the boredom of Bond

Now that I've finished the Penguin Modern Classics omnibus 'Quantum of Solace' I can now say I have read every James Bond story (by Ian Fleming). In some ways the last story proper 'The Living Daylights' is a case of saving the best for last. But it's not just one of the best-written Bond tales - it's one of the most realistic in the way it compresses the danger and excitement of Bond's job role into a few short, tense moments surrounded by hour after hour of boredom.

Arriving in Berlin to act as sniper-cover for an escaping agent, Bond is told this agent's window for escape is between 6-7pm on one of three consecutive nights. As per sod's law he eventually makes his attempt on the third night, making for a combination of long boring stretches of daytime, tense excitement for an hour or two, then more tedium:

"The next day, and the next night watch, were duplicates of the first [...] the rest was a killing of time and a tightening of the tension that, by the time the third and final day came, was like a fog in the small room."

This tedium includes visiting cafes, reading a (not un-Flemingesque sounding) thriller, and harbouring a fantasy about one of the female cello players frequenting the building next door ("Why in hell did she have to choose the cello? There was something almost indecent in the idea of that bulbous, ungainly instrument between her splayed thighs"). He is not to know how one of these musicians will come to impact on his mission...

With 'The Living Daylights' Fleming has found a dramatic way of writing about something undramatic - the necessary boredom that comes with a Secret Service (with any) job. It's present in some form throughout all of the novels - M suffers from it massively in the opening chapters of 'Dr. No' - but in 'The Living Daylights' we follow Bond through it almost minute by minute.

Describing this aspect of the literary Bond to an acquaintance recently I said that the first half of every Bond novel is him sitting at his desk doing his paperwork. Exaggerating for comic effect of course... but even so, when Bond is (finally) brought into 'From Russia With Love' we're treated to a whole chapter of him getting up, having breakfast, arguing with his housekeeper then attending dreary committee meetings:

"The note said that it was time Bond, as a senior officer in the Service, took a hand in major adminsitrative problems. Anyway, there was no one else available."

in 'Moonraker' we see Bond confronting "the normal business of a routine day at Headquarters":

"Mondays were hell. Two days of dockets and files to plough through. And weekends were generally busy times abroad [...] It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior civil servant"

(It's official - even James Bond hates Mondays)

Thankfully for his readers one of these special cases is never far off. Yet these humdrum scenes are an important part of Fleming's mosaics, his realistic settings and situations derived from his own experiences in the intelligence services. They sell the illusion of reality that the reader of a novel 'needs' in a way that the viewer of a film (Bond or otherwise) can be happy to dispense with.

And indeed, it's these type of scenes that are most conspicuously absent in the Bond films. The closest thing the constantly globe-trotting Movie Bond gets to doing paperwork is checking in at a luxurious hotel under his own name. It's a shock seeing Lazenby in 'O.H.M.S.S' go to his office to pack up his things and drink a toast to the Queen - up to then we had no idea he even had an office!