Dimensions
160 x 240 x 36mm
Goldeneye: the true story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of James Bond. For two months of every year, from 1946 to his death eighteen years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the Bond books and stories were written here. Fleming loved Jamaica, an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Here, amid stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica was the perfect mix of British old-fashioned imperial values, and of the dangerous and sensual; of reassuring conservatism and deference and the exciting exotic: in effect, the same curious combination that made the Bond novels so appealing and successful. So much of Bond leads back to Jamaica u the high-end jet-set tourism world in which our hero moves, the relentless attention to race, the aching concern with the end of the Empire and national decline, the awkward new relationship with the United States. Furthermore, the spirit of the island u its exotic beauty, its unpredictable danger, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama u infuses the books. Fleming threw himself into the hedonistic Jet Set party scene along the north coast: Hollywood giants, and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks, like other colonized people all over the empire, were rising up to demand respect and self-government. And as the imperial hero James Bond became ever more anachronistic and fantastical, so his popularity soared.
