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by having him tortured. Bond is placed on a stone seat which has been built on top of a geyser, and learns he has just 11 minutes left before it erupts with gigantic force to blow him away. He manages, as `with one mighty bound, to break free, strangles Blofeld with his bare hands, closes down a valve to block off the top of the geyser and runs up onto the castle battlements, where a conveniently tethered helium balloon allows him to escape before the geyser erupts. How he has achieved all this in less than 11 minutes is a mystery. But as he floats out over the sea, there is a world-shattering explosion and he sees the `Castle of Death' disintegrating in a vast fireball. Caught in the blast, his balloon falls into the sea and Bond feels himself sinking into warm water, `down towards peace, towards the rippling feathers of some childhood dream of softness and escape from pain'. We next read The Times obituary of `Commander James Bond, reporting that he has `died on active service'. In the same book, not only has Fleming at last arranged for his hero to get married; he has also killed him off.

We then learn that our hero is not in fact dead at all. He has been rescued from the sea, inevitably by the loving Suzuki, his soul-carrying anima, and in a lonely cave behind the shrine of the Guardians she has tended him gently back to health. But Bond has completely lost any memory of his former life or identity. Under guidance from the Wise Old Man, Suzuki gives the hero a new name, Todo Todoroki. They happily begin a new, simple life together by the sea shore. It is an idyllic picture of a man completely reborn, having conquered Death, left his old life behind and at last found his inmost identity.

But of course Bond has not really discovered his identity. He may have acted out the external pattern of a rebirth, but he has not been through any inward transformation. He has merely covered up his old identity with an outward disguise. Like everything else about James Bond, it is just `some childhood dream of escape. And sure enough, he eventually comes across a scrap of newspaper on which he can make out the word `Vladivostok'. He knows this somehow has deep significance for him; and when Suzuki tells him it is a place in Russia, he is sure that, if only he can get there, he will somehow learn who he truly is. The story ends with Bond setting off on a new journey across the sea to the Soviet Union. What Suzuki cannot tell him, because she does not know who he really is, is that when he arrives there he will fall into the hands of his real enemies, and that from this voyage there will be no return.

This death-wish laden fable was Fleming's last completed book. Less than a year later, and only a month after the death of his dominating mother, he himself was dead, at the age of only 56. In light of the peculiar strains of his last years, associated with the fantasy-figure who, like Frankenstein's monster, had taken over his life, he had become James Bond's only real-life victim.

As we end this introductory resume of some of the main ways in which so many stories have in the past 200 years taken on these dark and sentimental forms, the time has come to look from a fresh angle at the process which lay behind this fundamental change in the character of Western storytelling. One of its more conspicuous features, as we have seen (not least in our last example from Ian Fleming), was the way stories became more like personal dreams, reflecting the particular psychological inadequacies and imbalances of their creators. No storyteller provides a clearer illustration of this process than the novelist who forms the subject of our next chapter, Thomas Hardy.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867)

It might seem odd, as we explore the way in which storytelling has over the past two centuries become detached from its archetypal roots, to devote a whole chapter to the works of just one author. But the seven major novels written by Thomas Hardy between 1872 and 1895 provide such rich insight into this process of disintegration that it is worth