Abstract
Kingsley Amis wrote the first James Bond continuation novel, Colonel Sun, in 1968. One year earlier Amis gave a speech to a group of young Conservatives, published as Lucky Jim’s politics in 1967. Amis is famous for gravitating from the social democratic Left of British politics to the Thatcherite Right. Colonel Sun marks a midpoint in this journey. This article is an examination of the politics of Colonel Sun. I make the case that Colonel Sun must be understood as a political thriller, used by Amis to demonstrate his rightward drift, the ideological elements the central aspect of the novel.
Amis moves right
Kingsley Amis made his name as an Angry Young Man, the large group of anti-Establishment novelists and playwrights of the 1950s. His subsequent move to the right is probably overemphasised due to his popular image as a radical lefty during that time. His first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), targeted those attributes associated with the political right. However, one of Amis’s biographers, Robert Conquest, argues: “As ‘right-wing’ he saw his former superior officers in the Army, God, Professor Welch, his father, the (then) government: in fact, authority” (Conquest 1990: 15). Amis’s social democratic leanings in the 1950s were motivated by a belief in modernity and an antipathy towards the old order.
The Amis who wrote Lucky Jim did not have “much use for what Oxbridge stood for in the postwar world, seeing it, in common with the other Angry Young Men of the period, as one of the forces that made for the continuation of the pre-war cultural establishment” (Phelps 1990: 67). In Lucky Jim Amis chose as his central character the anti-heroic Jim Dixon, a lecturer at a provincial university. Dixon’s superior Professor Welch was the embodiment of what Amis perceived as the values and attitudes associated with what can be generally described as ‘the Establishment’—values and attitudes he was determined to confront and destruct in a most comic of fashions. Jim Dixon is an ordinary man with common tastes, tastes which are set against the grandeur and upper culture of Welch. Dixon’s likes, and Dixon’s reactions to the elite, are presented as superior to those who are placed higher in the social strata.
The move to the right was a drift, not a jump. Amis was not a Damascene convert. Amis (1967b: 201) wrote that the drift began with the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. Writing in the Observer in July 1963 demonstrates the move. In an article on patriotism Amis opined that the “emphasis on hierarchy, order, responsibility and so on, could help prop me up” (Jacobs 1995: 278). This is the conviction of good traditional Toryism. In brackets Amis acknowledges tacitly, almost apologetically, the potential reaction of his left-wing friends: “(You’re moving Right anyhow, Amis)” (Jacobs 1995: 278). Much of his views at the time were a reaction against Labour leader/prime minister Harold Wilson—a man Amis described as living in a “rather shoddy, drab, little bureaucratic form-filling universe” (Amis 1967a: 18).
Amis (1967a: 18) was insistent upon drawing a distinction between voting Conservative (the party) and being conservative (the viewpoint): “There is only one thing more horrible than Conservative philosophy and that is Socialist philosophy”. In the famous essay ‘Why Lucky Jim turned right’ Amis (1967b: 203) explained he was not a Conservative at all: “I am not a Tory, nor pro-Tory, … nor Right-wing, nor of the Right”. What emanates from the article is a deep disillusionment with the Left. By that point Amis hated communism, but he hated the vacillating British Left with as much passion: “rank-and-file Lefties with no rhetorical skills, no individual viewpoint, only a readiness to demonstrate and march against the system” (Amis 1967b: 205).
Amis was to become a supporter of prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a hostile opponent of various progressive causes. He admired Mrs Thatcher, writing in his memoirs that on meeting her he “was rather overcome with the occasion and the fairly close propinquity of Mrs T” (Amis 1991: 304). In a stimulating obituary written from a socialist perspective Gareth Jenkins (1996) ruminates on the extent of Amis’s political change over the course of his life. Jenkins views the central characters of Amis’s later work, especially Jake’s Thing (1978), Stanley and the Women (1984) and The Old Devils (1987), as ever more “the mouthpiece for Amis’s pet hates, uttering a never ending stream of extremely unfunny and narrow- (rather than quick-) minded attacks on gays, nuclear disarmers, women’s libbers, and so on”. While Amis had the established progressivism in his sights in the 1960s, he would not become a ‘fully-formed’ reactionary of the right until some time in the later 1970s and 1980s.
A political Bond
In his affectionate survey of the Flemings, The James Bond Dossier (1965), Amis writes “Politically, Bond’s England is substantially right of centre” (p 95). As evidence he cites the title of the eleventh Bond novel and a nostalgic passage at the conclusion of Dr No (1958) in which Bond thinks of the Royals and dear England. This attitude is evident at the opening of Colonel Sun: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been” (Amis 1968b: 11). The outlook is also apparent in Greece, a country Amis portrays as hopelessly backward and dying. “There is something to be said for the view that the Parthenon best seen from a distance,” writes Amis (1968b: 70). This is due to the deplorable state of the Greek restoration work (in comparison, the author concludes, with the Germans or the Americans). But within the Parthenon is the mighty Greece that has died. The notion of a once powerful civilisation left in such a parlous state does not leave James Bond “untouched,” (p 70) and this is a furtherance of the nostalgic nature of the novel.
The attributes of Bond are the very attributes with which Amis was associating himself during his political change. It is in this sense that James Bond might partly be seen as a catalyst for Amis’s conversion. Amis (1967a: 95) argued that Bond is Conservative: “For Bond is patriotic, loyal and dependable, brave and tough, all very unfashionable virtues and therefore all the more to be commended”. While analysing the literary Bond in The James Bond Dossier Amis was moving to the right; these are the masculine values of Bond with which Amis was increasingly identifying.
Did Fleming introduce Amis to a more right-wing view of the world? If so, it was the books and not the man: the two only met twice to discuss the Dossier (Jacobs 1995: 271). In the article ‘A New James Bond’, Amis (1968a: 66-7) wrote: “It is, of course, true that Bond, like me, is pro-Western, pro-British, even, by and large, pro-American and this is on first principles anathema to a great many people”. The notion of Bond as an accelerator of Amis’s change is an interesting proposition, albeit an improvable one. Nonetheless, here we can see Amis’s political change in action, and it is through Bond that this change is being expressed.
The treatment of women in Amis’s novels, particularly his later works, attracted criticism. In Stanley and the Women (1984) Amis deliberately provoked the received orthodoxy of feminism, with his biographer Richard Bradford (2001: 344) acknowledging that the novel is “a compendium of reactionary opinions, last-stand defences of chauvinism and presentations of women, practically all women, as calculating and malicious”. In Jake’s Thing (1978) he lampoons female calls for equal rights as well as littering comments about the emotional fragility of women. Another biographer, Paul Fussell (1994: 6), notes that Amis’ dislikes “broadened alarmingly, extending … to women, or at least the feminine character in general”.
Bond and Ariadne © Daren Hatfield
In complete contrast, Colonel Sun presents a woman who is both headstrong and independent. Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist working for the Soviets, allies herself with Bond as they fight to stop Sun’s plot to attack a conference hosted by the Soviets and implicating Britain. As with the novel as a whole, Ariadne is a decidedly political character (unusually for one of Bond’s women), but her femininity turns “what might have been a schoolmarmy earnestness into a young and touching solemnity” (Amis 1968: 67-8). Later Amis (1968: 101) writes that her “strength and intelligence impressed [Bond] anew”. Ariadne has the poise and sincerity to laugh at herself, and acknowledges the inconsistencies in her political positions. Ariadne is not incidental but vital: “the girl had shown herself to be speedy, resourceful and determined: a valuable ally indeed” (Amis 1968: 72). It was tempting for Amis to have allowed Ariadne to fall into Bond’s capitalist arms at the book’s close, but instead Ariadne does not abandon her convictions. Interestingly, Bond respects her all the more for her choice.
Yet what if Ariadne is viewed from a different perspective? She emerges as a strong and endearing character, with an eye for self-deprecation. On the face of it, her political inconsistencies are the result of youthful naivety—what General Arenski describes as “sentimental pity for the oppressed” (Amis 1968: 125)—or Bond’s suspicion that her communism originated in teenage revolt against a comfortable upbringing. Could it not be the case that Amis was, through Ariadne, taking a sideswipe at the politics with which he had been previously associated? Could he not have been identifying what he now viewed as the inherent inconsistencies within communism? Here we can see Amis’s political change in action: the complete rejection of the Left he had supported. Amis used his Bond novel to show how far he had come.
Amis certainly seems to have been making a political point with General Arenski. A high-ranking official of the KGB he is notable primarily for his incompetence and, frankly, his stupidity. Is this a statement on the impotence of Red Moscow? Soviets are depicted as inversely snobbish: Arenski thinks of Ariadne as a “typical Balkan whore” and the Chinese leadership as marked by “neo-Stalinist irresponsibility” (Amis 1968b: 129). What is more, Amis’ new prejudices are reflected in the character. Arenski is a homosexual, a trait that serves no other purpose than to allow the author to poke fun. Arenski’s sexuality resulted in the Kremlin view “that someone as obviously vulnerable as that was no danger in any quarter” (Amis 1968b: 120).
As such, he is portrayed as a leering deviant. In ‘General Incompetence’, where Ariadne meets Arenski and is accompanied by the sixteen year old Yanni, Arenski makes a subtle proposition (Amis 1968b: 124). Yanni is repulsed. Amis relishes in conveying his viewpoint through his characters: Arenski is a disgusting deviant, such is the affliction of his sexual taste he is a pederast too. This was a theme to which Amis was to return later in his career, especially in Difficulties With Girls. In Colonel Sun, albeit in a slightly less overt manner, Amis was similarly motivated to make his point clear and bait those of a liberal disposition.
Red terror and yellow peril
If the Soviets are incompetent in Colonel Sun, the Chinese are plain evil. This depiction is quite unexpected as whatever Amis’ move to the right it did not “include race or class prejudice, and the unreconstructed white racism which he found in the American South … was to make him deeply uncomfortable” (Jacobs 1995: 38). Colonel Sun Liang-tan makes for a deliciously vicious enemy, psychologically prone to a healthy dose of torture in order to feel like a god, although by the end of the novel he begs for Bond’s forgiveness having realised the iniquity of his actions: “I felt sick and guilty and ashamed. I behaved in an evil and childish way. It’s ridiculous and meaningless, but I want to apologize. Can you forgive me?” (Amis 1968b: 212). Being Chinese Amis depicts him as wicked, since specifically “oriental communism” is typified by “sincere indifference to human suffering and [a] habit of regarding men and women as objects” (Amis 1968b: 182). To contemporary readers this is off-putting, more reminiscent of the ‘Yellow Peril’ literature identified with the likes of Sax Rohmer.
There is a parallel here with Amis’s previous novel, The Anti-Death League (1966). This was an Amis novel with espionage elements, and the enemy is not Red Russia but Red China. Millions of Chinese soldiers are about to invade India and are depicted as especially foreign and incomprehensible. This depiction does allow another parallel to be drawn, this time with Fleming. Umberto Eco’s essay on James Bond claims that Fleming was essentially a racist: the villains are all non-Anglo-Saxon, many the result of miscegenation. The latter covers Sun: “It was only when you looked at Sun straight in the eyes that he seemed less than totally Chinese” (Amis 1968b: 47).
Colonel Sun Liang-tan © Daren Hatfield
However, Eco continues: “Whether he condemns or absolves inferior races, Fleming never goes beyond the latent racism of the man in the street, which makes one suspect that he doesn’t characterize his characters in such-and-such a way as the result of an ideological decision but purely from the demands of rhetoric” (Eco 1966: 91). Eco was probably right about Fleming’s intentions, and one suspects that these were the same intentions of Amis. The portrayal of Sun, and the attribution of negative characteristics on the basis of his race, distasteful though it is, also does not go beyond the ‘latent racism of the man in the street’ and satisfies the ‘demands of rhetoric’.
Sun and sadism
In Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (1978), a literary analysis of the thriller genre, Jerry Palmer notes, “obviously ideological elements … are a relatively superficial part of the thriller” (p 67). This does not seem the case with Colonel Sun. It is far more explicitly political than anything Fleming wrote; Casino Royale, with the brief discussion of 1950s conservatism between Bond and Mathis and the implicit analogy between Leiter’s money and Marshall Aid, as political as Fleming got. Amis was the grand doyen of the comic novel, but the entirety of his non-Bond literature acted, to varying extents, as a vehicle through which to vent his changing political posturing. Colonel Sun was no different; Amis developed a strongly political undertone and it is the politics that is the driving force of the novel.
Colonel Sun’s reputation is built on the torture scene in the final third of the novel. This is Amis at his most sadistic, a scene of excruciating violence being drawn out across over ten pages, patiently plotted and vividly detailed. Sun takes a perverse pleasure in inflicting all sorts of pain upon 007 in the belief that “through cruelty one rises to heights of superhuman awareness” (Amis 1968b: 193). Jerry Palmer contends that although the subordination of the other and the pursuit of ultimate power as an end in itself is stock in thrillers, Colonel Sun is the only one in which such sadism is explicit. Palmer (1978: 17) explains that what “Sun attempts to do is to reduce Bond to an object, to inflict a degree of pain that will deprive his victim of any capacity for active participation in the world.”
Only in Colonel Sun is this concept taken to its logical conclusion. At that extreme conclusion, Sun capitulates: quite distinctive for the genre. But if this is sadistic, it is also believable. Amis renders the character with patience and detail so that the reader truly believes that Sun could be consumed by iniquity, although one must also take into account Amis’ highly dubious reasoning that Sun’s nationality is a factor. There is a contrast here with Fleming. The Bond originals have often been accused of being sadistic (a questionable claim), however closer examination would suggest that the sadism of Colonel Sun is of a different variety. The sadism of Colonel Sun can be defined as power sought as an end in itself in the realm of personal relationships. In Fleming, the bases of the tortures exacted on Bond are never solely about power over another individual or reducing another individual to an object, even when Le Chiffre goes to work on 007 with a carpet-beater. There is always another reason, whereas Sun tortures Bond solely to feel like a god.
These political aspects give Colonel Sun real depth, ensuring it a prominent place in the Bond series. Colonel Sun was not just an action novel or a ‘boy’s own’ adventure, the underlying subtext throughout the work reveals it as a highly political thriller. In the novel Amis delineates how far he had come politically. It is a literate work, and Amis’s single entry proved more intellectually challenging and gripping than what was to follow. In Colonel Sun Kingsley Amis set the standard for his successors.
