Bond rebound
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
Colonel Sun : a James Bond Adventure Robert Markham (Cape 21s) The fact that 'Robert Markham' is a pseudonym adopted by Mr Kingsley Amis has been pub- licised elsewhere but is not mentioned on the jacket of, or inside, this book—a reminder that what may greatly interest some of us will hardly concern many more. We are not told, either, whether there are to be further James Bond adventures, far less whether 'Robert Markham' will in future always be Mr Amis.
I found this an enjoyable thriller, though perhaps less gripping than the best Flemings. If the product disappoints or disconcerts the public, if Bond sales mysteriously fall off, the explanation will probably lie with some changed inner rhythm, to which a public may show itself sensitive while the nosy critic roots after details. In a fairly superficial way, I think I notice a difference in the approach to The Ordeal, its position in the book and the speed with which it is resolved. Mr Amis handles this with great skill. I just wonder whether he may not have needed to screw him- self up with too much care, whether masochistic fantasy comes easily enough to him.
For the sadism which, ten years ago, critics weightily discovered to be, with sex and snobbery, essential to the James Bond appeal was, as Mr Amis himself says in the James Bond Dossier he published three years ago, more properly masochism. There was, indeed, always something of the hypochondriac about James Bond, forever concerned with his diet, wondering whether the last ordeal might not have impaired his sexual capacity, feeling that he needed another drink but fearful lest it slow up his responses, taking another shower and changing his underclothes before going out to get run over again. When, at the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun, he re- appeared brainwashed and smoking Senior Ser- vice (instead of 'the Morland Specials with the three gold rings), we had. I remember feel- ing, at last glimpsed the real James Bond.
At the time of the Dossier, Mr Antis had already got up his firearms, fast cars, golf and, to some extent, boats, while the sex in his novels has always seemed to me to be at least practicable.
If it comes to 'one-upping' people on drink, Mr Amis, give him time, has no equal. He one- ups Ian Fleming on the proof-strength of spirits in the Dossier (missing what was in the first place just a mistake about shaking martinis). I wonder, all the same, whether he realised how precisely characteristic of the awful bearded artist in Lucky Jim that ouzo and retsina chat would have seemed at precisely the date of his first and best book. I wonder, too, whether a Greek island is quite exotic enough nowadays. However, one under- stands that Mr Amis has now spent some time in Mexico, which has the highest non-political murder rate in the world.
Again, one doesn't know whether such near-impalpables are going to affect the large Bond public. Some will certainly be dis- appointed by the fact that a possible use of nuclear devices turns out to be merely a lobbing of mortar-shells.
The language, the idiom? I noticed one academicism, 'impart a pleasing sense of motion to' (a wind with a Greek name—to waves), the Eng. Lit, touch singularly inappro- priate (this is catching) to a homosexual Russian general on his first undercover security assignment and untainted, unlike Colonel Sun, Chinese intelligence colonel and eponymous hard man of the present volume, with anglo- philia. This ass is feeling pleased with himself. He is one of two asses in the book. The other is English, Sir Ranald Rideout. He is a minister, not a civil servant, and so, at the date of the story, should have been a Labour ass, which he very conspicuously isn't. And, certainly, Mr Amis is mistaken to sup- pose that an executive is not an administrator in that or any other world. The distinction is not at all the one observed by Mr Graham Greene between reporter and leader-writer.
Mr Amis's still-quite-recent progressive past shows elsewhere. The Russians are 'too grown- up these days' for the kidnapping of M, which is the plot's mainspring, to be the work of SMERSH. Though sometimes foolish, Russian communists are goodies now, the intelligent Chinese their enemies and ours. Irrelevantly, since no such character appears, we gather, that there exists a new large class of international criminals who are 'white Africans with a grudge.' Poor old Bond, brainwashed again by Mr Amis.
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