My Evolving Relationship with The Character of James Bond

I have a long, but oddly complicated relationship with James Bond ever since I laid eyes on the movies when I was very, very young. Obsessive fandom means that I've watched those movies repeatedly, to the point of rapidly and repeatedly watching each new one on its release. As a teenager, I turned to the novels and read those a few times each as well (well, the ones that I liked the most). I even started to read the continuation novels, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun (actually one of the best of all the novels, period), carrying on through John Gardener's tenure. But although I've bought every single one, I have to admit that I stopped actually reading the novels sometime during Raymond Benson's run.

I don't think that this was due to some quality issue on his part, but a change in my own tastes. Having said that, I keep buying them on the basis that I'm going to get around to reading them at some point. Although this occasionally holds true of other books I've bought, the chances of it happening for the newer Bond novels are presumably decreasing over time.

Hero is a pretty complicated word. While Ian Fleming undoubtedly did things that were heroic, my personal aversion to a lot of his politics (a feeling that's grown in me as I've grown up) and some of the (not always so casual) racism and misogyny in his writing have meant that the biography of him is also unread. Come to think of it, that tome may have well found its way to the charity shop (I checked - it hasn't, but it will).

The James Bond of the novels is also often difficult to describe as heroic. Is he a hero? Well, yes. And although he's probably not quite an anti-hero, his own snobbery, racism & misogyny (his role as Ian Fleming's alter ego is pretty well understood) make it difficult to root for him unequivocally. In some ways that makes him a perfect contemporary hero - people are complicated after all and nuanced writing through history tells us that good people sometimes do bad and bad people sometimes do good. Furthermore, heroism is sometimes a little more meaningful when achieved despite personal failings. In some ways however, this possibly makes him unadaptable to the screen in his purest form; screen heroes can be flawed, but movies tend to insist that they have some kind of inherent likeability or a similar sympathetic quality. Accurately depicting a 'hero' on screen who enjoys a sexual encounter tinged "with the sweet tang of rape" is beyond the pale and rightly so.

Maybe just for this reason, screen depictions have veered away from too pure a portrayal of Fleming's Bond (some Moore than others, of course) and given us various versions of a hero who's much easier to root for - predilections for alcohol and casual sex aren't really the worst things in the world. So my faith in the screen Bond as opposed to the literary one has been much easier to maintain as I've grown older (I nearly said 'grown up' but let's not go crazy). I still anticipate new Bond movies with the same fervour that I did decades ago and love movies that I loved years ago with undimmed intensity.

Fandom's a complicated thing and something I'm thinking of writing a lot more about as there are so many facets to it. Many people who are fans of something get a huge amount of pleasure from their fandom. But we shouldn't let blind devotion stop our fandom from evolving. After all, relationships begin, evolve, grow and sometimes end, so why wouldn't our fandom? I think it's safe to say that I've fallen out of love somewhat with the literary James Bond, but I think of him with the same warmth I might have for an ex-boyfriend. And that's not a bad thing.