James Bond Retrospective #0
I have a long history with James Bond. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a kid. It’s the films I have the most familiarity with, but my gateway into the franchise was actually through the GoldenEye Nintendo 64 video game, released in 1997. I was probably around eight at the time when I first owned it. Regardless, I spent many long, happy hours playing that one. And much of it was from before I was even really a James Bond fan, as I wasn’t originally drawn to the game because of Bond himself. It was simply one amongst several popular games I owned growing up, alongside other classics such as Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie.
All the same, the GoldenEye game did get me curious, as I knew there was also a movie. In time, I ended up seeing the movie and really enjoying that too. It was neat to compare it to the game, since the game uses many of the same environments from the movie, which made it a lot of fun to look at parts of the movie and be like, “Oh yeah, I recognize that location and that location.”
And that was where my Bond fandom truly began. After GoldenEye, I saw Pierce Brosnan’s second film, Tomorrow Never Dies. This time around I didn’t have the novelty of comparing the movie to a game I had loved, but I still really liked Brosnan’s second outing too. (While there was a Tomorrow Never Dies video game, I never played that one.)
Next up was Brosnan’s third entry, The World Is Not Enough. With his first two, my family had gotten them from the video rental store (anyone remember those?) and we watched them at home, but this time around I got to see The World Is Not Enough when it arrived in theaters in 1999, which was pretty cool. My first Bond film on the big screen.
It was after that when I made it my quest to see all the older Bond films too. I even owned them all on VHS at one point; all then-19 films made by Eon Productions, along with the ‘unofficial’ films, Never Say Never Again and the 1967 Casino Royale. (The only one I never saw back in the day was the 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, although I finally watched it many, many years later.) Either way, my Bond fandom was in full bloom. Come Die Another Day in 2002, Brosnan’s final film; I saw that in theaters too, and I have seen every subsequent Bond film in theaters ever since.
The novels, meanwhile, are a different story (pun intended). In contrast to the films which I watched over and over again, it took a long time for me to get around to the Bond books. I knew of them, but it wasn’t until sometime after high school when I actually began to read them. Even to this day, I still haven’t read all of them. And even the ones I have read, it was only once, and a long time ago at that. I’m guessing it was around 2008 or 2009 when I was making my way through the novels. I wanted to read all of them, at least initially, and I made pretty good progress too, but then I fizzled out partway. I read all of the books by Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, and I got through a good chunk of John Gardner’s books; everything from Licence Renewed to The Man from Barbarossa. I started to read his next one, Death Is Forever, but I only made it a few chapters in… and then I just stopped. And then that was it for me and the Bond books.
I saw Skyfall in 2012, which still stands to this day as my favourite Bond film of all time. I also saw Spectre in 2015 and enjoyed that quite a bit too. But then after that, I largely drifted away from James Bond for the next several years. It was something I’d been more enthusiastic about in my childhood, teenhood, and early adulthood, but then I started to feel that perhaps I was outgrowing it.
That is, up until No Time to Die was finally released, many years after Spectre in 2021. Seeing it rekindled my interest in the franchise. And with it, I decided to launch another attempt to read through every single Bond novel. As I do so, I would like to share my thoughts on each of them.
Ian Fleming was very much a man of his time, and there are unfortunately some sexist, racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted moments in his books. The early Bond films could have this too, but it’s more pronounced in the novels. A modern reader might find some of it too jarring and uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t blame them. Heck, I’m a big Bond fan and even I find it jarring at times. But I also try to keep in mind that his stories were written in a different, less progressive era. Some bigotry aside, Ian Fleming was a very gifted writer. His books are tense, gripping, well-plotted, and surprisingly emotional in places. It’s easy to see why his creation was compelling enough to kick off such a long-lasting franchise.
There are quite a lot of books in the series. As of this writing, there are 41 original Bond novels, along with 7 of the films that were novelized. I would also like to cover the Young Bond novels, of which there are currently 9. This gives us 57 books total. It’ll take me quite some time to get through them all. But this seems like a good time to start, since it’ll probably be a long wait until our 26th Bond movie and I need something to keep me occupied until then. In the meantime, I will report in again soon with my review of Casino Royale.