Bookworm: ‘Bond was actually a bit of a lush’

WHEN BOND MEETS BOYD

A new Bond film is just around the corner (well, Skyfall actually opens in October, but the trailer is already on the internet) and the 50 Years of Bond Style exhibition opened last week at London’s Barbican, but both take us quite a long way from Ian Fleming’s original creation.

William Boyd, currently writing an as yet untitled Bond novel for the Fleming Estate, is keen to get back to the original. His take on Bond, he assures Bookworm, will take us back to Bond as the Cold War spy caught up in plausible adventures (like From Russia With Love, which is essentially an attempt to kill him by means of a honeytrap) rather than more outlandish escapades.

Everything else is under wraps until next year, but Boyd does nothing to dispel expectations of a more grittily realistic Bond by pointing out that Fleming gave 007 some quite spectacular weaknesses, such as a 70-a-day cigarette habit. And while the Martini Bar at the Barbican exhibition might not point this out, Bond was actually a bit of a lush. Evidence? How about Thunderball’s first page, in which our hero realises that his eleventh whisky and soda had probably been a mistake. His eleventh?

STOP READING NOW

Next time you tear through Orwell’s 1984 on your e-reader, bear in mind that Big Brother really is watching you. Or at least that’s the implicit message in a fascinating article in The Wall Street Journal pointing out that companies such as Amazon don’t only know what we read, but also how we do so, as they are able to track at what precise point we give up reading. As the evidence shows that most of us give up on long non-fiction quite early on, there is already a trend for more long-form journalism instead. Good news for a few journalists, perhaps – but surely worrying for everyone else in the book business?

A BOOK AT BEDTIME

One of the innovations of the (truly excellent) children’s programme planned by Janet Smyth in this year’s Edinburgh book festival is the free daily “Night Owl” slot at 8pm, a 45-minute event at which a storyteller will read gentle stories and nursery rhymes to toddlers and their frazzled parents. It’s a great idea, although perhaps inevitably, in the wake of last year’s bestselling title from Canongate, festival staff have nicknamed it the “Go the F*** to Sleep” slot.