His argument thus expands the reach of previous biographies by outlining in considerable detail the importance of these years in understanding not only Fleming’s subjective life, but also those of his characters, including 007 and so-called “Bond girls” and women.īuckton’s reading begins with Fleming’s enrollment at Durnford Preparatory School on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, where he was enrolled in 1916 as an eight-year-old, and privileges in particular his years at a private school in Kitzbühel, Austria, where in 1927 Fleming’s mother Eve sent her “errant” nineteen-year-old son to refine his language skills (35). To be sure, the most accomplished biographical writing offers more than an inventory of facts, typically by probing its subject’s motives and assessing their larger implications: Why this decision or action? What were the consequences? Such interpretive work, however, is frequently overshadowed by the myriad details that comprise fascinating lives like Fleming’s, but not so with The World Is Not Enough, in which Buckton develops a close or, more consistent with contemporary critical vocabulary, symptomatic reading of Fleming’s early and young adult years. My use of the phrase “nuanced reading” is intended to emphasize the acuity of Buckton’s thesis about the text of Ian Fleming’s life and its influence on his writing.
Oliver Buckton’s The World Is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming thus hardly constitutes the exhumation of a cultural skeleton from the Cold War rather, it provides a nuanced reading of Fleming (and Bond) in which fans and scholars alike will take great interest. On the contrary, No Time to Die, the last film in which Daniel Craig appears as 007, received its première in 2021 after a delay caused by the COVID pandemic Steven Gerrard’s anthology From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond was published in 2020 and Ian Kinane’s study of Fleming, Jamaica, and post-war politics, Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence, followed soon thereafter in 2021. The publication of Casino Royale in 1953 introduced James Bond to the world, and both his popularity and scholarly interest in his creator Ian Fleming show little sign of waning. The new, exciting Fleming biography is now in print
0 kommentar(er)
