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Summary
Summary
Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--he was more than anything the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was an upper-class wastrel who had found purpose and excitement in the war, and to whom, like so many others, its end was a terrible disappointment--the elation of survival stifled by the reality of the new British impotence. In 1952 Fleming set out to repair this damage. By inventing the magical, parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, he fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death.
To grow up in England in the 1970s was to grow up with James Bond, and The Man Who Saved Britain is first of all the story of the author's relationship with the "national religion." Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs and humiliations of fandom while illuminating what Bond's evolution--from books to film, from his roots in the 1940s to his "managed decline" today--says about the conservative movement, sex, the monarchy, food, attitudes toward America, class, and everything in between. The Man Who Saved Britain is an insightful and, above all, entertaining exploration of postwar Britain through the palliative influence of one of its most legendary icons, the larger-than-life Agent 007.
Author Notes
Simon Winder is the editor of several anthologies, including the highly praised Night Thoughts . He works in publishing in London, where he lives with his family.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this glittering gem, Winder (publishing director at Penguin UK) combines cultural history, memoir and a terrifyingly formidable knowledge of James Bond plot lines to produce a hilarious and thoughtful narrative of the fall and rise of Britain from WWII to the present day. For a nation that had owned a quarter of the world but post-1945 was losing its possessions, Ian Fleming's masterful creation, 007, was its savior. Bond quipping, killing and bedding all the way put villainous foreigners and their sinister assortment of exotic henchmen back in their rightful place and ensured Britain would retain its top place in the world hierarchy. In reality, of course, the Americans and the Soviets gently ignored the sad little island and went about their Cold War business. But that did not matter, since 007 exemplified the potent fantasy of British superiority in all things. As for the best Bond movie and novel, Winder tilts toward 1963's From Russia with Love, where Fleming's writing reached its peak and director Terence Young coaxed terrific performances out of his actors. Fittingly for Winder, the film's theme is so dated it requires the most explanation for those who don't remember the Cold War. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
In trying to pin down Octopussy , the collection of Bond bits and pieces put together after Ian Fleming's death, Simon Winder tells us about something called a turducken. A turducken is a gruesome speciality from the southern United States, which, "in a mock medieval way, stuffs a boned chicken inside a boned duck inside a boned turkey". I'm not sure whether Octopussy can accurately be described as a turducken (I would have thought it was more of a mixed grill), but as a description of Winder's book it's perfect. The Man Who Saved Britain is a personal memoir stuffed inside a history of post-imperial Britain stuffed inside an analysis of the James Bond phenomenon. The end result is that none of the parts really has sufficient space to breathe (as you'd expect if you'd been shoved up a turkey's backside, I suppose). I have no idea what the dominant flavour of turducken is, and I'm not sure I'd ever want to find out, but the dominant flavour of Winder's book is Bond, James Bond. In the end it's just too strong a flavour to let anything much else come through. Winder's theme is "I'm a James Bond fan, but I think I really ought to be ashamed of it". The thing about Bond is that, no matter how hard you try to slag him off, no matter how vigorously you point out that the whole 007 thing is ridiculous and adolescent, no matter how politically incorrect it all is, and sexist/racist/you-name-it- ist, deep down there's a little kid in all of us who secretly wants to be Bond. I've noticed it when doing publicity for my own Young Bond books; usually staid and serious news programmes will have me on as a guest, because, well because it's James Bond! Once you've sat in a cinema as a kid and heard that twangy Vick Flick guitar riff strike up, there's no escaping the 007 spell. The first half of the book is a bracing romp through 20th- century British history, written in the popular "aren't we rubbish?" style. Winder's thesis is that Bond was created as a post- imperialist fantasy to cheer up a nation that had once owned the world but then had it taken away. After that we screwed up at every turn, as our importance dwindled to nothing. And forget the propaganda about decent British behaviour; in fact we behaved in a cowardly, small-minded and incompetent fashion, or in Winder's words, an astonishingly cowardly, jaw-droppingly small-minded and nauseatingly incompetent fashion. The man just can't resist a heated adjective. In fact his style is so hysterically over-the-top that after a while it ceases to have any impact and he forces you to disagree with him. "Well, actually, Simon, I don't find that nauseating, neither do I find it 'astounding, overwhelming, revolting, inconceivable, sickening, repulsive, terrifying, or despicable'." At one point he begrudgingly praises Fleming for the varied ways he describes Bond's sexual conquests (not easy - as any thriller writer knows, the language available to describe sex and violence is actually very limited), and one wishes that Winder had learnt something from Fleming's style - or at least got a copy editor to weed out the overloaded adjectives he uses to describe the heinous crimes of our fathers, sometimes even using the same word twice on the same page. Incredible! The more I read the book the more it reminded me of something, and the answer came on page 170, when Winder writes that the villain Goldfinger has "some of the best set-piece speeches, of which one cannot have too many". Winder's foam-flecked diatribe is exactly the sort of thing we expect from a great Bond villain. We, the reader and presumed Bond fan, are strapped to some steel-topped table with a laser inching up between our thighs, and forced to listen to the evil genius . . . "Ha, you British think you are a great nation, you are nothing! You are are a foolish, deluded race, poncing about on a dying island on the edge of a cold, small continent." We know, though, that it's a love/hate relationship, and in a moment Goldwinder will untie us and Bond will, once again, win the day. At times Winder strays into wishful thinking, as when he claims that the films' success in America "seems straightforward enough: they are seen as comedies of self-delusion". What? Really? I can just see it now: "Do you want to go and see the latest James Bond movie, honey?" "Gee, I don't know. Is it an exciting, hi-tech action thriller with gorgeous locations, a sexy hero who can do no wrong and plenty of cheeky humour?" "Oh no, honey, it's a comedy of self- delusion." "Great! I'll get the kids!" One in four Americans paid to see Thunderball on its release, a genuinely "jaw-dropping" fact. And, besides, can we really view the Bond movies as in any way British? The producers, the money and most of the writers have been American. Between them they can have had no desire to push some sort of colonial British propaganda. They simply wanted to make the sort of films that people wanted to go and watch. And watch them they did. To date the Bond movies have made somewhere in the region of $3,685m. And if the books and films had to rely on the British market to make their money, it just wouldn't have happened. As Winder's whole book demonstrates, Britain is just not a significant market any more. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this book enormously, and it's a refreshing antidote to the generally uncritical fan sites and countless other Bond books on the market. It reminded me that, yes, Britain has done much we should be ashamed of, not all the Bond books were great, some of the films were rotten and Roger Moore went on too long; but you only have to look at the lovingly photographed toy Aston Martin on the book's cover (and imagine the conversation at the shoot: "Hey, I used to have one of these." "Me too, but I lost the man who flies out of the ejector seat." "Me too . . .") to be reminded of why, despite everything, we still love James Bond. Charlie Higson's Blood Fever , the second in his Young Bond series, is published by Puffin. To order The Man Who Saved Britain for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-bond.1 In trying to pin down Octopussy , the collection of Bond bits and pieces put together after Ian Fleming's death, Simon Winder tells us about something called a turducken. A turducken is a gruesome speciality from the southern United States, which, "in a mock medieval way, stuffs a boned chicken inside a boned duck inside a boned turkey". I'm not sure whether Octopussy can accurately be described as a turducken (I would have thought it was more of a mixed grill), but as a description of Winder's book it's perfect. The Man Who Saved Britain is a personal memoir stuffed inside a history of post-imperial Britain stuffed inside an analysis of the James Bond phenomenon. The end result is that none of the parts really has sufficient space to breathe (as you'd expect if you'd been shoved up a turkey's backside, I suppose). I have no idea what the dominant flavour of turducken is, and I'm not sure I'd ever want to find out, but the dominant flavour of Winder's book is Bond, James Bond. In the end it's just too strong a flavour to let anything much else come through. The first half of the book is a bracing romp through 20th- century British history, written in the popular "aren't we rubbish?" style. Winder's thesis is that Bond was created as a post- imperialist fantasy to cheer up a nation that had once owned the world but then had it taken away. After that we screwed up at every turn, as our importance dwindled to nothing. And forget the propaganda about decent British behaviour; in fact we behaved in a cowardly, small-minded and incompetent fashion, or in Winder's words, an astonishingly cowardly, jaw-droppingly small-minded and nauseatingly incompetent fashion. The man just can't resist a heated adjective. In fact his style is so hysterically over-the-top that after a while it ceases to have any impact and he forces you to disagree with him. "Well, actually, Simon, I don't find that nauseating, neither do I find it 'astounding, overwhelming, revolting, inconceivable, sickening, repulsive, terrifying, or despicable'." - Charlie Higson.
Kirkus Review
British editor Winder uses Ian Fleming's most famous character to tie together a series of important personal and societal events in this cheery memoir. He begins his potted history with a starry-eyed recollection of seeing The Spy Who Loved Me at age ten. It was a pivotal moment for Winder; the rugged Bond of the silver screen impinged on his consciousness and never really let go. The author makes an early disclaimer that his knowledge of history is limited at best and his life hasn't really been interesting enough to merit a full-blown memoir--a typically British act of self-deprecation that might not appear to be the best start for a book. As the breadth of his Bond obsession slowly unravels, however, he manages to make some entertaining, albeit often tenuous links among himself, Fleming's character and various upheavals in British society. Winder attempts to determine why the British public became so enamored of Bond after World War II. He explains how his own Bond-influenced penchant for safari suits caused him years of grief in foreign climes. He wonders why his frequent snorkeling trips have never met with the kind of undersea encounters inevitably faced by his hero moments after dipping a toe in the water. He primarily admires the Bond novels, but such is the extent of his obsession that he manages to find something worthwhile in even the most wretched big-screen adaptations. This leads to many passages in which the author muses on the nature of fandom, but he never strays too far from his original intentions. Winder manages to craft a deeply humorous tome from very eclectic subject matter. Ambitious and highly original. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Writing with wit and a sound knowledge of his subject matter, Winder (editor, Night Thoughts) traces the highs and lows of James Bond's career in print and on film and explores his symbolic and eclectic influence over time. He reveals how Bond, fresh from the pen of Ian Fleming, captured Britain's imagination and infused the self-image of a war-weary and weakened nation with fresh verve. Winder combines personal reminiscences of growing up in Britain during the Bond craze, biographical information on the colorful Ian Fleming and others, illustrative scenarios from the Bond adventures, and genial commentary on all of it. Although perceptive and entertaining, this work eventually loses focus in an overly enthusiastic effort to blend many components into one whole. Readers with a good grasp of the historical context and the Bond oeuvre at the outset will be better able to appreciate the book's essence. Others could feel a bit lost. For public libraries. Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction Eating Old Jamaica at the Tunbridge Wells Odeon I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage. He crouches behind a gravestone and takes out an enormous pistol. A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake. Around them hundreds of voodoo worshippers are screaming and convulsing. The man with the large chin starts shooting the black people, who are too busy rolling their eyes and waving old cutlasses to offer proper resistance. To be honest my memory goes a bit hazy at this point. In a moment of bravado before the film I had bought a jumbo Old Jamaica, a weird 1970s chocolate bar filled with rum essence and raisins. It had struck me as a sophisticated treat, little realizing that its only target market was in fact aspirational ten-year-old boys. Anyway, the reality of feeling sick, the perception of being drunk, and the confusion of the notionally West Indian flavour of the treat and the loosely West Indian setting of the film conspired to overwhelm me. Leaving the voodoo worshippers to their fate I staggered to the toilets. Thirty years later, rum essence still flings me back--like some reduced-to-clear Proust--to that cinema and what proved to be a transformative encounter with a man with a large chin. Writing this is peculiarly painful. The film in question was Live and Let Die, and its hero, James Bond, has since that moment deeply affected my life. For me that film pushed open the Golden Doors of sex and death, revealing a world of sophistication and cruelty previously unimagined. Sheltered by a prior movie diet of such duff material as Tales of Beatrix Potter, a ballet film featuring a dancing frog, I suddenly had discovered a film packed with steel-clawed black giants, alligators, speedboats and girls whimpering, "Oh, James." The Two Bad Mice prancing about hitting a little plaster fish (which of course, at the time, I had absolutely loved) became overnight something thought of always but spoken of never. I went to see Live and Let Die again a week later, this time spurning the siren song of the Old Jamaica: it was a flawless gem. Every scene conveyed so much--the brutal cunning of the villains, the decency and wit of Bond, the glamorous American and West Indian locations, the miraculous music. Happy years followed of reading and reading again all the Bond books, tracking down the older Bond films, preparing myself spiritually for the next one, The Man with the Golden Gun. The painfulness in all this is of course that Live and Let Die is dreadful. In a moment of lunatic parental outreach I recently bought the DVD to watch with my own twelve- and ten-year-old sons. I had not seen the movie in many years and this planned piece of quality nurturing left me mute with grief. The film was a mean-spirited and offensive shambles, too stupid really even to be racist, too chaotic to be camp. Worse, the film was the first to feature Roger Moore--a faintly louche manikin, famous as the Saint and, with Tony Curtis (then going through one of his cyclical career low-points), one of the Persuaders. Moore was to spearhead the progressive degeneration of Bond over a further seven films. Now I can see that I encountered and fell for Bond at the precise point, 1973, when he was spiralling out of control. And yet for many years he had been important--important to millions of people in all kinds of ways, a uniquely powerful, strange presence in British life since his invention by Ian Fleming in the early 1950s. Wholly oblivious, I had as a ten-year-old bumped into his most embarrassing avatar, but my entire upbringing had been in effect soaked in the world in which Bond had thrived and in which he was understood. In this time--before Bond films were ever shown on television--double bills of old ones would tour cinemas, playing to vast steaming audiences, seeing the films, like myself, over and over again almost as a religious undertaking. I was simply then the latest among whole populations of men and women (well, mainly men to be honest) who had stood in line for the Bond experience. Our school games were soaked in Bond, our talk was endlessly about the films and about the cruelty and sex in the books: Bond was a sort of currency, albeit, and quite unknown to me, one in steep decline on the open market. This book is an attempt to get to grips with Bond's legacy and with the worlds in which Bond really mattered--not to a helpless ten-year-old ding-a-ling in the early seventies but to the generation who had fought in the Second World War and who in vast numbers read the Bond books in the 1950s and saw the Bond films in the 1960s. I hope to explore with reasonable seriousness the trauma faced by Britain in the 1940s and after--a far smaller trauma than that of mainland Europe, but profound nonetheless and one that could have been terminal. The link between Bond's invention and his overwhelming success and the horrors faced by Britain from 1939 onwards are close and interesting. Ian Fleming, a cynical upper-class waster galvanized by and briefly endorsed by the emergency of the War, reacted to the gradual, but sometimes vertiginous, implosion of Britain when the fighting had ended by creating the Bond books. These proceeded to find their vast niche as part of a general right-wing reaction to the humiliations and failures of British life. I want to re-create some of the stifling British obsession with the Second World War, which still cannot be shaken even today, but which once permeated all aspects of life and was dominant throughout my own childhood. Toys, film, novels, memoirs about the War were everywhere, and through them strode James Bond, the secret hero who calmly carried the values of that war through a treacherous and ungrateful Cold War world. Inevitably this book must lean heavily on a sort of ancient archaeology--here are the remains of a door post, here a possible site of cult ritual. So much has changed and so rapidly that it is hard to get right inside the original impact of the books or the films. Morals have changed, movie gun noises are much more reverberant, sex has got sexier. The Cold War has, weirdly, completely vanished, leaving behind such peculiar debris as From Russia with Love, a book and a film which will appear as strange to future generations as abandoned Kazakhstan rocket silos or fallout shelters. As a memoir, this book is fragmentary and scraped together from very slightly interesting bits and bobs. My life has just not been melodramatic enough to take up more than a few pages. I had a cheerful childhood packed with affection, no specific features to incite sympathy and no adventures to speak of. As history it will anger many, filled as it is with shocking generalizations and lack of documentation. I share that anger. This book was written in large part because I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed--and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together. The eight chapters are roughly chronological, pursuing Fleming's, Britain's and Bond's lives from the 1930s to the 1970s with occasional comfort-breaks to deal with specific themes. I have tried to give just enough background on Britain and its empire to make events around and after the War intelligible. While carefully researched, this material is breathtakingly selective and loaded with no doubt facetious and callow interpretation of a kind that will have historians shrieking to heaven for vengeance. I should really emphasize that I am not a professional historian and that anyone who has devoted their life to a serious study of this period should probably see about swapping this for something else. A further obvious point is that this is a book only about some people some of the time: for every individual concerned about Britain's international prestige or the global nuclear threat there were countless more simply getting on with their lives. It is a simile used before, but it is like Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: a shepherd stares at the clouds, a ploughman ploughs a field, a merchant ship hurries by, and down in the corner Icarus crashes--with a tiny ploof! of water--completely unremarked into the sea. Clearly the end of the British Empire was for very many people an unremarked and tiny ploof! but for many others, continuously or intermittently, it was much more. Devoted contemporary fans will be driven to distraction by this book. Going to a premiere of the last Bond film, Die Another Day, at the Empire Leicester Square, I had to say that I was unmoved by what happened on the screen. Tiny voices whispered that Die Hard did this better, that Face/Off did this better, that even Vin Diesel's xXx did this better. I'm afraid that some years back I parted from the Way and feel relieved at having done so. But Bond's later abasement should not cloud what he used to be and movies featuring John Cleese as Q and an invisible car cannot sully the immense pleasures of the books and the early films. This then is part memoir, part history, part a meditation on being a fan/not being a fan. The little telltale phrase, though, in the last paragraph, "going to a premiere," will of course tell you all you need to know. I am not exactly cured. Like a hopeless modern version of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, I lie slumped at my desk with disturbingly well-thumbed copies of Diamonds Are Forever and DVDs of Octopussy (for God's sake) flapping about my head. But that I think still applies to British men in general--if diminishingly so--who still walk a little differently, dream certain dreams, and are somewhat comforted and sexually a little odder than would have been the case without the imagination of a man born into a very different sort of Britain. Excerpted from The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond by Simon Winder. Copyright (c) 2006 by Simon Winder. Published in October 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpted from The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond by Simon Winder All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Eating Old Jamaica at the Tunbridge Wells Odeon | p. xi |
Note: Books and Films | p. xvii |
1 "Night and Day" | p. 3 |
2 The Stuffed Cobra | p. 30 |
3 Coronation Chicken | p. 67 |
4 Managed Decline | p. 104 |
5 "Champagne and Benzedrine! Never Again" | p. 136 |
6 The Beatles with Earmuffs | p. 179 |
7 Sweat and Polyester | p. 214 |
8 An Acceptable Level of Violence | p. 244 |
Conclusion: Two Walks | p. 277 |
Acknowledgements | p. 287 |