UP FRONT:'Now here is Sebastian Faulks throwing his literary weight behind what is, essentially, not a million miles from a Mills & Boon,' writes Daisy Cummins
SEBASTIAN FAULKS writing Bond as Fleming. Isn't that marvellous? Breathing new life into the books and whole franchise. I must admit that I only picked up Devil May Care because of Faulks' name. Up until now I've been a Bond movie whore and an Ian Fleming virgin [ Happy with the hooker line, Ed?]. Not any more.
It got me thinking, though. I write for Mills & Boon, a company that has long been lashed out of it by the snobbish literocracy. It's nothing but pulp fiction, purple prose and so on and so forth ad nauseum.
Now, here is Sebastian Faulks throwing the literary weight of his expertise behind what is essentially, not a million miles from a Mills & Boon. Think about it before you hurl missiles my way. Firstly, they are both 100 years old this year (Fleming and Mills & Boon, that is - Happy birthday!).
Both forms of the novel are unashamedly "genre". Bond offers the escapism of thrilling adventures and beautiful women, a handsome hero and exotic locations; Mills & Boon offers the escapism of romance, beautiful women, a handsome hero and exotic locations. They both feature glittering scenes in ballrooms, exquisite houses and casinos here and there. The promise and fulfilment of sex is a constant erotic tension.
When one picks up a Bond novel, one knows that it's going to be structured in a certain way. It'll have the familiar beginning, the little prologue, a slice of the action to whet the appetite before meeting Bond and being hurtled along his next exciting journey.
In a Mills & Boon we know that more or less on page one we're going to meet the Hero and Heroine. We'll see that they're obviously meant to be together but that some conflict is driving them apart, and will keep them apart until the final pages. That's not to say that they don't get together in the meantime - they do, sometimes explosively (another similarity in a Bond novel, albeit probably due to Semtex and not foreplay) but you'll be kept on the edge of your seat until the end. In both, the denouement is the same. The world is saved and everyone lives happily ever after.
Entertainment and high fantasy, that's what Fleming/Bond and Mills & Boon offer in spades. Along with trademark touches such as the exotic locales, and descriptions of local edible delicacies. It's all to make you wish that you were there too, in that rarified milieu where anything is possible. It's where James Bond saves civilisation, gets the French babe and slays the Russian temptress all at the same time, while also drinking his Martini, shaken, not stirred. Exhausted yet? Well he's a super-hero, he can handle it.
The alpha-male hero in the classic Mills & Boon romance is Bond's not too distant cousin. He, too, is virile, the best of the best, the most handsome, the richest. Mills & Boon caters for female fantasy and escapism, Bond for the male equivalent. It's a human compulsion to fantasise. It's okay. That's why these books do so well. And they are both shot through with a blend of Englishness that so appeals and harks back to Blyton and Agatha Christie.
Daisy Cummins writes novels for Mills & Boon under the pseudonym Abby Green