Bloody big ship
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Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)
One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.
Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:
They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.
The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.
And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:
‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’
This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.
The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.
But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.
Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:
Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?
Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.
Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.
I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.
