If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact that, inept as it mostly is, it does contain a single good, even quite brilliant and, considering that it was first published in 1973, genuinely postmodern idea that rescues it from the zero rating it would otherwise receive. But since that idea is sprung on the reader two-thirds of the way through, and it would be horribly tricky reviewing the book without divulging the twist in its tail, I invite anyone intending to purchase it to look away now.
Pearson was also Ian Fleming’s biographer, and the basic premise here is that James Bond really existed (the book’s framing device has Pearson himself interviewing the ageing agent in a plush, posh hotel in Bermuda); that, as a precocious adolescent in the 1930s, he was inducted into the heady world of international espionage by the well-connected Fleming; and that he eventually rose to the top of the British Secret Service’s hierarchy of spies. So far, so-so. The conceit is droll enough; it’s the execution that is, on almost every level, execrable, less Fleming, alas, than Capt. W. E. Johns, less Bond than Biggles.
Fleming was, to be sure, no Conrad, but he did possess an enviable knack for racy, fast-paced narrative. By contrast, every one of Pearson’s action scenes falls comically flat, the more so as, on three separate occasions, Bond finds extricating himself from a hairy situation ‘easier than expected’. As for Pearson’s style, based (or, rather, debased) on Fleming’s own, it positively teems with what tennis commentators call unforced errors.
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