Bond Finally Makes the Grade

It’s not what I expected to happen when I picked up The Man With the Golden Gun the other day, fifty-eight years after reading it for the first time, but revisiting Fleming’s final work has changed my opinion of the book.  While it still doesn’t feel like a full-scale Bond adventure, aside from a few unpolished edges here and there I suspect that it's more or less what the author set out to write.  Just as The Spy Who Loved Me is a minor-key prelude meant to signal a new direction for the series, The Man With the Golden Gun is a muted coda for Fleming’s recent string of thrillers based on classics of Middle-English literature.

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bond plays a flawed Gawain who fails his test at the Green Chapel.  By losing his nerve and allowing Tracy di Vicenzo to be caught up in Operation Bedlam, Bond inadvertently sets the stage for her to receive the deadly counterstroke meant for him.  In You Only Live Twice Bond assumes the role of Sir Orfeo, journeying to the Otherworld to win back his missing bride.  Spurred by fragmentary memories of his former life, Bond travels to Vladivostok before being captured by the KGB, brainwashed and programmed to assassinate his old boss in London.   

In this final volume of the series, after his attempt to kill “M” triggers an intensive regimen of shock treatments, Bond is sent to Jamaica on a suicide mission that will either validate his recovery or allow him to die with his boots on.  This is Fleming in classic Western mode, with two fabled gunslingers, James Bond and “Pistols” Scaramanga, spending much of the book sizing up one other before their climactic shoot-out.  But at the same time the story cleverly brings Fleming’s Arthurian cycle to a satisfying conclusion.

With SPECTRE out of the way Bond is pitted against traditional enemies, in this case an unholy union of Mafia and KGB.  The Catalan pistoleer seems to be a composite of previous villains, sporting Goldfinger's reddish crew cut, the athletic physique of Largo, the towering stature of Blofeld, and the deadly aim of Donovan Grant.

Meanwhile, the Jamaican setting allows Bond and the reader to revisit the scene of earlier adventures, reconnect with old friends, and reminisce about an old flame before the hero is granted a final chance to prove himself worthy.  

Unlike any of his usual adventures, this one finds Bond choreographing some x-rated entertainment for Scaramanga and his associates, then fantasizing about seducing his own former secretary, but resisting the temptation to sleep with her or any of the other attractive young ladies he encounters.  Bond is polite to everyone, including his mortal enemy.  He leaves a five-pound tip to a waitress named Tiffy, risks his own life to aid Felix Leiter, and acknowledges the possibility that he just might owe his miraculous survival to the supernatural intervention of an Obeah woman named Mother Edna.  

For anyone keeping score, this all adds up to a demonstration of the knightly virtues of chastity, courtesy, generosity, friendship, and piety.  Fittingly, as he recovers from gunshot wounds, including one made by a bullet dipped in snake venom, Bond is notified of a recommendation for knighthood.

Fleming also had a real-life favor to repay.  By including From Russia With Love on his list of favorite books in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had apparently helped make Ian Fleming America’s best-selling crime novelist.  With some time on his hands in Jamaica, Bond opens a copy of Kennedy’s Profiles In Courage and begins to read the chapter on Kansas Senator Edmund G. Ross, which begins with the quote, “I…looked down into my open grave.”

It's a nice tribute that was also prophetic.  By the time Fleming had finished writing that scene, the Eternal Flame flickered over President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.  In another six months Fleming himself would be laid to rest in a grave at St. James’s Churchyard, Sevenhampton.

There is a spectacular train crash in Golden Gun, perhaps offered as a sop to future screenwriters, who would surely find a disappointing lack of action or nail-biting suspense in Fleming’s final book of his Bond saga.  Like many of the other scenes and characters, the disaster harks back to another work, in this case the end of Bridge On the River Kwai.  Of course the author felt obliged to cite his source, giving Felix the line “How did you dig the River Kwai stunt?  Go off all right?"

Whatever his faults, Mr. Fleming was gallant to the end.