Ian Fleming’s Parabolas

Abstract: The novels of Ian Fleming (1908–1964) have enjoyed extraordinary popularity, expanding their cultural reach through new films, novels, and editions despite the obvious misogyny of Fleming’s most famous character. Renewed interest in James Bond comes as the United Kingdom faces down a period of global marginalization just like Fleming thought postwar Britain had to suffer. Recursiveness of this kind—historical, but also formal and biographical—is part of the internal structure of the very first Bond novel. Casino Royale (1953) sets the template for potentially limitless spy thrillers. But it does so with keen skepticism toward its own genre. In the double image of the “parabola of agony,” a philosophy of torture, and the “conventional parabola”—the shape and pattern of Bond’s (and Fleming’s) relationships— Casino Royale suggests that the violence and sex for which Fleming’s novels have been variously condemned and devoured threaten to make the spy thriller merely conventional.