'Tis the season of Bond

Dear readers,

Today we return to a subject dear to my heart, that of James Bond, 007, licensed to kill. This is very much the time for it; recently we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Bond film, Dr. No, and later this month, of course, we will be treated to the latest cinematic instalment, Skyfall, complete with its Adele-sung theme song. (Skyfall is Bond 23, canonically, but that ignores the execrable Casino Royale and the much more entertaining, if silly, Never Say Never Again.) I've yet to hear the theme song, but Adele strikes me as ideal, very much a Shirley Bassey for the 21st century, with no disrespect to the still-extant Dame Shirley.

This month's GQ devoted a considerable portion of its pages to Bond, and very interesting it was too. Dame Judi Dench wrote an fascinating piece on working with Daniel Craig, David Walliams interviewed Sir Roger Moore, and Danny Wallace visited GoldenEye, and wrote the first chapter of a supposed Bond novel. All of this brought home to me how varied Bond is; how, in many ways, he is what you want him to be.

Popular perception of 007 is overwhelmingly shaped by the films, of course, and people's Platonic ideal of Bond is often dependent on their age and therefore who was their childhood Bond. (Mine was late-stage Moore, Dalton and, I suppose, early Brosnan, though I was hardly a child by the time the series was revived by GoldenEye.) For some, Bond is the seductive killer of Sir Sean Connery; for others, he is the licensed-to-quip Sir Roger Moore, and for younger people he is the smooth charmer of Pierce Brosnan. Those growing up with Daniel Craig will have a very different slant on 007, and there can't be many people whose childhood Bond was George Lazenby.

Then again, there is the Bond of the books. Fleming's Bond. The general revival of Bond over the past, say, ten years will, I'm sure, have driven more people in the direction of Fleming's eleven novels and two collections of short stories (and I devoured the John Gardner successor books as a teenager); but I dare say they are still considerably overshadowed by the silver screen Bond. The literary Bond is, it is almost a cliché to say, darker and bleaker than the films. There is a striking sense of the soullessness of Bond's job (is it a vocation, really?), and the famous brand names and high living are surely an antidote to all that, oases of enjoyment in a life that is really rather cold. And this shows in Fleming's writing. The very first book, Casino Royale, is, I think, a terse, tense and brutal masterpiece, and if anyone has framed a spy novel with better first and last lines, then it can only be Len Deighton.

"The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning."

"Yes, dammit, I said 'was'. The bitch is dead now."

I like both the books and the films, though I freely accept that some of the late Moore outings were very silly, and Sir Roger was looking rather creaky (see A View to a Kill). By contrast, I think Live and Let Die is one of the very best, up there with From Russia With Love and Thunderball. One has to enjoy them (or not) on their own terms. For me, the jury is still out on Daniel Craig. He is a magnificent actor, as anyone who watched Our Friends in the North must surely attest, but, while I thought Casino Royale was very good, I found Quantum of Solace a little limp (a shame especially as it's a cracking short story, albeit Bond barely features). Maybe Skyfall will tip the balance one way or the other; though I think Craig has also signed up for Bond 24.

All of which brings me to my perhaps-controversial conclusion. I've thought long and hard about this, and I wouldn't be without any of the Bond films, but my favourite screen Bond is Timothy Dalton. Like Brosnan, he was considered for the role more than once, but playing the role in his early 40s was probably about right. And I will say now that I think The Living Daylights is out-and-out one of the best Bond films there is. The gadgetry takes a back seat, we have a sympathetic and rounded Bond girl in the exquisite Maryam d'Abo, and some excellent villains. Dalton's Bond can be charming and quippy, but he is also a killer. That's his job. He also looked like Bond; dark hair, saturnine looks, a hint of Celtic charm. Bond, after all, was never the perfect English gentleman. Half-Scots and half-Swiss, he never quite fitted in.

If The Living Daylights was a great film, I accept that Licence to Kill was less satisfactory, though it still entertains. And I will always regret that Dalton walked away after that, hardly helped by the long legal wrangling between UA/MGM and Eon Productions. He'd have made an excellent fist of GoldenEye, I'm sure, though he'd have been in the region of fifty by that time. Brosnan proved a good Bond, but some of the darkness, so pervasive in the novels, had gone (and one could hardly blame a man who had been in the entertaining but campy Remington Steele).

Still, Bond fans have much to look forward to. First, there is Skyfall; then, next autumn, we have William Boyd's new Bond novel, to be set in the late 1960s. We shall return to this soon enough, I'm sure...