The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [274]
But one feature of Fleming's stories so striking that in the film versions it was turned into self-parody is their endings. In almost every instance, when the climactic battle has been brought to its triumphant conclusion, Bond sinks into the arms of the beautiful heroine whom he has liberated from the monster's clutches. It might seem like the perfect archetypal conclusion, the image of hero and anima coming together in joyful union. Except that in every story it is, of course, a different woman, each given a flip, throwaway, double-entendre-type name such as Pussy Galore, Honeychile Rider, Tiffany Case. Such disposable images of womanhood, viewed only as fantasy objects of male erotic desire, can scarcely be taken as standing for `the eternal feminine'. We may also then note that there is no sign of Bond having attained rule over any kind of a 'kingdom'. Indeed there has been no sign of his inwardly developing and maturing through the story at all. He is exactly the same cardboard figure he has been all along, through story after story; programmed like an automaton with exactly the same set of outward characteristics and responses, like wanting to seduce every pretty woman in sight, while demanding that his vodka-martinis be `shaken not stirred'.
So obviously is Bond just a two-dimensional fantasy projection that we might wonder how and why Fleming came to conceive his hero in the first place. Considerable light was shed on this by the biography of Fleming published after his death by John Pearson. We learn how as a young man, obsessed with fast cars and chasing pretty girls, he first imagined the figure who was to become Bond in his daydreams before World War Two, during which he served for several years in Naval Intelligence. It was this projection of his fantasy-self whom he developed into the hero of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel published in 1953. Fleming relished being paid for imagining how his fantasy-self could enjoy all the egocentric gratifications he could have wished for: driving his sports cars; living the secret life of an intelligence agent; enjoying effortless sexual success with an endless stream of adoring women; outwitting and killing his opponents. Yet all this seemed somehow morally justified by the fact that he was doing it in the name of a higher cause: fighting for his country; battling for `our side' against wicked villains plotting the downfall of Western civilisation. The values of the Self could thus be called in to sanctify what was essentially just ego-centred self-indulgence.
If this suggests that in real life Fleming was something of a `boy hero who cannot grow up', or puer aeternus, this was borne out by the unhappy story of his relations with the opposite sex. A succession of women could testify how he took them up and cast them off just as callously as Bond. To the end of his days he never matured into a whole, emotionally secure man. And in this sense it is noticeable how Bond always remained in a curiously ambivalent, immature relationship to authority in the stories, in particular to the all-powerful figure who ultimately ruled his life, the head of the Secret Service, `M' (although, like a perpetual schoolboy, he was always prepared to cock a secret snook at `M' behind his back). One might think `M' was thus the Father-figure whom Fleming so lacked in his life, his father having died in the First World War when he was still a boy. But, considering the difficulty he had in relating maturely with women, nothing in Pearson's biography was more illuminating than his account of the shadow cast over Fleming's life by the dominating personality