Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories by John Griswold

The problem with reviewing a book of this type is that it was never intended to be read from cover to cover, rather to be dipped into as required to clarify the original texts. It is a weighty book, numbering 449 pages and in addition to providing information such as what the references to the girl in the balloon bet signify, provides the reader with conversions to the current buying power of monetary values, includes a blow by blow account of the famous golf match between James Bond and Goldfinger and analyses the entire bridge game in Moonraker. Although they don't provide riveting reading in themselves, they do at least allow the reader to find out exactly what was going on at any point in these stories. The book has hundreds of references, obscure and not so, which makes it an essential addition to the library anyone who considers themselves to serious about the works of Ian Fleming.

Despite its strengths the book has a number of flaws. Self published, the book would have benefited from an editor to tidy things up; it is unnecessary to write "French for:", each time a phase appears in French, when a key could have provided the same information more concisely. And why are some entries repeated in full for several books, whereas other repeated entries refer the reader to the first occurrence of that entry. Also, while there is a global glossary, it hasn't been used consistently - wouldn't the repeated entries have been better off in it?

One area of the book that could prove to be rather controversial in the Bond community are the chronologies. As Fleming introduced a number of inconsistencies throughout the series, Griswold has attempted to realign the stories, claiming that the series should be seen as a whole. This revisionist argument doesn't really stand up in a reference book and allocating specific dates where there is not enough information to do so is not on. e.g. "December 3, 1937: Vivienne Michel was born in Sainte Famille, Canada" (p. 350), while in the footnotes the author writes that "The only dates that would allow her to be 23 years old... would be from October 14, 1937 through December 31, 1937". That surely is precise enough, the point of a reference work is to point out the inconsistencies, not change the original works. And although the chronologies are written in such a way that they don't spoil the plot, they seem quite out of place and include a level of precision that is unnecessary.

These are really minor complaints though. The main issue I have with this book is the language translations; at best they are cumbersome; often they are incomprehensible; and many times they are wrong. Griswold assures us (p. 430) that "Rapido! Seguro! Economico!" means "Rapid! Assurance! Economic!". Would he please tell me what that means in English? - language translation should express the meaning of the original phrase rather than providing an out of context translation of each word. Much better would have been "Fast! Safe! Cheap!", depending on the context in which it was originally written - unfortunately there is no way to link back to the original text from the alphabetical annotations, which would have benefited from having chapter numbers indicated, or even better, listed as they occur in Fleming's texts. Another error (page 282) is that "estancias" is Spanish for "stays" and Fleming really meant "estados" which means "estates". This information is wrong; although "estancia" can mean "stay", it can also mean a ranch or farm, which is exactly what Fleming meant. And Griswold has written "D.S.S.: Possibly stands for: 'Department of State Security'". In fact it probably means "Department of Social Security", an altogether different matter, although once again it is difficult to trace where the reference is to be found in the text of The Man With The Golden Gun. These silly little errors undermine what is undoubtadly an otherwise well researched book, but every single verifiable fact should have been confirmed.

Despite these criticisms the book is a must have for anyone who is serious about Fleming's novels. Although it does contain a small number of factual errors, and my advice is to ignore all translations, these surely can be corrected by the author in a future edition, arguably making it one of the ultimate guides to the James Bond novels.




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