Mind Your Head, Mr. Bond

The release of David Lowery’s The Green Knight in the summer of 2021 provided a good excuse to revisit On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a Bond thriller based in part on the charming 14th century poem which Lowery freely adapts for the screen.  

What, if anything, does this have to do with The Spy Who Loved Me?  We’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, for those who have somehow joined the thread at this point, I’ve been presenting the case for reading From Russia With Love as a bleak Cold-War reimagining of a Disney double-feature, with Rosa Klebb as both evil stepmother and murderous old crone, while Bond must first woo Cinderella and then wake Sleeping Beauty.  In Dr. No, Fleming seems to update the tale of Theseus and the Labyrinth as a Fu Manchu pulp adventure, while charting a parallel course with the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues.  Goldfinger seems to be the author’s amusingly Freudian take on “Rumpelstiltskin.”

Although such notions must have occurred to legions of readers over the years, they never popped up on my radar until a fluke of timing underlined  just how snugly On Her Majesty’s Secret Service fits with events from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  This sudden realization led me to wonder what other classic tales might lie concealed beneath the dust jackets of Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers.

To recap the case for this view of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:  both the Medieval poem and Fleming’s late novel describe a hero’s fateful encounter with an adversary over Christmas holiday.  In both works the hero travels to a remote stronghold to meet his disguised opponent, whose name is based on a color.  In both stories a sinister crone serves as chaperone for a young woman who seems eager to sleep with the hero.  

A sly fox is hunted in both works, and each contains a thrilling chase across sparkling winter landscapes.  On New Year’s Day, shortly after he leaves the fortress, the hero receives his adversary's counterstroke, a return-blow to match one suffered by his enemy more than a year earlier.

Blow-by-Blow: 

• In the Middle English poem, Gawain is challenged by the Green Knight.  In Fleming’s novel, Bond’s archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld pretends to be one Comte Balthazar de Bleuville, or Bleuchamp, whose various surnames can be translated as “blue field.”
  
  
• Gawain spends Christmas as a guest of King Bertilak, whom Gawain does not recognize as the Green Knight because of a magic spell.  Bond finds the appearance of the “Count” does not match any description of Blofeld, evidently owing to a combination of diet, exercise, and extensive plastic surgery.
  
  
• The wardress of Bertilak’s castle is Morgan le Fey in the form of an ugly crone.  At Piz Gloria, the homely Irma Bunt struggles to keep the clinic’s young female patients in line. 
  
  
• Bertilac’s beautiful queen slips into Gawain’s room to seduce him.  Despite Irma Bunt’s watchful eye, the comely Ruby Windsor, a farmgirl who believes she might be a princess, sneaks into Bond’s room.  Tellingly, Ruby hails from Lancashire - Gawain country.
  
  
• Under the rules of their game the Green Knight is entitled to take a swing at Gawain’s neck because of his own beheading a year previously at Camelot.  What happens to Tracy can be seen as Blofeld’s revenge-stroke, because Thunderball ends with the death of Emilio Largo, not only Blofeld’s trusted lieutenant but his heir.

Strange Detour 

Between the publication of Thunderball and O.H.M.S.S. came Ian Fleming’s first heart attack and the curious case of The Spy Who Loved Me.  In the writer's only first-person narrative from a female perspective, Bond joins the story a hundred pages in, completely by chance - unless we believe in fate or destiny.  And by the time we’re heavily invested in James Bond thrillers, of course we do.

When it was shipped to bookstores in 1962 fans and reviewers wondered whether Spy was evidence of a dried-up author desperately flailing in new directions.  It seemed that Fleming had completely lost touch with his audience.  I first read the work only a few years back when I was combing through a batch of his late novels, hoping to tease out fragments of myths and fairy tales to bolster a hunch.  I came away disappointed.  Although an interesting read, the book didn’t fit a pattern which, at least to me, seemed otherwise so firmly-grounded.

It’s possible that Fleming suddenly decided to abandon his customary models to try his hand at a modern Gothic novel - say, a space-age Jane Eyre with mysterious international troubleshooter James Bond in the Edward Rochester role.  After all, Jane Eyre and Vivienne Michel were both young orphan girls installed in strict religious institutions, and, well… there’s that fire towards the end of both books.  Umm.  I’ll get back to you on that one.

After our family watched David Lowery’s The Green Knight in the summer of 2021, my wife decided to order a copy of the recent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage.  In the half-century since I was forced to read the poem for a class assignment, I had completely forgotten about those opening lines:

Hairs on the back of my neck were already standing on end.  Fleming may have started crafting his version of Gawain sooner than I thought.  I decided to dig out The Spy Who Loved Me for another look.

Bond: “Troy’s a bad town - sort of a gangster suburb to Albany."

The name “Troy” crops up half a dozen times in Spy, in reference to Troy, New York, the home of crime boss Mr. Sanguinetti, who tries to burn down the motel where Vivienne Michel happens to be staying in order to collect insurance on his failing enterprise.  A pair of lowlife minions known as “Sluggsy” and “Horror” are sent to do the job.

Fleming has Bond reminisce about the events of Thunderball, while musing about someday getting another crack at Blofeld.  The two thugs may be second-rate henchmen, but their boss Mr. Sanguinetti is only a minor-league villain, one who, like Blofeld, is on the lam by the end of the book.  

Spy seems to be a deliberately downscaled adventure, perhaps intended chiefly as a bridge, anchoring itself to Thunderball  while pivoting away from Greek Myth and into the new realm of Arthurian Romance.  Thunderball saw cities threatened with Jovian fire.  Blofeld’s new scheme in O.H.M.S.S. will transform verdant acreage into the sterile Wasteland of Grail legend.  In the meantime, a couple of tough guys from Troy have shown up with torches, and thus a mid-sized dragon needs slaying not far from the shore of Lake George.  Of course, there’s also a damsel to protect.  

Lowery’s The Green Knight devotes much of the film’s running time to events barely hinted at in the poem (the haunting scene of Winifred searching for her lost head is derived from a single place-name).  According to the anonymous poet, dragons, wolves, human foes, ogres, giants, and countless other marvels were encountered during Gawain’s journey, but since there’s not ink enough nor time to do them all justice, the reader is free to use his or her imagination.  Lowery does just that, fleshing out a few of these suggestions, shaping each into a test of Gawain’s virtues. 

A similar test may be administered in Spy.  Showing up between official missions at a critical moment in the story, 007 is asked to prove his gallantry by risking his own life to help a strange girl in peril.  Granted, he does feel entitled to sleep with the girl once they believe the peril is past.  It isn’t, and the premature celebration is nearly fatal.  Like Lowery’s Gawain, Bond may not be worthy of a seat at the Round Table until his journey’s end.  

Fleming had decided to give James Bond a story-arc, and Spy seems to be a windup that stretches back into Thunderball before launching the pitch.  It is also a preview of the next installment in miniature.

The author has the outline of his sequel clearly in his sights when a fatherly officer (imagine the stern Tom Selleck from Blue Bloods in the role) advises Vivienne Michel at the end of Spy to steer clear of the likes of Mr. Bond.  He warns her against harboring any foolish thought of marrying such a man, because of a “deadly quality in the persons involved…to both friends and enemies.” 

While on his detour through America Bond himself makes the point that events in his recent past and those that are yet to come, are all part of the same deadly, ongoing game.

It’s understandable that Bond has begun to see his job as part of a game after the events of Thunderball.  The key to cracking the case was a girl named for a game piece, and he got the chance to grill her by winning at chemin de fer. 

The Spy Who Loved Me can seem a disappointing installment in the series, little more than a prologue to OHMSS, intended to help glue the final novels together.  We are not only reminded of the harrowing battle in Thunderball, but also meet a Bond who hasn’t quite recovered from it.  He is already on the way to becoming an embittered screw-up, a man whose downward spiral will level off temporarily during Operation Bedlam, before taking that final plunge into the sea in You Only Live Twice.

With this prefatory side-trip to Lake George out of the way, the larger game, the dangerous hunt, will resume in earnest with Fleming’s next book, in which games played at Christmas will take center stage.  Even before the stakes reach the gruesome level of The Green Knight’s challenge, Bond will be reminded three times (twice by Fraulein Bunt) to “mind your head.”

By no coincidence, it is autumn when Gawain sets out on his quest, and autumn when the cabins are ignited near Lake George.  The seasons will roll around to autumn once more in OHMSS as Bond prepares to drop in on a remote chalet in the Swiss Alps where the Blue Count waits his turn. 

OHMSS      From Russia With Love     Dr. No      Goldfinger      Thunderball        You Only Live Twice

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