Quality of Success: Complete 007 Short Stories Coming Soon

Continuing the movie-tie for Casino Royale, Penguin Books announced a ‘Complete Collection’ of the Ian Fleming James Bond short stories for their Penguin Modern Classics series. The title for the collection will be taken from Fleming’s short story ‘Quantum of Solace’, and will include all the five short stories from ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (1960) and the three short adventures originally published in the first paperback edition of ‘Octopussy and the Living Daylights’ (1966), together with the recently resurrected ‘007 in New York’.

Since the title ‘Quantum of Solace’ was announced for the new EON movie, there has been much comment in the press about the precise meaning of Fleming’s less well-known but intriguing title. Originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1959, ‘Quantum of Solace’ represented an attempt by Ian Fleming to write a more conventional short story based on the style of Somerset Maugham. Fleming felt Maugham’s approach to short story telling offered a possible model for writing Bond stories of more concentrated literary quality while still building on the success of the longer 007 novels. Fleming was also looking for a way of writing Bond adventures that did not involve the usual annual workload of a full novel per year, which the author was finding increasingly demanding given his health problems.

According to Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett, ‘Quantum of Solace’ was intended to depict the ‘harsh realities and emotional privations of colonial life in the tropics’. At the heart of the tale, which is based on a story Bond is told at a dinner party one evening, is the question of boredom and alienation, and how to escape from this, which was something of a running theme throughout Fleming’s novels and particularly interested the author. Fleming’s hero was often worried about going stale, as was Fleming himself. At one point during the evening, the Governor of the Bahamas defines the ‘quantum of solace’ as a precise numerical notation of the amount of comfort and humanity that is necessary between two people if true love is to flourish. When the ‘quantum of solace’ is zero, there can be no love. Bond understands the concept fully, remarking at one point that ‘when the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you’ (i.e. the ‘quantum’ is at zero), then, reflects Bond, ‘you’ve got to get away to save yourself’.

Lycett has suggested that the story was, in many ways, subtly revealing about the state of Fleming’s own marriage. He and Anne had become tired and bored with one another, and the Bond author was taking stock of his own future and whether there was anything left in the marriage worth clinging on to.

This interpretation of the phrase was also in evidence at the EON press conference held earlier this year to launch the new 007 film. When asked by curious journalists about the meaning of the title, Daniel Craig responded: ‘It’s from Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only short story collection. He’s having a debate with an ambassador at a party about relationships and the point they break down: the moment there’s no hope left. You need a tiny bit of comfort to cling to – a quantum of solace that, no matter what, at least you still love each other’.

Craig added, perhaps offering an important clue about the emotional undercurrent of the new movie’s storyline: ‘For Bond in Casino Royale, he never had that because his love was taken away from him. This movie is him trying to rediscover it…’.

2008 marks the centenary year of Ian Fleming's birth. The combination of the new movie, the Fleming centenary celebrations headed by the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, and the new adult Bond novel, Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks published on 28th May 2008 and final instalments (for now) of the Moneypenny Diaries, Final Fling (by Kate Westbrook) and Young Bond, By Royal Command (by Charlie Higson) make this a bumper year for Bond fans.