James Bond: The Secret History by Sean Egan

Author:Sean Egan [Egan, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786060693
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

CONTINUING THE LEGACY

On 23 June 1966 came the appearance of a coda to the Fleming Bond canon in the form of Octopussy and The Living Daylights.

It was a slender volume of ninety-four pages containing merely two Bond short stories, both already published if not widely disseminated or even – in the world of segmented information that existed before the Internet – known of. It’s precisely because of the Internet that, these days, such a volume would also automatically mop up ‘007 in New York’ and ‘The Property of a Lady’, the other Bond short fiction then uncollected in volume form. While the latter story was added to the book when it went into paperback the following year, it took three-and-a-half decades for the New York story to also be hauled in.

‘Octopussy’ had been serialised in the Daily Express in October 1965 and in Playboy across March and April 1966. It’s a tale in which Bond is, as in ‘Quantum of Solace’, merely a bit-player. However, it is on a far higher plane of quality than the latter work.

It’s also odd, beginning with the fact that central figure, Major Dexter Smythe, feels like an older, decaying version of James Bond. An ex-British Secret Service man, he was once a ‘brave and resourceful officer and a handsome man who had made easy sexual conquests all his military life …’ He is now fifty-four, slightly bald, has a sagging belly and varicose veins. He also sounds a lot like Ian Fleming towards the end of the latter’s life: domiciled in his beloved Jamaica, he enjoys underwater diving and continues to smoke and drink excessively despite two coronaries. Smythe’s defiance of medical advice is due to the fact that he – in the first of several exquisite phrases herein – ‘had arrived at the frontier of the death wish’. Tropical sloth, self-indulgence, widower status and guilt had worn him down to a state of ‘spiritual accidie’ – making him the third of Fleming’s villains after Mr Big and Ernst Stavro Blofeld to suffer from this condition. The only thing that has lately kept him clinging to life is the anthropomorphism he has invested in the birds, insects and fish that inhabit the grounds of his villa, particularly a small brown octopus he has nicknamed ‘Octopussy’. A couple of hours earlier, though, there had been an occurrence that made him realise even this circumscribed life was futile. The occurrence was a visit by one James Bond.

Flashback. When Bond states that he is from the Ministry of Defence, Smythe recognises it as a euphemism for the Secret Service. As the two men begin to talk, Fleming captures in Smythe the supplicatory, almost pathetic state of mind to which those with a guilty conscience are reduced: when Bond asks him if he minds if he smokes, ‘Somehow this small sign of a shared weakness comforted Major Smythe.’

Bond’s questioning leads to Smythe thinking back to the period immediately following the war. While employed cleaning up Gestapo and Abwehr hideouts, the major had stumbled upon the existence of some hidden gold bars.

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