Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (44 page)
Read Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Online
Authors: Matthew Parker
Their success cannot be put down to the car chases, jeopardy, beautiful people and exotic locations. Plenty of other films and books have done this without sharing Bond’s gargantuan success. Bond, like his creator, is in many ways pretty unlikeable. So why has he survived?
The defining moment of all the films comes in 1977’s
The Spy Who Loved Me.
Roger Moore, in an outrageous yellow ‘onesie’, is being chased on skis by a host of villains. He is heading towards a huge drop. Still the baddies come; Bond is hopelessly outnumbered. The music rises in pitch, then abruptly cuts off as Bond skis straight over the edge of a cliff and hangs in the sky, tumbling downwards in slow motion. Seconds pass. Then, suddenly, a parachute opens. A Union Jack parachute. And the theme music roars back in celebration.
The audience, holding its breath, lets out a huge cheer. Then laughs. It is exciting and funny. Gripping but ridiculous. We are laughing at ourselves, and celebrating that self-consciousness. Americans call it one of the great moments of British humour.
Just as the books don’t take themselves too seriously, with Fleming forever reminding us that we are reading a ‘comic book’ and that what the imperial hero calls home is now a country in sharp decline, so the films have continued this sense of fun and national self-deprecation. This can be seen in the very first film,
Dr No,
described by a reviewer at the time as ‘full of submerged self-parody’. Bond expresses our complicated relationship with our past, and our empire – at once a little bit proud, a little bit ashamed, and forever aware that our ‘greatest days’ are behind us.
It is this complexity, born in the Jamaica of Fleming’s time, that gives continued life to James Bond and projects an image of Britishness that makes us likeable to ourselves, and to the rest of the world – who no doubt enjoyed the appearance of Bond in the Olympic opening ceremony almost as much as we did.
Goldeneye today. The trees planted by Ian Fleming have grown to maturity but the banana groves that once surrounded the property are long gone.
Several of Fleming’s novels and short stories were set in Jamaica, but the island’s influence is to be found everywhere in his writing.
Kingston s premier hotel, Myrtle Bank, photographed for a postcard in the late 1940s. The hotel was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1907, but was destroyed by fire in 1966.
Ian entertains two ladies off the Goldeneye beach
Newly-elected Senator John Kennedy, on a visit in January 1953, poses outside Sunset Lodge, the hotel that launched the jet-set in Jamaica.
Coward and friends on the Sunset Lodge beach. From left to right: Graham Payn, Noël Coward, John C. Wilson, Princess Natasha Paley and Joyce Carey.
Ann on her first visit to Goldeneye, with her chaperone, the Duchess of Westminster, in the background.
Aview over Port Maria harbour from Noël Coward’s house, Firefly, showing Cabrita Island, the inspiration for Mr Big’s Isle of Surprise in
Live and Let Die.
The beautiful Streamertail hummingbird, or ‘Doctor Bird’.
Although in decline by the time Fleming built Goldeneye in St Mary, the banana business was still the most important economic activity in the Oracabessa area.
Lucian Freud visited Goldeneye in 1953 and spent much of his time painting in a nearby banana grove. He had produced this portrait of Ann three years earlier.
