Tom Fleming
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond
By Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury 224pp £20)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

The exhibition at the Imperial War Museum marking the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth runs until 1 March 2009 and is well worth visiting. If you can't make it, this book serves as a kind of catalogue to it, with double-spread film stills and a large format providing a touch of coffee-table glamour; yet it's also an informative, readable volume in its own right, and Ben Macintyre's text deserves to be read from cover to cover. Macintyre is well qualified to write about Bond and his world: his last book was the bestselling Agent Zigzag, about the fast-living Second World War spy Eddie Chapman. He writes lucidly, insightfully, and with a light touch so crucial to any treatment of James Bond.

Much of Fleming's success as a thriller-writer relied, famously, on his skilful combination of fact and fiction. Macintyre's approach is to take various aspects of the James Bond diegesis and, chapter by chapter, examine their provenance in Fleming's own world and experiences. The chapter on 'Who was James Bond?', for instance, is as good a summary of the possible real-life inspirations behind Bond as you will get. One of the more appealing of these characters was Patrick Dalzel-Job. During the Second World War he served in 30 Assault Unit (30 AU), the 'private army' of the Naval Intelligence Division, where Fleming was personal assistant to the Director. Dalzel-Job was a daring, independent-minded soldier, a superb marksman who could 'ski backwards', and a fearless operative who wore a coat with a compass in one of its buttons. He died in 2003, at the age of ninety, having retired to the Scottish Highlands. Though he never denied the Bond connection, claiming Fleming had once told him he was an inspiration for the character, he alleged never to have read a Bond book or seen a Bond film: 'And I only ever loved one woman, and I'm not a drinking man.'

Fleming helped set up 30 AU: he called them his 'Red Indians', much to their annoyance. Indeed, his vivid, romantic imagination had a field day in his role at the NID. One of his jobs was to come up with 'plots', as he called them, for overseas espionage operations; they were mostly complex, inventive, and wildly impractical. It's fair to say that in this, at the NID, James Bond was conceived and Fleming found his vocation, though it was disguised at the time. After the war he landed a cushy job as foreign news editor of the Kemsley group, which owned the Sunday Times, and developed a taste for the international travel and expense account-funded highlife that Bond himself would so relish.

The Bond plots themselves were not all fantastic inventions. Fleming would later quote with approval the words of Churchill, who asserted that 'in the higher ranges of the Secret Service, the actual facts of many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama'. Fleming said himself that 'My plots ... go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible', and referred to 'the Russian spy Khokhlov with his cigarette case that fired dum-dum bullets' as a real-life example of the improbable; Macintyre elaborates enjoyably here on Khokhlov's story. He was a Soviet spy who had fought behind the lines during the Second World War; in 1953, he found himself tasked to assassinate a notable anti-Soviet émigré in Berlin. When his conscience held him back, he defected to the West, bringing with him a cornucopia of devious gadgetry that included the aforementioned cigarette cases and a miniature revolver that fired poison bullets. The Soviets took a remarkable revenge, though - and one which is familiar to us today. They laced the coffee he was drinking at a 1957 conference in Frankfurt with radioactive thallium. 'Its effects were terrifying,' writes Macintyre. 'Khokhlov's face erupted in black, brown and blue lumps, his eyes oozed a sticky liquid and his hair fell out in handfuls. The blood in his veins turned to plasma, as his bones crumbled.' Amazingly, he survived, thanks to continual blood transfusions from American doctors working day and night.

In another chapter, on 'Bond Girls', Macintyre recounts the story of Muriel Wright, the prototype, perhaps, for all those beautiful, doomed women whom Bond encounters. Fleming first met 'Mu' in Kitzbühel in 1935. Remarkably beautiful, she was 'an expert rider, skied beautifully, and was one of Britain's foremost polo players'; she also was in love with Fleming, who treated her badly. They were unofficially engaged, and Fleming was consistently faithless; her brother even came round to his house with a horsewhip once. Then,

suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On 14 March, 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night there was an air raid: a chunk of flying masonry hurtled through her open window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once.

Fleming was devastated. But one associate remarked at the time: 'the trouble with Ian is that you have to get yourself killed before he feels anything'.

Another chapter focuses on Bond's gadgets (Bond lovers adore 'things', says Macintyre - especially 'things that do things'). Everything that makes Bond interesting with relation to the real world, in fact, is explored here. Ben Macintyre's skill, in this entertaining mix of history, espionage, biography, and post-war sociology, is to make you see clearly where Ian Fleming's world ended and the fantasy of James Bond began.

Tom Fleming is Deputy Editor of the Literary Review, and a great-nephew of Ian Fleming.