Abstract
This chapter draws on critical theory and autobiographical memoir to compare two versions of Bond. The first is the one encountered by a working-class grammar-school boy in the early 1960s, and the second the version subsequently developed in the 1980s by a professional literary critic influenced by post-structuralist criticism. Focusing on the ‘Cold War’ novels From Russia with Love (1957), Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954) and Moonraker (1955), the chapter analyses Fleming’s approaches to class, gender and patriotism, and argues that the naïve initial reception of the fiction was in many ways truer and more valid than the subsequent critical revision.
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Notes
- 1.
Those novels in which the Soviet Union and its agency SMERSH are specified as Bond’s principal nemesis, as distinct from those in which he is up against the global network SPECTRE.
- 2.
The sketch actually pre-dates the Monty Python version, having originated in 1967 on At Last the 1948 Show.
- 3.
During the war my father, after numerous attempts, became one of those ‘boy soldiers’ who lied about their age to join the army. He finally managed to enlist in 1943 at the age of 15.
- 4.
This makes sense. My doctrinaire socialism came not from my working-class upbringing, but from graduate school-teachers. Currently the Labour Party is a party of the middle class. Some 75 per cent of Labour members are ABC1 voters, and 57 per cent of them have a degree. Nearly half live in London and the South of England. Source: New Statesman, 14 July 2016.
- 5.
Despite his conservatism in so many matters, Fleming’s deployment of product placement was both innovative and influential (it remains, for example, a staple and lucrative feature of the Bond films).
- 6.
In June 2016 the UK government conducted a referendum on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union (EU). The people voted to leave the EU, and at the time of publication of this volume (2018), the government is preparing to accomplish this secession.
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Holderness, G. (2018). You Only Live Twice: A Tale of Two Bonds. In: Strong, J. (eds) James Bond Uncovered. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76123-7_2
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