time knocking about at the British College of Arms, learning about how noble lines are traced. “Snobbery and vanity positively sprawl through our files,” he is told there.
Bond writer Raymond Benson, in a glowing review included in his enjoyable James Bond Bedside Companion, calls out this section of the novel as a tedious detour. It’s a detour, alright, but an enjoyable one which gives On Her Majesty’s Secret Service verisimilitude, and a momentary, uneasy rest from an otherwise bone-rattling ride.
The only major caveat I would make regarding this novel’s excellence is how things are wrapped up at Piz Gloria. It is set up well enough, with Bond and a band of Corsican gangsters making a helicopter assault. Then the battle royale is wrapped up offstage, as Bond takes off on an unsuccessful pursuit of Blofeld. Once again, his spy skills are badly off.
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| Bond goes off in search of Blofeld at Piz Gloria in a climactic scene in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, here depicted in a newspaper comic-strip adaptation illustrated by John McLusky that ran in 1964-65. Image from https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1892242 |
Bond’s attitude toward sex gets some attention. With Tracy in his life, he is less cavalier, more attentive. Yes, he does sleep with another woman, using her to extract useful intelligence on what Blofeld is up to, but Fleming is careful to note here the relationship was not one-sided:
A small night wind rose up outside and moaned round the building, giving an extra sweetness, an extra warmth, even a certain friendship to what was no more than an act of physical passion. There was real pleasure in what they did to each other, and in the end, when it was over and they lay quietly in each other’s arms, Bond knew, and knew that the girl knew, that they had done nothing wrong, done no harm to each other.
As much as I love Fleming’s Bond, there are three novels I rate much higher than all the others. I’m just not sure of the order. Casino Royale with its haunting, doomed romance is his best straightforward novel; From Russia, With Love with its tense plot is the best pure spy yarn.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the best Bond book. It delivers everything Bond lovers had been conditioned to expect and want, and simultaneously serves up generous quantities of ambiance and tension with wit and care. It is crammed with background on Bond, too, more than readers usually got from Fleming. We just begin to really know our hero 11 books into the series.
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| Ian Fleming poses at his writing desk at Goldeneye, his Jamaican home away from home where Bond was born. On Her Majesty's Secret Service focuses on a topic strange to many readers in 1963 but more imaginable today: biological warfare. |
Having struggled with his prior two novels, the contentious collaboration that was Thunderball and the unpopular experiment that was The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming seemed rejuvenated here. His characterizations, scenery, and dialogue all crackle with authority.
After proposing marriage to Tracy in an airport, and her accepting, we have this tiny gem after he begins to escort her to her flight:
Bond
stubbed out his cigarette, gave a quick glance round their trysting-place to
fix its banality in his mind, and walked to the door, leaving the fragments of
his old life torn up amidst the debris of an airport breakfast.
Thoughts of a new life proved fleeting, for Bond and his creator. Fleming died just one year after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was published. There would be other Bond books, by Fleming and numerous official and unofficial successors, but this remains in many ways the high point for the whole series. It still holds up.
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