From Jamaica with Love.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica - Book review

Matthew Parker, Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (New York: Pegasus, 2015), 400 pp., $27.95.

What is the secret of James Bond's extraordinary endurance? Sixty-two years after he made his first appearance in a novel by Ian Fleming (and fifty-one years after the death of his creator), 007 still haunts our spy-novel dreams. John le Carre has sold a lot of books, and has sometimes come close to producing substantive literature, but his protagonist George Smiley never inspired mass obsession. And while Jason Bourne might offer a bit of competition when it comes to high-concept movie chase scenes, he can't hold a candle to Fleming's creation when it comes to theme songs, catchphrases or brand recognition. The whole point of Bond is that we know precisely what we're going to get, and we'll be mighty disappointed if we don't. Shaken, not stirred. Submissive supermodels. Cars that put Google and Tesla to shame. Villains with shark tanks and neon names.

A lot of us would like to believe that we've outgrown this sort of thing. But Bond couldn't care less. Fie just goes right on selling books and memorabilia and DVDS, and he certainly didn't look obsolete when he parachuted into the 2012 London Olympics at the side of Queen Elizabeth II. Later this year, he'll be turning up in Spectre, the twenty-fourth film in the Bond franchise; that number doesn't include the knockoffs, the clones or the parodies, none of which has had anything like the staying power of the original. (The movies have grossed over $6 billion worldwide by now--and that's not adjusted for inflation.) Easily dismissed as a glorified cartoon character, Bond turns out to have a surprisingly stubborn lock on the collective id. Every time we start congratulating ourselves on some new sensitivity class we've passed, Bond rises up to remind us: nothing beats making a debonair wisecrack in your tuxedo right after you've offed the bad guy.

Bond has become such a part of our cultural background noise that it comes as a something of a jolt to recall that he's actually the product of one man's imagination. One summer's day in 1952, the frustrated British newspaper executive Fleming sat down at his typewriter to produce Casino Royale. It took him a few tries to get the opening right, but the final product has a campy irresistibility: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling--a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension--becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it."

The character shared many salient traits with his creator. Fleming, like Bond, was an alumnus of British naval intelligence during World War II. Both smoked seventy cigarettes a day, consumed Churchillian quantities of alcohol and exulted in the fleeting assignation. (With characteristic obliviousness, Fleming put this observation in the mouth of one of his female characters: "All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken")

Both men were widely traveled, multilingual and strikingly xenophobic. The Japanese have "an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible." The Chinese are "hysterical." Italians are "bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent over themselves." Afrikaners are "a bastard race, sly, stupid and ill-bred." In From...