March 2015

I have a thing for the James Bond franchise that goes beyond gadgets and Bond Girls. As an Anglophile, it even goes beyond the fact that Bond is a British icon. Instead, I love to look at James Bond and Ian Fleming in their relation to the British psyche of the 1950s and 1960s, a reflection of a nation with a changing identity as the colonies that once made up so much of its identity started to peel away one by one, amidst the physical and mental rebuilding after the destruction of World War II.

So, for me, GOLDENEYE is like a textbook, except much, much more readable than one. In it, Matthew Parker takes a look at one of the greatest of these influences on the story of 007. The subtitle is “Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica,” and this book is as much a testament to Jamaica as it is to Bond.

Fleming would spend several months each year at Goldeneye, his retreat on the north coast of Jamaica. A painfully Spartan house to anyone who was his guest, Fleming reveled in its large open windows and basic furniture. It was here, and almost exclusively here, that each Bond novel would be crafted, amidst a buzzing North Coast social scene totally removed from the independence movement spreading across the country. When Jamaica gained independence in 1962, Fleming and his friends would mourn the loss of their tidy colonial outpost first and foremost, and would consider the magic of the place lost.

GOLDENEYE inspired a sense of wanderlust in me --- something that’s not hard, granted --- to poke around Jamaica; it is in many ways a love story to the island, expressed via Fleming’s affection for it. It also made me want to dive back into the Bond novels, which I haven’t read in full and can differ wildly from the films of the same names. And it gave me a perspective on the perfect gentleman spy 007 and how his creation was the product of a very imperfect author. With the next Bond film, Spectre, coming out later this year, GOLDENEYE is the perfect book to understand the roots of one of the world’s most legendary cultural icons and the legendary faults of his creator.

     --- Commentary by Greg Fitzgerald