Free For Your Eyes Only by Ben Macintyre Page B

business, peace had reigned for nearly a year, and peace was killing him.’ For many of the men and women who had fought Nazism for six long years, peace was an almost physical jolt. Amid the fear and deprivations of war, many had experienced excitement, danger and a freedom from the daily drudgery of normal life in ways that would never be repeated. Even men like Fleming, who had fought a relatively comfortable war of the intellect, had been stretched and challenged. Victory brought peace, but it also brought boredom: ‘The only vice Bond utterly condemned.’
    Fleming himself was easily bored. He was bored by shooting parties in Scotland, stockbroking, small talk and his wife’s literary soirées. He was bored as only a member of the upper class who has never had to work hard can be bored. He was temperamentally inclined to boredom, and alarmed by its effect on his moods. The very first lines of
Casino Royale
are suffused with ennui: ‘The soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of fear and greed and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.’ Fleming’s villains suffer from the affliction as well as his hero. ‘Mister Bond, I suffer from boredom,’ declares Mr Big in
Live and Let Die
. ‘I am a prey to what the early Christians called “accidie” – the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated . . .’ Flemingspent much of his life trying to escape boredom, seeking new thrills, new locations, new cars, new lovers. ‘There was only one way to deal with boredom – kick oneself out of it,’ he wrote in
From Russia with Love
. Fleming’s novels were a cure for boredom, his own and that of his readers: his inspiration was to take the reality and spirit of the Second World War – British self-belief, technological wizardry, and above all the sense of moral rectitude in an honourable cause – and apply it to the far more murky world of the Cold War.
    In his novel
The Sixth Column
, published in 1951, Peter Fleming wrote of Britain’s need for a buccaneering hero ‘with the urbane, faintly swashbuckling sangfroid of Raffles’, as an ‘antidote to the restrictions and frustrations of life in England’. For Ian Fleming, the veteran of wartime intelligence, a patriotic spy at war, whether cold or hot, was simply ‘the most exciting of all human adventure stories – the single man, in the darkness, facing death alone for the sake of the great mass of his countrymen’. Bond is a worldsaver, just as Britain perceived itself to be during the war; American intelligence is secondary to that of Britain. Indeed, the Americans rely on Bond: when the evil forces of SMERSH seek to attack the West, their primary target is Bond, and Bond alone, who must be killed ‘with ignominy’. Fleming played on contemporary fears to give Bond modern relevance, but his hero harks back to wartime figures like Patrick Dalzel-Job and Fitzroy Maclean, the ideal antidoteto Britain’s postwar austerity, rationing and the looming premonition of lost power.
    As the two superpowers, the USA and USSR, fought it out in an escalating arms race, Britons could, through Bond and his exploits, relive a fast-disappearing world where Britain called the shots, and won the war. ‘You underestimate the English,’ Bond warns Goldfinger. ‘They may be slow, but they get there.’ This was, of course, fantasy – Britain’s power was eroding fast, and in the great espionage confrontation between the CIA and the KGB, Britain’s SIS was no more than a minor player. In the 1950s, the British intelligence establishment was rocked by the exposure of an entire Soviet spy network within its ranks: the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean represented a body blow to the prestige and self-confidence of the British secret service. So far from dominating the espionage battle