Bring on the Bond girls

This is turning out to be the year of James Bond. Acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks is writing a new 007 thriller for the 21st century, Daniel Craig's second outing as Bond hits cinemas this autumn, and a major exhibition marks the centenary of creator Ian Fleming's birth. But is it still just a Boy's Own adventure? Here, seven women examine the phenomenon, from Fleming's writing style to his spy's sartorial habits. Then there's the debate about his sexual preferences...
Bond Girls
Observer Writers Turned Bond Girls Bidisha, Lynn Barber And Katheryn Flett. Photograph: Andy Hall

'At 12, reading Bond made me yearn to be grown-up'

It had been more than 30 years since I first read Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's debut Bond, and this year - the centenary of Fleming's birth - I wondered how it stood up, and indeed how the fortysomething me would relate to a book the teenage me had adored, way back before the Cold War thawed.

Despite being fairly baffled by the casino scenes (and there are a lot of casino scenes in Casino Royale - the clue is in the title) I was entirely in thrall to the heady adult glamour of it all:


I'd forgotten what a great opening paragraph this is: economical yet powerfully evocative, so unfussily focused and modern it could have been written this morning. I kept on reading and was, somewhat to my surprise, thrilled by it all over again. The 12-year-old Flett went on to read the rest of the Bonds in quick succession, and now the 43-year-old version, who had just raced through 007's triumph over Le Chiffre at Baccarat, wanted to do the same.

Circa 1976, reading Casino Royale made me yearn to be grown-up, with the concomitant, albeit remote, possibility of somehow evolving into a woman like Vesper Lynd, who wore a black velvet dress that was 'simple and yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world can achieve...'; the sort of woman 007 might (eeek! uuuurgh! aaargh!) even want to sleep with - 'but only when the job had been done'; someone who would gaze at the sleeping alpha male beside her and note that 'with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical brutal and cold'.

Although I never signed up to Her Majesty's Secret Service or wangled myself some velvety couture on expenses, I have occasionally woken up next to a cut-price, off-the-peg 'Bond' - not all it's cracked-up to be, frankly. Admittedly, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I once told Hugh Hefner to his face that his lifestyle was responsible for making men jealous and women's lives just a tiny bit too complex for comfort (it was a subjective sort of argument but he took it on the chin). At that point I'd forgotten how important the equally fantastical and corrosive world of Bond - a world in which men were men and women were merely grateful - had once been to this pubescent girl. It's been a terrible post-feminist burden.

In 1996 I went to Jamaica with the photographer Martin Parr on an assignment for the-then Observer Life magazine. We were reporting on what had been billed as the inaugural Official James Bond Festival, though I don't think there's been another since. About 1,000 mostly American punters and 100-odd journalists stayed at a big, high-rise, all-inclusive complex called the Jamaica Grande. The festival itself was a riot of tackiness and disorganisation and therefore perfect material, but in among the chaos and the undrinkable martinis there were a few highlights, not the least of which was a visit to Fleming's former estate, Goldeneye, which is now owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. Here I got to see the small desk and typewriter at which Fleming wrote that punchy, potent opening paragraph. The view from the window, of hissing Caribbean surf and waving palms, is about as far from the steamy, febrile interior of the Casino Royale as it is possible to imagine, which to my mind makes those opening lines even better.

'I never really knew there were books ... I mean I sorta knew, but I'm not a book man myself - no action ... ' muttered the lightly-lobstered 'Bond fan' next to me as we shuffled past Fleming's desk. I was almost lost for words, there in the holy-of-holies, but I suggested he might like to give the old reading lark a bit of a whirl; that there was even more to Bond than met the eye from the vantage point of a cinema seat.

I stopped short of suggesting that beyond the girls and gadgets - and even Sean Connery - there was, in the pages of the original novels, pretty much all the agony and the ecstasy of an archetypal modern male laid bare - sexed-up, I grant you, in the case of Bond himself, but the villains are flipsides of the same masculine coin.

Fleming's centenary has engendered an orgy of Bond: Daniel Craig's second outing in the deliciously-titled Quantum of Solace, not to mention speedboats on the Thames, a Goldfinger golf tournament, a set of Royal Mail stamps, and a Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (interesting choice of venue), while the actual day, 28 May, sees the publication of Sebastian Faulks's Devil May Care. A new Bond for the new century, but also conveniently set in 1967. 'Bond is damaged, ageing and in a sense it is the return of the gunfighter for one last heroic mission,' Faulks has said. 'He has been widowed and is slightly more vulnerable than any previous Bond, but at the same time he is both gallant and highly sexed, if you can be both. Although he is a great seducer, he really does appreciate the girls he seduces and he doesn't actually use them badly.'

Hurrah for that, because a touchy-feely Bond taking himself off to therapy in order to work through his issues is clearly beyond the pale, and I will gladly settle for Faulks's version of unreconstructed Bond, even though I'd be very wary of letting dreamy, impressionable 12 year-old girls - if they still exist - anywhere near him, for obvious reasons.
Kathryn Flett

'He's a show-off, the stunts are silly and I hate the gadgets'

If you don't like James Bond, you keep quiet. It's safest that way. The last thing you want to do is stick your head above the parapet and admit it. So I'll keep this brief. The one thing I do like is: 'The name's Bond, James Bond.' It is suavely satisfying, the sort of line you can keep repeating to yourself, with varying intonations, under your breath. Otherwise, I have never seen the point of him.

I have a problem with action men. I prefer inaction men. I think James Bond is a show-off. And showing off is tiresome. I find stunts silly. The car chases I loathe: they're loud, boring, pointless. I can't stand the gadgets either. Bond, I felt as a child, was for boys. Girls had superior things to think about, although I was never sure what. The idea was, anyway, ruined by my best friend at primary school who was in love with Bond. Even then, I knew not to tell her how I felt.

It's gone on like this all my life. All four of my sons love James Bond and read Anthony Horowitz (though Charlie Higson has yet to bite). Is this what is meant by male Bonding? I wouldn't dream of discouraging them. I accept there must be something wrong with me, some deficiency in my character. We all went together on a family outing to Casino Royale. I did admire Daniel Craig's torso and thought he looked dishy in a dinner jacket. I liked it best when he looked smart and was sitting quietly over his dinner. If only he were able to stay still like that more often. It is his career choice that is the obvious problem. I am glad there was a tongue-in-cheek element to the film. The boys went back for a second helping.

I also have a problem with Bond girls. Nothing personal. It is just that I can't stand them. Each woman is no more than a new gadget to Bond. They are glamorously disposable. They are drop-dead gorgeous and then, at least in the sense of their screen lives, they just drop dead. None of them has a chance of lasting, let alone mattering (they're only women after all) while Bond persists in going on for ever.
Kate Kellaway

'Can't people see he's a slimy alcoholic with a bad barber?'

Ah, Bond. The human Swiss Army knife, capable of running, killing, boozing, being sarcastic and fornicating, all at the same time. I hate him. I've always hated him. As an international spokesmodel for the old imperial boys' club, Bond represents everything that's odious about the status quo: smug machismo, the military industrial complex and its gadget-porn, boxy tailoring. Bond's a naff deluxe combo of the Milk Tray man, the Grecian 2000 hair dye advert dude, a low-level guest from the Chancellor's reception and a financial adviser from Hemel Hempstead.

Observing the furore whenever a new Bond project comes out, I feel like the kid in The Emperor's New Clothes: why can't people see that he's a slimy old alcoholic with a bad barber? Are female Bond-lovers so in thrall to cold men that they'll gape adoringly at someone who only notices the token beautiful woman when he wants to bonk her once, cheesily, despite his angina? Maybe I need to work on my man-worshipping squaw skills to fully appreciate the masochist potential here ... but then, maybe not. As for Judi Dench as M, big deal. By the time Hollywood caught up with the idea of female bosses in the secret service, it had been happening in the real world for years.

I think the Bond mythos is loved because it represents people's biggest bigot fantasies: a lone, authoritative hetero who seems to have no friends, who likes neither women nor children, whose idea of human drama is simple violence and peril, whose job is a quest for a (preferably foreign) bogeyman. As with football and music fandom, I reckon the biggest followers of the slick special agent are bland, chauvinistic, angry wannabes who've spent their lives wondering what it would be like, just for a moment, to have some charisma. The fact that the Bond estate still successfully spawns further books shows how many people approve of the fantasy.

· Bidisha's third book, Venetian Masters, a memoir, is published by Summersdale.

'Bond is clearly gay. His deepest love is reserved for M, his boss'

I was put right off James Bond in my first week at Oxford when I received an invitation to a James Bond party at the Oxford Union. It consisted of Jonathan Aitken in a DJ, pouring vodkatinis from a cocktail shaker, surrounded by a dozen or so freshwomen who had caught his eye - no other men at all. What a twat, I concluded, and never bothered to read a James Bond novel from that day to this or, rather, until last week when my editor made me.

First surprise is how wonderfully readable Fleming is. I expected his style to be as dull as Jeffrey Archer's but not a bit of it - he is a master of vivid description and the arresting phrase. I particularly liked 'as malevolently inscrutable as a parrot'. But also he's nerdy and pedagogic, so keen to impart exotic facts about, say, the history of voodoo or different species of shark. He is a great travel writer and the world was much more foreign then. He describes the strange inhabitants of the United States with the same anthropological wonder as Dickens a century before.

The chapter on Harlem in Live and Let Die is quite extraordinary - yards of negro speech reproduced with all the phonetic pedantry of prewar writers doing Cockney: 'Aw, honey. Dey ain't no use tryin' tuh git mad at me. Ah done nuthen tuh give yuh recasion tuh ack dat way.' Bond listens carefully until he gets the gist and concludes that negroes are just like you and me: 'Seems they're interested in much the same things as everyone else - sex, having fun, and keeping up with the Joneses.' Fancy that.

Fleming also has a wonderful Sherlock Holmesian faith in the idea that you can 'read' people's emotions from their faces. Their eyes go opaque when they are lying and flash red when they are angry. Psychopaths and manic depressives (Fleming seems to think they're the same thing) go mad like werewolves at the full moon.

He believes in the medieval humours - sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic - and the three great drives, which are self-preservation, sex and the herd instinct, in that order. People who are sexually neuter (like Rosa Klebb) have a great advantage because: 'Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.'

In the Bond films, much is made of Bond's taste for vodkatinis, shaken, not stirred, but in the books, his main gustatory passion seems to be breakfast. He adapts to the customs of the country (maple syrup in the States, yoghurt in Turkey) but at home in London, his breakfast consists of two cups of very strong black De Bry coffee brewed in an American Chemex machine and served in a Queen Anne silver coffee pot, a single speckled brown egg boiled for three-and-a-third minutes and served in a dark blue eggcup, followed by two slices of wholewheat toast, with Jersey butter, Tiptree strawberry jam, Cooper's Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian heather honey from Fortnum's. I have abbreviated this considerably - the full description takes up a whole page.

Dinner never gets the same attention and Fleming barely mentions wine. But he is keen on his cigarettes. Bond smokes three packs a day - Turkish, ideally, or Morlands 'with their three gold bands', or Chesterfields when he is in the States - and much time is spent lighting, offering, sharing cigarettes, though his beloved M smokes a pipe, and Bond would never dream of lighting up in front of him uninvited.

In the novels, Bond is not at all the smug Jonathan Aitken figure I assumed. He suffers from fear of flying and worries that he is 'tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear'. Even his status as a sex god is doubtful. In From Russia With Love, his task is to 'pimp for England' - to sleep with a beautiful Russian girl who has a crush on him and is dying to get him to bed. But he is as shy as any blushing bride and finds every excuse to postpone the deed, explaining that he can't make love because his little finger is broken (what does he need his little finger for?). .

He suffers performance anxiety too: 'Would he be able to act the part? ... Would his body dissociate itself from his secret thoughts and effectively make the love he would declare?' Apparently he passes the test, but he isn't exactly jumping on the girl at every opportunity; at one point, he tries to deflect her by saying they can't make love now because their train is just approaching Venice and they mustn't miss the view.

And however beautiful the sirens sent to seduce him, he still periodically wonders 'why he bothered with other women when the most darling of them all was his secretary' - Loelia Ponsonby, incidentally, not Miss Moneypenny. Actually, I don't know why he bothers with other women at all because he is clearly gay - his deepest love is reserved for M, his boss, followed by Felix Leiter, his CIA companion - but he is such a silly old muddlehead he obviously hasn't twigged that yet. Perhaps Sebastian Faulks could drag him out of the closet? Probably not.
Lynn Barber

'Mum says the books are like Enid Blyton'

James Bond is still the foremost action hero, definitely the one and only spy; he's the adventure, the gadgets and the masculinity in one. But then again, I've only seen the films. So far in my life, I haven't got to the stage where I read spy novels and who knows if I ever will.

If someone was to ask me to name three fictional spies, James Bond would be second after the Pink Panther (but only because I love the Pink Panther's name) and then I'd be stymied. Plus I think the Pink Panther may be a detective, not a spy. Not that it's always clear which is which.

When I was staying with some friends in Italy, the only videos in the rented house were the entire Bond collection; we were stuck inside during storms and we watched them all in a matter of days. That isn't to say it's the only way I could be induced to watch the films, but otherwise I mightn't have bothered to see them.

The last one I saw was Casino Royale. I thought Daniel Craig acted the part perfectly but, in my mind, and maybe thanks to the other films, his appearance was wrong; James Bond should be narrower and slicker. I wonder if, in the books, our man has as many little quips as he does in the films. This is the one thing that really annoys me about the films - all the irritating one-liners. And even though the girls look really cool and maybe knock out one bad guy with a gun or something, then they just die. That's really infuriating. If they are really on equal terms with Bond, how come they just die all the time?

James Bond doesn't come into conversation much among my friends. None of us is especially keen on him, and none of us has read the books, but I would be surprised if any of us hadn't seen at least one film. I am getting excited about the new film and imagine we will all go to see it because it's one of the films that you're kind of expected to go and see.

I am aware there were Bonds before Craig and that Craig is probably my mum's age. My mum and her friends don't take Bond seriously - they say Roger Moore looked like a Rothmans advert (cigarettes from the old days, with big watches and pictures of airline pilots) and Pierce Brosnan has what they call PGL - pointless good looks, i.e. very handsome but you don't actually fancy him. They like Sean Connery - they fall about laughing about how he looked handsome even in a one-piece, shorty, powder-blue, towelling outfit with a zip down the front, which does sound quite an achievement ... Mum says the books are unbelievably badly written, but very simple and exciting, kind of like Enid Blyton.
Isobel Adomakoh Young

· Isobel, who is 15, and her mother, Louisa Young, write the Zizou Corder novels, their latest, Lee Raven, Boy Thief, was published earlier this year.

'I treasure my musty old paperbacks: their yellowing pages, campy covers'

Girls aren't supposed to like James Bond - or at least not girls like me, who still own copies of unreadable books like The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing and who spent their early twenties campaigning for VAT to be removed from sanitary towels. Imagine telling Bond you plan on 'reclaiming the night': he'd have your dungarees off faster than you could say Simone de Beauvoir. But like him I do.

Moonraker, starring Roger Moore and a large hovercraft, was only the third or fourth film I ever saw at the Sheffield Gaumont, and though I suspect this was a Saturday afternoon entertainment designed more for my brother and father than for me, from that day on I was hooked on the idea of Bond, if not the precise details.

What was not to like? The film was funny and exciting. I was transfixed by Jaws's girlfriend, who looked like Heidi. I remember, too, laughing knowingly at Q's joke at the end when he catches Bond and Holly Goodhead frolicking in zero gravity - 'I think he's attempting re-entry, sir!'- even though I wasn't entirely sure what he meant by it.

It wasn't many years after this that my father gave me his old set of Pan paperbacks of the Bond books. I love these books: their yellowing pages, their delicious, musty tobacco smell, their campy covers. I've got one beside me as I write: Diamonds Are Forever, which cost 2/6d and came highly recommended both by the Daily Express ('Where Bond goes, trouble is a fellow-traveller!') and by Pan's blurb writers ('Greater than Casino Royale? More terrible than Live and Let Die? More hazardous than Moonraker? YES.') The cover features a painting of a girl in black underwear sitting on a back-to-front chair at an old-fashioned dressing table in the pose that, curiously, Christine Keeler was yet to make famous (this edition was printed in 1962; Lewis Morley's iconic photograph of Keeler was not taken until 1963).

No, I agree: it doesn't sound good, put like this, but there is something incredibly appealing about it to me. I guess it's that I associate it with longed-for adulthood and sophistication - and I am still, at the age of 38, longing for both of those.

These days, I loathe the Bond movie franchise. A kind of weariness has set in with the whole greed of pressing on and on with the films, and I cannot come to terms with M played by Judi Dench, who, swathed in voluminous linen, looks like a poster girl for department store shopping even as she is explaining some complicated point about diplomacy or equipment (oh dear, this feminist betrayal grows more serious with every word I write).

But I still really like the books, and I still like Bond the character, as he is written. Ian Fleming thought Bond a 'cardboard booby' most of the time. 'I write for warm-blooded heterosexuals in planes and trains,' he said. 'If one has a grain of intelligence, it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond.'

I know what he meant, though this statement is also, perhaps, touched with needy false modesty. I know, too, that the novels are stuffed with racism and what read now like borderline rapes (Bond's women always seem to be left with 'bruised' bodies after his 'piercingly wonderful' attentions). The only trouble is that, by the standards of the modern airport read, they are so superbly written: neat plots, immense atmosphere, sentences that are as clean and well-constructed as one of Bond's beloved cocktails.

Chandler was a fan and you can see why. Fleming can take you places: from Liberia to Vegas and back again. As for Bond, when he is not chasing skirt, he has a reassuring straightforwardness. Thriller writers now are always giving their heroes 'complexity': they're screwed up about women, or miserably divorced, or drinking too much.

But you can get sick both of their introspection and their creators' plodding pop psychology. Bond, on the other hand, would rather wallow in a pair of false eyelashes than in self-pity. Also, no matter how stressed out he is, there is always time for a grilled Dover sole and a glass of Pouilly Fuissé.

Before I started writing this, I googled 'feminism' and 'James Bond'. For a cardboard booby, people do get mighty worked up about him. He and his creator are either off the hook - practically secret feminists! - on account of what strong and subversive women the likes of Pussy Galore and Tatiana Romanova are underneath their Max Factor and uplift bras; or they're wicked misogynists and we should frog-march them out of the nation's libraries forthwith.

The truth, of course, lies in between. But isn't that the case with most guys? I doubt my father knew it at the time, but in one sense my little shelf of Pans was a really fun preparation for life.
Rachel Cooke

'What made Fleming such a martyr to his misogyny?'

Although they now have their own junior 007 books by Charlie Higson, precocious visitors to the Imperial War Museum's new exhibition about James Bond are sure to be drawn to Fleming's originals, searching for the plots behind the exhibits. Take Rosa Klebb's flick-knife shoes, whose prototype now passes, at the museum, for a principal attraction. At what point in From Russia With Love does lethal footwear sported by this horrible old lesbian, startle the habitually underprepared James Bond?

Not until the closing pages, it emerges, after Bond, described by the museum as an 'iconic figure', has enjoyed a lengthy trip aboard the Orient Express, a jaunt whose only purpose, so far as one can tell, is as a pretext for extended erotical passages about his latest conquest, Tatiana, a manifestly suspect Smersh spy. In preparation for their first encounter, young readers will discover Tatiana dresses expertly, wearing 'nothing but the black ribbon round her neck and black silk stockings rolled above her knees'. Cor! For the train trip, however, she dispenses with the stockings, prompting Bond to kiss her 'long and cruelly'.

As for the bloody shirt from Casino Royale, perhaps it hails from the testicle-mashing episode which ensues after our dimwitted hero has fallen head first into another obvious trap, for which he blames his woman colleague, Vesper. 'These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men... the silly bitch.' Although Fleming, the daft sod, would have to write a lot better for one to care, one way or the other, what made him such a martyr to his misogyny, the prominence of this theme does raise quite interesting questions about his admirers, who apparently included Kingsley Amis, Raymond Chandler and John Betjeman. Recently, Sebastian Faulks reread the books, in preparation for his new sequel, and said they 'have stood up very well'.

Admittedly, Fleming's solemn accounts of Bond's pioneeringly metrosexual attention to exercise and grooming, would not be out of place in a current issue of GQ, and may well have looked startlingly modern in the 1950s. 'After shaving,' we learn from one typical, sartorial reverie, 'and putting on a sleeveless dark blue Sea Island cotton shirt and navy blue tropical worsted trousers, he slipped his bare feet into black leather sandals and went through the bedroom ... '

If the existence of an inner life can only be guessed at, Bond's externals are described with such sober precision that it is remarkable no one ever launched a range of Bond leisurewear, featuring 'white linen bathing drawers' or, at the very least, a patent, Bond 'pyjama coat', for which Casino Royale all but supplies the pattern. 'It had no buttons,' Fleming explains, 'but there was a loose belt round the waist. The sleeves were wide and short, ending just above the elbow. The result was cool and comfortable...' Actually, you wonder if this passion for clothes might not explain, up to a point, the requirement for regular, balancing outbursts of manly woman hating. 'Women were for recreation,' opines Mr pyjama-coat designer, for whom sex is always better, when it has the 'sweet tang of rape'.

Although Bond's creator will not be everyone's first choice for national celebration, the current outburst of Fleming/Bond adulation must surely bring hope to fans of less popular offenders against current sexual and political mores. Is it too ambitious to hope that similar indulgence may one day be extended to, say, the Amises, to VS Naipaul, even the semi-untouchable Philip Larkin? It would be vain, of course, to hope for anything so handsome as a reverential exhibition at the Imperial War Museum for a poet widely shunned for writing, in private letters, things such as: 'Women repel me inconceivably. They are shits.' But, then, thinking of Bond - racist, rape-enthusiast yet still 'iconic' - perhaps some more modest form of redemption should not be completely ruled out.
Catherine Bennett

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