WHEN the normally highbrow novelist Sebastian Faulks accepted the challenge of writing a James Bond book to mark this year’s Ian Fleming centenary, I wonder if he considered the option of sniffing glue first.
The thought arises from an intriguing court case in England a few months back, in which another upmarket author successfully sued a local shoe factory whose noxious fumes, it was claimed, had forced her to abandon a more complex work of fiction and write a mere thriller instead.
Joan Brady, a former Whitbread Prize winner, was awarded £115,000 on that occasion for physical and mental suffering caused by the cobblers’ solvents (the factory disputed this, but its lawyers settled anyway). An indirect result of her ordeal was a brutal crime novel – the only genre she could write in the circumstances, apparently – called Bleedout, in which a character is beaten to death during the opening paragraph.
Less idealistic authors might have seen the episode as a win-win scenario: in that, as a rule, thriller writers tend to be more commercially successful than literary ones. Bleedout sold quite well, in fact. So you might think that if any novelists were suing for damages, it should be those unfortunate artistic types who are doomed to critical acclaim and public indifference.
Not every writer has a factory next door to blame. But if you found it impossible to lower your literary standards to suit the needs of the market, you could always sue your parents. Or failing them, your schoolteachers – and anyone else who had conspired in saddling you with an education.
As usual, Orwell understood the problem. In a 1945 essay called Good Bad Books, he noted that there were many writers “whom it is quite impossible to call good by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste. . .They bring out the fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music hall comedian.”
But getting back to Faulks, the glue option does not seem to have occurred to him as he made the adjustment from his normal, cerebral approach – he spent “almost five years researching Victorian psychiatry” for a previous novel – to something more playful. Instead he studied the methods of Bond’s creator, who was in the habit of completing a novel in only six weeks.
“In his house in Jamaica,” Faulks’s website notes, “Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”
The jury is still out on how successfully Faulks slummed it in the thriller world. Perhaps his book will create a new crossover readership; or perhaps it will just disappoint two sets of fans simultaneously. The challenge of appealing to both is illustrated by those old Proust snobs at the New York Times, whose review dismissed the new book as “a serviceable madeleine for Bond nostalgists”.
With the focus now turning to the inevitable movie version, the question many Bond nostalgists will be asking is: who should play the serviceable Madeleine? My money would be on Halle Berry, again. But Scarlet Johansson might be interesting too.
TIME WAS, writers used pseudonyms to hide their true identities. Some, like the prolific author Anonymous, did so because they feared persecution for what they wrote. Some – such as Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell (the Brontës) – wanted to avoid being dismissed as mere women. A few, like Eric Blair (Orwell), were just worried about embarrassing their parents.
But using a pseudonym while making no secret about your real identity is all the rage lately. My esteemed former colleague John Banville is a prime example. Not only does everybody know that he writes thrillers as Benjamin Black, because the publishers understandably regard this as a promotional advantage. But he even interviewed himself – or at least his alter ego – for a magazine last year.
And now, with this Bond book, the trend has taken another twist. It’s not Sebastian Faulks who wrote it, apparently. It’s “Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming”, according to the byline.
One thinks of those up-market hotel groups that also provide a stripped-own service for budget travellers and business people on the run. “Courtyard by Marriott”, say. Or of those convenience-store versions of the big supermarkets, like Tesco Express. Presumably it’s a similar marketing strategy with the writers. Customers can be assured of the same commitment to quality as from the mother brand, but the metaphors may be more accessible than usual.
I would like to draw an even wittier conclusion from all this. Unfortunately, as I pen these words, the nearby Guinness Brewery is roasting hops again, and the wind is blowing my way. So for the moment at least, I can think of nothing except beer. I hope to return to the subject at a future date, when I will be writing as Myles Na Gopaleen.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie