The omens were good when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel not written by Ian Fleming, 50 years ago today. The Lucky Jim author was already moonlighting in genre fiction and was such a Bond buff that he’d produced not one but two guides to him and his world. Amis was the obvious heir.
At first, Colonel Sun appears to be a super-faithful quasi-pastiche, opening (like Goldfinger) with 007 wielding a putter. But after that, everything gets very perplexing. Heading off post-golf to see his boss for supper, Bond fails to notice the foreign agents following his car, or that he’s leading them to the home counties mansion of M. It’s not only him; the whole of MI6 come across as such a hapless outfit that a carful of D-grade goons can easily kidnap its leader and nearly kill or capture its best agent; the setting in Berkshire, AKA Berks, may be a clue to Amis’s view of it. And when 007 heads to Greece, the agency doesn’t become any more impressive: our (MI6) Man in Athens is taken out, so Bond must enlist locals for sidekicks.
Colonel Sun constantly deviates from the Bond model. There’s a protracted, gruesome torture scene – but it ends unexpectedly. The novel’s eponymous villain is Chinese, like Dr No, but then Bond’s chief mission is revealed: prevent Sun from massacring a secret Soviet conference on the island of Vrakonisi. Yes, Bond, the arch-foe of SMERSH, is now aligned with the USSR. It’s all staggeringly un-Fleming-like.
Amis channelling Fleming – who died in 1964 – is a connoisseur of ethnicities, loftily informing us when sketching a woman (“a cocktail of heredities”) forced to sleep with Sun’s goons that Albanians “are much less a race than the end-product of successive admixtures with the native stock – Latin, Slavonic, Greek, Turco-Tatar”. On first sharing ouzo with the book’s female lead, Ariadne, “Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, ‘classical’ look.” Of two men she introduces him to, “one was in his mid-30s, dark, good-looking, a little overweight: Greek … the other grey, dried-up, close-cropped: Russian”.
Sun is ostensibly the most repellent racial caricature of all, a descendant of Fu Manchu and other fiendish orientals. Amis’s introduction of Sun is not unlike a Crufts judge inspecting an intriguing breed: “He was tall for a Chinese … one of the northern types akin to the Thamba Tibetan, big-boned and long-headed. The skin colour was the familiar flat-light yellow, the hair blue-black and dead straight, the epicanthic eye-fold notably conspicuous.” Yet Sun’s central Asian heritage that make him “less than totally Chinese”, and European influences also compromise his purity, distinguishing him from 007’s usual megalomaniac antagonists. He’s arguably as much a critique of Fleming’s two-dimensional villains as a continuation of the pattern.
Ariadne similarly both conforms to the Fleming formula for Bond girls and deviates from it. In fighting alongside Bond against Sun, she’s not been previously seduced into betraying anyone, and at the end, Bond doesn’t ask her to become a British wife, or spy for the west – she remains on Vrakonisi, as a Russian agent. If you set aside the obligatory slavering passages about her erotic allure, you could just about see Ariadne as a forerunner of today’s female action hero (just).
So why is Colonel Sun so strange? Some context, personal and geopolitical, helps make sense of it. Amis, by March 1968, had already made public his Damascene conversion from left to right, and signed a group letter to the Times titled Backing for US Policies in Vietnam. In the novel, the Vietnam war is mentioned three times, and pointedly links the villain to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh. Not content with fingering China as chief wager of a proxy war against the US in south-east Asia, Amis envisages China as battling covertly in Europe against the Nato nations and the USSR; bafflingly, as there’s precious little evidence of such operations.
Since 1965, the USSR had replaced China as North Vietnam’s main military backer. Three years later, it would invade Czechoslovakia to end the reformist “Prague spring”. So four years before Richard Nixon went to China, Amis has got his villain nation and his potentially amiable one the wrong way round – whether to get away from Fleming’s Manichaean cold war dualism, or just as a pretext for having a Chinese baddie.
