Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
864 pages
Lt Cdr Andrew Ward
Ian Fleming was vital to the successes of Naval Intelligence in the Second World War. History’s second most famous naval intelligence officer created the most famous: James Bond. Unsurprisingly, the marketing for this new biography made full use of the 007 connection in this extended lull between Bond films. However, there is a depth and richness to Ian Fleming’s life story which is probably little known even amongst Bond fans. Indeed, Fleming (1908–1964) has a claim to be one of the key personalities of the first half of the 20th century. Everyone who was anyone knew him, or least knew of him even before he became a world-famous author.
He was born into the Robert Fleming banking dynasty as one of four competing brothers. By “being put down for Eton”, he became part of a class of self-assured Empire-rulers which has now disappeared and is hard to imagine. He was surrounded by the well-travelled, the titled, the very rich and by aspiring writers. Everyone from the headmaster’s daughter at his prep school, to his older brother Peter, to his best friend Noël Coward published novels during his lifetime, some of which featured caricatures of Ian Fleming. At times the book’s narrative can be a little clunky – there are so many people name-dropped that a cast of characters would have been useful, as in Hilary Mantel’s historical novels. Nevertheless, Shakespeare skilfully weaves in the quotations of Ian’s associates to give a full picture of ‘the Complete Man’.
Fleming’s time away from the upper-class social milieu in England seems to have shaped him the most. Instead of university, he spent two years in Kitzbühel in Austria, Geneva and Munich learning languages and the art of writing from tutors assigned by his domineering mother. Fleming scooped a Soviet show trial in Moscow in 1933, travelled extensively as a foreign newspaper correspondent for The Sunday Times and carried out long research trips for the later Bond novels. He wrote his books at his spartan Jamaican villa ‘Goldeneye’, named after a Naval Intelligence contingency plan for a German invasion of Spain.
Sometimes historians writing about Ian Fleming concentrate on the serious side of his life, dismissing the Bond novels as insubstantial pulp fiction. Gratifyingly for this reviewer, Shakespeare takes the opposite approach, clearly signposting the parts of Fleming’s life story which resurface in the novels.
Most significantly, Fleming’s wartime career forms the richest seam of material for James Bond’s adventures. This is especially important because few records of Fleming’s work for Admiral John Godfrey in Naval Intelligence survive. Indeed, Shakespeare devotes a whole chapter to this problem, giving credence to this book’s claim to be the definitive Fleming biography. Shakespeare also tackles the vexed question of whether the James Bond character is autobiographical. There are certainly elements of Ian Fleming in Bond, but also parts of other people he met in wartime, particularly the commandos he recruited for 30 Assault Unit, a special force formed in 1943 to ‘pinch’ items of intelligence interest during raids and amphibious operations.
For this readership, the Royal Navy is our identity. For Ian Fleming, the Navy was only ever a part of ‘the Complete Man’. He did not attend Dartmouth (he dropped out of Sandhurst in 1927), nor did he serve at sea. Nevertheless, his affection for the Navy is clear. Rather like Winston Churchill (who counted Ian’s father Valentine among his close friends), Ian Fleming was a ‘former naval person’ forever after. By assigning his own rank of Commander RNVR to his hero James Bond, Fleming has done more than most to sustain the Senior Service’s lustre into the 21st century.
