James Bond behind the Iron Curtain

A review of Bond Behind the Iron Curtain by James Fleming, The Book Collector, 2021.

This is an attractively and elegantly produced book by Ian Fleming’s nephew. Ian Fleming founded The Book Collector in 1952, an erudite and unique quarterly periodical, and it is now edited by James.

I was asked to write an article for it about dust-jackets, now completed and sent in for publication, in particular the practice of switching them between one copy of a book and another and whether that matters. Through that I entered a lively and entertaining short correspondence with James and obtained a copy of this book.

The author freely admits that the book is “untidy” and although it is ordered according to country, the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the arrangement still seems to me a little haphazard. One reference to a bookseller is unannotated on its first appearance, although he is identified later on. An essay by Maya Turovskaya, translated from the Russian, is an especially entertaining account of the reception given to the Bond novels in Russia, where they were seen as symptomatic of the bourgeois inferiority complex and even as pornographic rubbish. Elsewhere there are accusations of racism and sexism which are hard to counter, but I am reluctant to go down the booby-trapped road of the extent to which we should make allowances for different times, different mores.

From a bibliographic point of view, the book is full of interest and there is much to lean about the Soviet mindset, and it is witty, thought-provoking and well illustrated.