The James Bond Dossier - The Dossier

The Dossier

The James Bond Dossier includes most of the Bond fiction cycle, excepting Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966), the final collection of 007 short stories, which was published after the Dossier. Kingsley Amis’s argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming’s critics said, ‘a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life’. He viewed them as popular literature, akin to that of the Science Fiction texts he critiqued in New Maps of Hell (1960).

Although written in Amis’s usual, accessible, light-hearted style, The James Bond Dossier is neither patronizing nor ironic — it is a detailed literary criticism of the Ian Fleming canon. In the main, he admires Fleming’s achievement, yet does not withhold criticism where the material proves unsatisfactory or inconsistent, especially when the narration slips into ‘the idiom of the novelette’. Amis reserves his most serious criticism for what he considered to be academically pretentious rejections of the Bond books, a theme implicitly informing much of the Dossier.

Each of the 14 chapters deals with one aspect of the novels — ‘No woman had ever held this man’ defends Bond's attitude to and treatment of women: “Bond's habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominating or combative”; ‘Damnably clear grey eyes’ describes M., the head of SIS: “a peevish, priggish old monster”; ‘A glint of red’ is about the villains, who have in common only physical largeness and angry eyes; and so forth. According to his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, the hand of sovietologist and scholar Robert Conquest is betrayed in Amis’s precise dissertation upon the genesis and changing nomenclatures of SMERSH, the employer of the villains of the early novels. Three appendices deal, respectively, with science fiction, literature and escape, and 'sadism'. With ‘almost parodic scholarly dedication’, Amis provides a ten-category (‘Places’, ‘Girl’, ‘Villain’s Project’, etc.) reference guide (pp. 156–159) to the Bond novels and short stories.

Typical of Amis's approach is where he suggests several implausibilities in Bond's capture by the eponymous villain in Dr No (1958). However, that ‘Bond is temporarily helpless in his creator’s grip’, does not matter, because ‘three of Mr Fleming’s favourite situations are about to come up one after the other. Bond is to be wined and dined, lectured on the aesthetics of power, and finally tortured by his chief enemy’. Earlier, Amis had discussed the matter of Bond’s correct designation: ‘It’s inaccurate, of course, to describe James Bond as a spy, in the strict sense of one who steals or buys or smuggles the secrets of foreign powers . . . Bond’s claims to be considered a counter-spy, one who operates against the agents of unfriendly powers, are rather more substantial’.

Although, as noted elsewhere, Amis wrote three books related to the James Bond franchise, and may or may not have contributed to one of Fleming's novels, The James Bond Dossier would end up being the only book of this type to be published under Amis's own name.