Boyd on Bond

And so, dear readers, to the South Bank last night, to the Queen Elizabeth Hall where William Boyd was being interviewed about his new addition to the James Bond canon, Solo. (I should say, parenthetically, that while I generally distrust sarf London, I tend to view the South Bank as a north London bridgehead and really part of the civilised world). Boyd is the latest in a long line to pick up Fleming's baton, stretching all the way back to Kingsley Amis's pseudonymous Colonel Sun, and the new book was written with the full co-operation of Fleming's estate. A copy of Solo is now in possession but as-yet untouched, so of that more another day.

I am a great fan of William Boyd. He is a talented and thoughtful writer with a broad canvas, and one who is no stranger to spy fiction. He is also a Bond fanatic with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Fleming's writing (and he included Fleming as a character in his 2002 masterpiece, Any Human Heart). The format of the evening was a Q&A, introduced by Ian Fleming's niece, Lucy, which indicates how closely Boyd has worked with the Fleming Estate. She had some interesting observations on Fleming and the extent to which he would have approved of Boyd's work. Solo is a continuation novel set in 1969, so taking the timeline upon which Fleming (eventually) settled for Bond and is a period piece, in the vein of Sebastian Faulks's Devil May Care rather than the updated John Gardner and Raymond Benson novels or Jeffrey Deaver's (I thought very good) reboot of the franchise, Carte Blanche.

It is an interesting decision to place Bond (back) in period. In Boyd's book, 007 has just turned 45, and the setting is Africa, one Boyd knows well; he was born in Ghana and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria, where he saw first-hand some of the effects of the Biafran War. His upbringing informed books like A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach, so his depiction of the continent should be worthy of Fleming's high standards of research and sense of place. Creating a period Bond will not please everyone. For some, Bond should always be at the peak of his powers, somewhere in his thirties, and with every accoutrement of modern life at his disposal. Done well, as Jeffrey Deaver did, this can be excellent, but I somehow feel Bond belongs in his time, or at least very close to it. It makes his back-story more credible (and Boyd's short reading from the beginning of Solo cast some interesting light on 007's wartime experiences as a young officer in the RNVR).

On to Boyd. The interview was conducted by journalist and poetess Olivia Cole (whose brother Harry was spotted in the audience toting a glass of champagne - well done, that man). Cole is a very accomplished and successful woman, but she seemed, especially at first, a little ill at ease, the opening questions slightly stilted and stumbled-over. Perhaps I am being harsh; but there were one or two moments of buttock-clenching awkwardness. Boyd himself was a model interviewee: polite, modest, funny and extremely well-informed. He was keen to stress that, while he drew very heavily from Fleming's writings, which he knows back-to-front, he had made a conscious decision to ignore completely the filmic Bond in creating his own version of the character. He took many of the basic reference points from Bond's (premature) obituary in You Only Live Twice, in which Fleming himself finally settled on some of the way points of 007's life and career.

Even for those familiar with the literary Bond, there were some stark and useful reminders. We know, of course, that Bond is a damaged and troubled man, with self-doubt and fear constant companions. You don't see the cinematic Bond vomit with fear. But Boyd also reminds us of his orphanhood, and his deeply emotional (ahem) bond to M as a substitute father-figure. He also stressed - and this was something I hadn't thought very much about - that Bond is an intellectual figure. Although he leaves school at 17, his Chelsea flat is "book-lined", and he is an impressive autodidact. There is surely something of Fleming in this. An upbringing of privilege, yes, but with an unconventional relationship with formal education balanced by a hoarder's brain which hoovers up snippets of information (and, in Fleming's case, often scatters them through the pages of the 007 novels).

So now I must scurry through the rest of the biography of Woodrow Wilson I'm currently reading, so I can turn to Boyd on Bond. The signs are promising. Certainly, he brings the most passionate attachment to Bond to the task so far, and maybe, just maybe, knows even more about the subject than even Fleming did. A note upon which to end, and to make a martini, I think. It is, after all, always five o'clock somewhere.