On Her Majesty's Secret Service Ian Fleming

Inspirations

As with all his Bond books, Fleming used events or names from his life in his writing. In the 1930s Fleming often visited Kitzbühel in Austria to ski; he once deliberately set off down a slope that had been closed because of the danger of an avalanche. The snow cracked behind him and an avalanche came down, catching him at its end: Fleming used the incident as the model for Bond's escape from Piz Gloria.[23] Fleming would occasionally stay at the sports club of Schloss Mittersill in the Austrian Alps; in 1940 the Nazis closed down the club and turned it into an institute for research into so-called "race science". It was this pseudo-scientific research centre that inspired Blofeld's own centre of Piz Gloria.[24][d]

The connection between M and the inspiration for his character, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, was made apparent with Bond visiting Quarterdeck, M's home. Bond rings the ship's bell for HMS Repulse, M's last command: it was Godfrey's ship too.[12][26] Godfrey was Fleming's superior officer in Naval Intelligence Division (NID) during the war[27] and was known for his bellicose and irascible temperament.[28] Fleming also used the name of Donald McLachlan, a former colleague of both his and Godfrey's in the NID.[12]

The name "Hilary Bray" was that of an old-Etonian with whom Fleming worked at the stockbroking firm Rowe & Pitman.[29] "Sable Basilisk" was based on the title of "Rouge Dragon" in the College of Arms. Rouge Dragon was Lanne-Mirrlees's title at the college; he asked Fleming not to use his real title in the book, although it did appear in the manuscript and typescripts.[30] In a play on words, Fleming used Mirrlees's address, a flat in Basil Street, and combined it with a dragon-like creature, a basilisk, to come up with the name.[31] Lanne-Mirrlees's ancestors were generally born without earlobes, and Fleming used this physical attribute for Blofeld.[29] Lanne-Mirrlees also discovered that the line of the Bonds of Peckham bears the family motto "The World is Not Enough", which Fleming appropriated for Bond's own family.[24]

Fleming also used historical references for some of his names. Marc-Ange Draco's name is based upon that of El Draco, the Spanish nickname for Sir Francis Drake.[29] For Tracy's background, Fleming used that of Muriel Wright, a married wartime lover of his who died in an air-raid.[32] Bond's grief for the loss of his wife echoes Fleming's at the loss of Wright.[33] Fleming made some mistakes in the novel, such as Bond ordering a half-bottle of Pol Roger champagne; Fleming's friend Patrick Leigh Fermor pointed out that Pol Roger was the only champagne at the time not to be produced in half-bottles.[34]

Characters

On Her Majesty's Secret Service contains what the writer Raymond Benson—who later wrote a series of Bond novels—calls "major revelations" about Bond's character and habits.[18] These start with Bond's showing an emotional side, visiting the grave of his former lover Vesper Lynd; it is revealed that he has been doing this every year since her death.[18][e] This emotional side is again shown with Bond asking Tracy to marry him.[36] The author Val McDermid considers that both professionally and personally, Bond is a more emotionally rounded character than in previous novels in the series. Disillusioned with his job at the start of the novel he progresses through the plot to the point where, for McDermid, "his reactions are complex, far more three-dimensional than the films".[37] In 1963 the critic Raymond Mortimer described Bond as having "values [that] are both anti-humanist and anti-Christian". Bond is the greedy and predatory id to M's "pleasure-hating and grumpy" superego.[38] Mortimer went on to say that "James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets".[38] The novelist and critic Kingsley Amis—in his examination of Bond—finds Bond a Byronic hero, seen as "lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret".[39]

Amis observes that Bond's character changes during the course of the novels, physically and emotionally declining through the series; he notes that On Her Majesty's Secret Service sees Bond's sharpest decline because of the death of Tracy, leading him to be in a form of neurosis at the start of the next book, You Only Live Twice.[40] The cultural historians Janet Woollacott and Tony Bennett agree, and note that the darkness in Bond becomes more pronounced with the murder of his wife.[41] Bond drinks far more alcohol in On Her Majesty's Secret Service than he does in previous books, and this reflected Fleming's alcohol intake in the early 1960s.[42] Near the beginning of the novel, one work-day evening, Bond has four double vodkas and tonics and some seconal, a barbiturate;[43] at other points Bond "was aching for a drink"[43] and his urine "showed traces of an excess of uric acid ... due to a super-abundance of alcohol in the blood-stream".[44] One study, undertaken by doctors, estimated Bond's alcohol intake at between 65 and 92 units of alcohol a week, which puts him at the level of "over four times the advisable maximum alcohol consumption for an adult male", based on the UK's medical recommendations.[45][f]

Benson considers that the character of Tracy is not as well defined as some other female leads in the Bond canon, but points out that it may be the enigmatic quality that Bond falls in love with.[49] Benson also notes that Fleming gives relatively little information about the character, only how Bond reacts to her.[49] The literary critic Dan Mills observes that with two strong female characters in the novel—Tracy and Irma Bunt—On Her Majesty's Secret Service subverts the conventions of the genre by having characters that are equally or more integral to and involved in the plot than their two counterparts, Bond and Blofeld.[50]

Despite Tracy's independent and assertive character, the media historian James Chapman observes that part of her role in the book is to act as "a traditional ... male fantasy of women's sexuality".[51] This he asserts, is "culturally problematic" for modern readers.[51] In doing do, he says, Tracy is fulfilling the same role as some of the women in the other Bond novels, including Jill Masterton in Goldfinger, Domino Vitali in Thunderball and Viv in The Spy Who Loved Me.[51]

The cultural critic Umberto Eco lists Marc-Ange Draco among those characters in the Bond novels who undertake activities closer to those of the traditional villains, but who act on the side of good in support of Bond; others of this type include Darko Kerim (From Russia, with Love), Tiger Tanaka (You Only Live Twice) and Enrico Colombo (the short story "Risico").[52] The historian Jeremy Black notes the connection between Draco and the Second World War; Draco wears the King's medal for resistance fighters. The reference to the war is a method used by Fleming in several novels to differentiate good from evil; those who fought for the Allies—particularly Britain—were considered "good", while Germans or those who supported them were "bad". Draco's medal for valour from Britain cements him as one of Bond's core allies, despite his criminal activities.[53][54]

The sociologist Anthony Synnott observes that many of the men who assist Bond are either handsome or striking looking;[55] this includes Draco, about whom Fleming writes: "The man had such a delightful face, so lit with humour and mischief and magnetism that ... Bond could no more have killed him than he could have killed, well, Tracy".[56] Sable Basilisk is another who fits the same mould, according to Synnott,[55] as Fleming describes him as "rapier-slim, with a fine, thin, studious face that was saved from seriousness by wry lines at the edges of the mouth and an ironical glint in the level eyes"[57] Synnott considers that just as Bond's allies are good looking, his enemies are, on the whole, unattractive and often grotesque.[58] Irma Bunt—described by Mills as "Blofeld's asexual second in command"[59]—is evil and therefore ugly, according to Synnott.[60] When the character first appears in the book, Fleming describes her as looking:

... like a very sunburnt female wardress. She had a square, brutal face with hard yellow eyes. Her smile was an oblong hole without humour or welcome, and there were sunburn blisters at the left corner of her mouth which she licked from time to time with the tip of a pale tongue. Wisps of brownish grey hair, with a tight, neat bun at the back, showed from under a skiing hat with a yellow talc visor that had straps which met under her chin. Her strong, short body was dressed in unbecomingly tight vorlage trousers topped by a grey wind-jacket ornamented over the left breast with a large red G topped by a coronet. Irma La not so Douce, thought Bond.[61]

Blofeld differs from other villains in the Bond series, according to the literary historian Lars Ole Sauerberg. Sauerberg identifies Le Chiffre (Casino Royale) and Mr Big (Live and Let Die) as criminals with large ambitions and Hugo Drax, Doctor No and Goldfinger as those who commit crimes in order to complete their larger plans; all five are connected with the Soviet Union. Blofeld occupies his own classification as the only one of whom it is not possible to distinguish between a criminal act as a means or an end. Sauerberg considers that Blofeld's motives are "in his general nihilism and destructive urge".[62] Synott notes that not only are nearly all Bond's enemies are foreign, they are "doubly foreign".[58] Blofeld's ancestry shows he is Polish and Greek and, during the Second World War, he had betrayed Poland by working with the Abwehr, the Nazi military-intelligence service.[63][g]