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Among the people best placed to predict how any James Bond of the future might look is a British writer with a strong feel for spies and for spying. William Boyd has been drawn back to the terrain repeatedly in his books. What’s more, he wrote his own official Bond novel, Solo, in 2013.
Now Amazon has picked up the rights to the character, Boyd foresees a succession of 007 spin-off products and entertainments. Perhaps even be new AI-generated novels? “Certainly wait for Bond aftershave – and for the theme park and the dinner jackets,” he said. “The new owners will have to commodify everything about their billion-dollar purchase, so there will be nightclubs and vodkas.”
But the novelist and screenwriter does not regard this as fresh treachery. The true defilers of the authentic Bond have been at work for decades, making films that bear little relation to creator Ian Fleming’s original.
“It is too late. The great schism is that the films have nothing to do with the novels,” said Boyd. “The films are preposterous action movies that have to sell globally and so cannot have too much dialogue.”
Fleming’s novels from the 1950s were already old-fashioned by the time the first film, Dr No, came out in 1962, Boyd argues. “Since then the film have got further and further away from the stories and the gulf is now so wide, it doesn’t really matter.”
Anyone who wonders how Fleming’s Bond behaved should go to his own book, he suggests. “I took Fleming’s character and then ran with it, so if anyone is interested, all the information is in Solo; from Bond’s book-lined study to his favourite marmalade.”
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Boyd’s research took him back to detail dropped from the films, but often borrowed from Fleming’s own life. “The amazing thing is that this not-very-good writer created a figure as mythic as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. His novels remain the Bond mother lode, with all their imperfections and their political incorrectness.”
Is franchise writing, then, akin to the process of creating fiction with AI, by “scraping” past data? After all, Boyd scoured Fleming’s 14 books, “pen in hand”, before he wrote Solo. “It is true that everything in that novel that seems unusual is actually sourced from Fleming – for example, that Bond was a nervous flyer. He gave Bond all his own foibles.”
But AI, Boyd hopes, could only work to generate strict very formulaic fiction. “It might work for romcoms, but it was absolutely useless when I tried it a year or so ago. I needed someone to fake their own death for a screenplay I was writing and I asked it how. AI will become more efficient, of course. I think, though, you will always only be able to get something ‘quite good’. Serious literature is incredibly idiosyncratic and AI will find that hard to match. The only straw to clutch at is the sheer complexity and randomness of human individuality.”
On Boyd’s mind this weekend is not just espionage, but literary franchises and sequels in general, as his new 10-part mystery, The Jura Affair, featuring his regular fictional heroine, Bethany Mellmoth, comes to BBC Radio 4 this Monday. Meanwhile Gabriel’s Moon, the first of his new trilogy of cold war novels, is set for publication in early April.
The radio story, read by Ruth Everett, will see Mellmoth, now about 26, turn detective after she picks up a packet left on a tube train that seems to contain a valuable first edition of George Orwell’s book 1984. “She is like a young Miss Marple in a way, because she becomes a sleuth,” said Boyd, admitting he is open to offers to make Mellmoth into a refreshing Bond-style franchise. “Bethany is a character I’ve been writing about for years now. She is ambitious, but she can’t make a decision about her life. We once made a short film about her starring Lucy Boynton and Jack Lowden, before they were both so famous. We’d hoped it would spin off into a series.”
Boyd’s interest in Jura was piqued by the time Orwell spent on the Scottish island as he wrote his dystopian novel. “It was the strange fact of Orwell going to live in this unbelievably remote house on the island, just with his adopted son and his sister helping out. There was no water or electricity, so this public intellectual, who was very ill, was living this peasant life as he wrote 1984.” In The Jura Affair Mellmoth “stumbles across an elaborate scam”, Boyd explains, and even wonders if Orwell is haunting her.
The shape of a thriller like this one, but more particularly of a spy novel, is a distillation of the basic function of a novel, the author believes. “I think a strong narrative is fundamental to writing fiction. If you decline compelling story, then you had better be a terribly good to keep entertaining the reader.”
The new cold war trilogy is Boyd’s first attempt at full-length sequels, a bigger kind of literary franchise. “I have nearly finished book number two. They are about a travel writer, Gabriel Dax, who is inveigled into the world of espionage.”
In previous novels, such as Any Human Heart or Restless, spies are often present. “I just feel it chimes with us,” Boyd explains. “We get the themes of betrayal, duplicity, or changed identity. After all, we have all been lied to and all lied.”
