On James Bond
The Strangely Distorted, and Weirdly Elongated World of James Bond (Unabridged Version)
By John David EbertÂ
1.Â
The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending U-2 spyplanes on reconnaissance missions over Moscow, to which the Russians would respond by imprisoning the entire planet within the orbit of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. Thus, in the world into which Fleming’s famous character was born, everyone was busy looking over everyone else’s shoulders. Indeed, Bond himself is essentially an extension of the human eyeball, cut loose from the body and sent roving across the planet to peer through walls and behind closed doors. If the Berlin Wall was Russia’s response to the Marshall Plan, then the West’s response to the Berlin Wall was James Bond, a man who specializes in boring through walls. Â
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