Quite some time ago, I mentioned that I was planning to read Matthew Parker’s book on Goldeneye. The odd thing is, I don’t think I ever got around to it, so, a. couple of weeks ago, the paperback eying me from my shelf, I thought I’d finally put that right. Like all texts about Ian Fleming however, it has left me with extremely mixed feelings. There’s no getting around the fact that the creator of James Bond was quite a sickening imperialist and snob, and I think Parker makes that even more apparent in his book about Fleming’s luxury house in Jamaica than Lycett or Shakespeare do in their biographies. He was a gut-churning conservative who despised the welfare state, any form of social progressiveness, and essentially thought black Jamaicans should just accept white British rule.

The thing is, what comes through in Parker’s book is far more nuanced and intriguing: he juxtaposes summaries and short reviews of Fleming’s writing against what he was doing as well as what was happening in the wider world at the time he was writing, so that we get a very interesting idea of where bond came from. He may certainly be an imperial figure, but his was an empire very much in decline. Fleming may have resented the demise of Britain, but he could neither avoid or deny it. What Parker gives us, then, is a picture of an anachronism at odds with the modernising world he was being drawn into: a man not all that comfortable with the open, liberal values of the postwar world, who fled to Jamaica to write far-fetched adventure stories to escape it. Yet ultimately who, despite his flaws, was one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century: nuanced, enigmatic, but ultimately a likeable guy who didn’t take himself – or his creation – too seriously.

As Parker puts it in his closing remarks, “​It is this complexity, born in the Jamaica of Fleming’s time, that gives continued life to James Bond and projects an image of Britishness that makes us likeable to ourselves, and to the rest of the world – who no doubt enjoyed the appearance of Bond in the Olympic opening ceremony almost as much as we did.” Frankly, I couldn’t put it better.