“Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” by Nicholas Shakespeare
This is a 823 pages book that dives deep into the fascinating life of Ian Fleming, a person most famous for creating the character of James Bond.
The author, Nicholas Shakespeare, was granted access from the Fleming estate to all of his files, making this long biography as close as accurate as can get: a narrative based on information gathered from unpublished letters and diaries, declassified files, previously uninterviewed witnesses; as well as interviews with Fleming’s past biographers, friends, and family.
The biography reveals the privileged upbringing that Fleming had – including studying at Eaton and Sandhurst – but a difficult childhood nonetheless after his father’s death in World War I and while having a controling mother. It shows the era when he was working at Reuters going around Europe covering the rise of Hitler, among many other now-historical pivotal events, and a brief life as a stockbroker in the City of London.
The book also shows his time at the military during World War II, serving as a personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, where Fleming contributed in planning covert operations, and helped to create a special commando unit known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU). The occurrences in this era later hugely contributed to his early ideas of James Bond, where the spy character is actually inspired by his own experiences and from the people around him.
But his James Bond part of his life, as we shall see in the book, comes much later in his life. In fact, the character only appear in the last fifth of his life, almost as an afterthought. And instead, there’s so much that Fleming himself did in his lifetime that makes this book a real page turner, the kind of life that would be a force of nature even if he had never created James Bond.
“The pre-Bond Fleming was a patriotic Scot who had lived in Austria, Munich and Geneva as Hitler was coming to power”, Shakespeare remarks, “He made a noteworthy contribution to the Second World War – and not only in organising covert operations in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conflict.” Shakespeare then continues, “He was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the United States into the fight, and worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign Intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his Sunday Times desk.”
It was during his stint at Sunday Times (that he held from after World War II in 1945 until his death in 1964) that he really began to write the Bond novels, where he incorporated his years of knowledge to pen and paper while overseeing the network of foreign correspondents and playing an undercover role. Particularly after he bought a 6.1 hectare estate in Jamaica for a holiday house (that he named Goldeneye) with a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking a private beach. It was there when the idea of writing James Bond novels really came to him as he was swimming in his bay. As Fleming remarks, “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.”
And it’s very intriguing, for example, that Fleming got his inspiration for “From Russia, With Love” from his time in Moscow as a Reuters journalist covering a controversial international trial during Stalin’s Soviet. Or his own experience in money matters (including being excluded from his wealthy grandfather’s will) can come up in the way James Bond refused a 1 million Pounds dowry from Marc-Ange Draco in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Or the fact that the villain’s nerve center in “Moonraker” was the actual site of Fleming’s pre-war Pimlico address. Or the headquarter of the terrorist group in “Spectre” was inspired by a real-life encounter in France during World War II. Or how “You Only Live Twice” ended with James Bond on a small island peacefully living on the sea, with no memory of his past, that is until he gets a message that sends him back to the world that will corrupt him, which was written during a period of time when he had a turmulous marriage and just wanted to get away from it all.
But the novels didn’t become an instant hit from the get go. In fact, none of Fleming’s first 5 novels sold more than 12,000 copies in hardback. So much so that he was so sick and tired of Bond at one time and was very close to killing off the character in 1956. But as luck have it, the novels then took off in 1957 following the Suez Crisis in the autumn of 1956, when British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (whom was at Jamaica at the time to rest from sickness) decided to use Ian’s Goldeneye home as his basis for global operation hub, with the sick leader “sending secret telegrams to London, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Ottowa, Sydney, Wellington and Cairo.”
His Goldeneye base gave Fleming the unintended exposure, which eventually led to people reading his books. And much later, JFK helped to boost James Bond’s popularity into the stratosphere as the young American Senator (and later President) publicly lauded the novels as some of his favourite books.
If fact, the book recorded the moment when James Bond became instantly popular: “In the 1950s, the idea of individual agency was not yet so strong. It took off two months after Ian’s dinner with JFK, with the shooting down on 1 May 1960 of a top-secret U-2 surveillance plane over Soviet territory. On parachuting free, the American pilot, Gary Powers, was captured by the Russians, forcing President Eisenhower to admit what had occurred. As soon as it was revealed that spies really existed, the fantasy of James Bond became more real to American readers.”
Moreover, this book also shows the human side of Fleming, such as his troubled marriage to a toxic Ann Charteris, his love to his only son Caspar (whom he wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for), the dire effects of their marriage on Caspar, and his numerous affairs (all of which reflected in the demeanor of James Bond as a playboy). It mentions all the people that helped him along the way, and his many writing influences, such as William Plomer, Alfred Adler, Leo Perutz, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, including his number 1 inspiration Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway was not by all means his only inspiration. In fact, Fleming read a wide range of books in impressively several languages, with the German edition of “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy mentioned as his dessert island book.
Furthermore, the book also delightfully shows the random name pop throughout the story, such as Fleming’s downstair neighbour during his time working at the City of London that happened to be T. S. Elliot whom was working at Lloyd’s Bank, or meeting J. P. Morgan Jr. when he went to America, having a contact with Alan Turing in World War II, casually diving with Jacques Cousteau, having a family connection with Winston Churchill, being friends with Roald Dahl, having dinner with JFK, having a brief encounter with Alfred Hitchcock at an airport, and of course his encounter with the real James Bond: an American ornithologist by the name of Dr. James Bond, whom Fleming (an avid bird watcher) had a copy of his book “Birds of the West Indies.”
Perhaps nobody can summarize Fleming better than Christopher Moran, the professor of US National Security who specializes in Ian Fleming’s Secret Service work. Moran was quoted in the book where he said, “It’s impossible to cling to the orthodoxy that Ian Fleming was a nobody. He was unique, there is nobody to compare him with. He was invested in and aware of the whole cycle of intelligence, which is remarkable when you think of the compartmentalised world – “the need to know” – of intelligence. Fleming transcended that world. He was not a desk officer, he was the desk officer. He knew it all, as a spy chief should, operating as a proxy spy chief for three to four years. He was the glue that glued these bits and pieces.”
All in all, this is a long book filled with impressive intricate details. If this is in a film form, this would likely be several episodes mini-series rather than one whole movie. It is in my opinion best read in a slow pace, in order to fully emmersed at every aspect of Ian Fleming’s life, which in turn he poured into the character of James Bond. And once you read his whole story, you’ll understand how and why James Bond can be such a brilliant spy novel.
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