Essay · Literature & Culture
The Man Who Cannot Be Killed
James Bond was created in 1952 by a bored, unhappy, recently married former intelligence officer writing his first novel in a Jamaican house he had built to escape from England, and he has refused to die for seventy years. The refusal is the most interesting thing about him. It tells us something important about what Bond actually is — not a character in the conventional sense, not a fictional person with a psychology and a history and the capacity to change, but something closer to a myth, a structure, a vessel into which each decade pours its own anxieties and desires and emerges with a slightly different man but always, recognisably, the same.
By Bergotte · Jamaica & London · Literature & Culture
Begin with Fleming, because without Fleming there is nothing to explain. Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in 1908 into a family of wealth and some distinction — his father Valentine Fleming was a Conservative MP who died at the Somme, his brother Peter was a celebrated travel writer, his mother Evelyn was a woman of formidable social ambition and complex emotional demands — and he spent the first forty-three years of his life being, by most available measures, less than he might have been. He was asked to leave Eton. He failed the Foreign Office exam. He worked in banking, in journalism, in stockbroking, with the mild competence and the evident boredom of a man of considerable intelligence doing things that did not particularly interest him. The war gave him what he needed: as Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, he spent six years organising and planning intelligence operations, most of which were carried out by other people while Fleming sat in an office in Whitehall conceiving them, which turned out to be the ideal preparation for a career as a thriller writer.
He built Goldeneye — the house in Jamaica, on a cliff above the Caribbean — in 1945 and spent two months there every winter for the rest of his life, and it was there, in January 1952, facing the prospect of his imminent marriage to Ann O’Neill with feelings he later described as terror, that he sat down at his golden typewriter and invented James Bond. The motivation was, by his own account, straightforwardly escapist: he wanted to write “the spy story to end all spy stories,” a thriller of such pace and excitement that it would anaesthetise the anxiety he felt about the life he was entering. He wrote Casino Royale in six weeks, at a thousand words a day, and sent it to his friend the publisher Jonathan Cape, who published it in 1953 with moderate success and no particular premonition of what had been set in motion.
What Fleming Built and Why It Worked
Bond, as Fleming created him, is not a complicated character. This has been held against him, by critics who prefer their fictional protagonists to have interior lives of some depth, and the criticism misses the point entirely. Bond’s relative simplicity is not a failure of characterisation but a feature of the design: he is constructed to function as a vehicle for the reader’s fantasy rather than as an object of the reader’s analysis, to carry the reader through a series of extraordinary experiences rather than to be examined as a psychological case. He has tastes rather than a personality — scrambled eggs, the precise specification of a martini, the correct way to press a suit, the makes of cars and guns and cigarettes that mark him as a man who knows what he wants and is not prepared to accept a substitute. He has a body, and the body is capable of absorbing punishment and delivering it, and the punishment and the delivery are described with the attention to physical detail that Fleming brought to everything, which is the attention of a sensuous man who believed that the quality of a material experience was worth the effort of precise description.
The world Fleming built around him is equally precise. The locations — the Casino at Royale-les-Eaux, the Jamaican beach, the Swiss Alps, the Istanbul waterways — are rendered with the specificity of a man who had been to these places and remembered them with the appetite of a traveller who noticed things. The villains are baroque in their physical peculiarities and their megalomaniacal ambitions and their tendency toward the monologue, and the baroque quality is not carelessness but calculation: the villain needs to be large enough to make Bond’s victory over him significant, and Fleming understood, intuitively, that the thriller’s pleasures are the pleasures of excess — too much of everything, the quantities calibrated for fantasy rather than for realism.
The sex is frank for its era, the violence precise and occasionally sadistic, the snobbery unapologetic and somewhat knowing — Fleming was aware that Bond’s elaborate consumer preferences were a form of middle-class aspiration dressed in upper-class clothes, available to the reader as a shared fantasy of a life of quality that postwar austerity Britain had made unavailable to most of the people reading about it. The early Bond novels were published in the years of rationing and National Service and the slow, grinding recovery from a war that had been won at the cost of the empire that gave Britain its sense of itself, and into this context arrived a man who went where he liked, ate what he wanted, drove what he drove, and never worried about the bill, because Her Majesty’s Government was paying.
“Bond said nothing. He was already thinking about the next assignment.” — Ian Fleming, passim
The Cold War and the Perfect Spy
Bond could not have been invented at any other historical moment, and the moment that produced him is the key to his initial success and, paradoxically, to his subsequent longevity. The Cold War created, for Western democratic societies, a particular kind of anxiety: the anxiety of the free world confronting a totalitarian enemy that was both genuinely threatening and genuinely alien, that operated by rules — the rules of the intelligence war, of ideological loyalty, of state violence conducted in the shadows — that were incompatible with the values the West claimed to be defending. The liberal democracy cannot, in principle, fight the secret war the way the totalitarian state fights it: it cannot torture, cannot assassinate, cannot operate without legal constraint, cannot prioritise state security above individual rights. Bond resolves this contradiction by being officially sanctioned to do all of these things — the licence to kill is Fleming’s most brilliant invention, the legal fiction that allows the democratic state to have its spy and to disown him simultaneously.
He is the instrument of state violence that the state cannot officially acknowledge, operating in the grey zone between the law and the necessity, doing what needs to be done in a world where what needs to be done is sometimes ugly and Fleming was honest enough to say so. The early novels are surprisingly candid about the moral cost of Bond’s profession: Casino Royale ends with Bond genuinely shaken by what the job requires, considering resignation, told by M that the licence to kill is a burden rather than a privilege. This moral seriousness does not survive into the later Fleming novels in quite the same form, but it is there at the foundation, and it is part of what gives the early books their staying power.
SMERSH and SPECTRE and the succession of megalomaniacal villains with their private armies and their underground lairs are, of course, fantasy — but they are fantasy that serves a real psychological function. The Cold War enemy was diffuse, ideological, difficult to locate and impossible to personalise, and the thriller’s solution to this problem is the villain with a face: a specific person, with a specific plan, whose defeat is achievable within the two hundred pages available, unlike the defeat of Soviet communism, which was going to take rather longer. Bond fights the Cold War as a personal duel, which is the only form in which the Cold War was imaginable as a story, and the form’s appeal to readers who were living inside the undramatic daily reality of the Cold War was enormous and entirely understandable.
Why He Did Not Die With Fleming
Fleming died in 1964, having published fourteen novels and two short story collections and having seen his creation transferred to the cinema in a form — the Broccoli productions, beginning with Dr. No in 1962 — that would prove more durable than the novels themselves. The question of Bond’s post-Fleming survival is the more interesting question, because the Cold War that had generated him ended in 1989 and the empire whose anxieties he had managed had been over for decades and the world he was equipped to navigate — the world of SMERSH and Soviet expansion and the simple moral geography of Us and Them — had been replaced by something more complicated and less narratively satisfying.
The answer lies in the films more than in the continuation novels, because the films are the primary medium through which Bond has survived, and the films have done something to Bond that the novels could not quite do: they have made him generic enough to be adapted to any decade while specific enough to remain recognisable across all of them. The Bond of the films is not quite the Bond of the novels — he is less internally complex, less morally troubled, more purely a vehicle for spectacle — and the simplification has served him well, because a character of genuine complexity would be more resistant to the adaptation that each decade requires.
What the films have done, across twenty-six official entries and six actors and sixty years, is to treat Bond not as a character but as a set of attributes — the tuxedo, the martini, the car, the gun, the woman, the villain, the theme song — that can be recombined in different proportions and in different tonal registers to produce something that feels current without abandoning what is essential. The Roger Moore Bond is not the Sean Connery Bond is not the Timothy Dalton Bond is not the Daniel Craig Bond, and the differences are as significant as the similarities: Moore’s irony, Dalton’s darkness, Craig’s psychological damage — each actor has brought to the role a reading that reflects something about the decade in which he was working, about what the culture needed Bond to be in order to remain useful.
Bond and the Empire He Outlived
The relationship between Bond and the British Empire is one of the more discussed aspects of the cultural criticism that has accumulated around the character, and the discussion has not always been entirely honest about what is actually there. Bond is, unquestionably, a product of the imperial imagination: his ease in foreign countries, his assumption of competence and authority in places that are other people’s homes, his relationship to women and to non-white characters in the early novels, the casual racism that Fleming shared with most men of his class and era — these are the features of a fantasy produced by a culture that had recently lost an empire and had not yet worked out how to think about itself in the world that remained.
The films have managed this inheritance with varying degrees of grace and varying degrees of acknowledgement. The Moore era tended toward the jokey and the spectacular, using the locations as backdrop rather than as place and treating the geopolitical questions the plots raised with a cheerful superficiality that avoided the racism of the novels by avoiding most of their content. The Craig era — which began with Casino Royale (2006) and ended with No Time to Die (2021) — attempted something more ambitious: a Bond who was aware of the history he was embedded in, who was shown the moral cost of the work he did, who was denied the easy resolutions of the classic formula. The Craig Bond is a damaged man doing a damaged job in a world that has run out of the simple moral geography that made the job legible, and the damage is the films’ most honest engagement with what Bond actually is and what it costs to be him.
The decision in No Time to Die to kill Bond — definitively, sacrificially, in a sequence of genuine emotional weight — was the Craig era’s most radical gesture, and its radicalism was immediately contested by the franchise’s producers, who made clear before the film had finished its theatrical run that Bond would return, that the character whose death had just been staged would be reborn in the next actor who put on the tuxedo. The gesture and its immediate undoing together constitute the most honest statement the franchise has made about Bond’s actual condition: he is not a character who can die, because he is not a character in the sense that requires death to be final. He is a myth, and myths do not die. They change their vessels.
The Myth and Its Structure
The mythological reading of Bond — the one that places him alongside Odysseus and Achilles and the knight-errant of the medieval romance — is both illuminating and slightly overcooked, as mythological readings of popular culture tend to be, but it points at something real. Bond has the structural attributes of the hero myth as Joseph Campbell described it: the call to adventure, the crossing of the threshold into a world of extraordinary danger, the series of trials, the defeat of the monstrous enemy, the return. The villain’s lair is the underworld. The Bond girl is the anima figure. M is the wise elder. The gadgets are the magical weapons. The formula is as old as storytelling and as durable, which is why it has survived the death of the Cold War and the end of the empire and the cultural transformations that have made so much of what Fleming wrote feel dated or offensive or both.
What the myth provides, in Bond’s case, is a fantasy of personal agency in a world of systemic complexity — the fantasy that the right man in the right place at the right moment can determine the outcome of events that would otherwise be determined by forces too large and too diffuse to be confronted. This fantasy is not unique to Bond, but Bond has been its most consistent and most commercially successful vehicle, and the consistency is itself significant: every generation has needed the fantasy, which tells us something about the experience of living in the modern world, where the forces that shape individual lives are predominantly systemic and impersonal and resistant to the kind of direct confrontation that Bond offers.
The martini. The gun. The woman. The villain. The moment where everything depends on one man’s capacity to act decisively. These are not realistic elements. They are the elements of a structure that the culture returns to, in each generation, because the structure addresses something real about the experience of living in a world where individual agency feels perpetually insufficient, where the enemies are too diffuse to be personalised, where the right man with the right skills in the right moment is exactly what is needed and exactly what is not available. Bond is available. He is always available. He is the fantasy of sufficiency in an insufficient world, and the fantasy is as old as the hero myth and as persistent, which is why he refuses to die.
He refuses to die because we have not finished needing him. When we have finished needing him, he will die. The evidence of seventy years suggests that we are not close.
This essay draws on Ian Fleming’s fourteen Bond novels (1953–1966), Andrew Lycett’s biography Ian Fleming (1995), Jeremy Black’s The Politics of James Bond (2000), and the twenty-six official Eon Productions films (1962–2021). The continuation novels by John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Anthony Horowitz, and others are acknowledged but not discussed in detail. Ian Fleming was born May 28, 1908, in London, and died August 12, 1964, in Canterbury. Goldeneye, his Jamaican home, is now a hotel.
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