You Only Live Twice: a Tale of Two Bonds

This chapter draws on critical theory and autobiographical memoir to compare two versions of Bond. The first is the one encountered by a working-class grammar-school boy in the early 1960s, and the second the version subsequently developed in the 1980s by a professional literary critic influenced by post-structuralist criticism. Focusing on the ‘Cold War’ novels From Russia with Love (1957), Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954) and Moonraker (1955), the chapter analyses Fleming’s approaches to class, gender and patriotism, and argues that the naïve initial reception of the fiction was in many ways truer and more valid than the subsequent critical revision.