Opinion Bounder and a spy

Cut to fog-shrouded London in 1872,where he resurfaces as a policeman. Melville may have remained a constable all his life if not for the Fenians,a group of Irish nationalists. Taking advantage of the newly invented dynamite,they launched a bombing campaign in London. Melville,as an Irishman,was a natural pick for the new outfit to infiltrate terrorist cells. He burst into the public eye when he foiled the “Jubilee Plot”,a Fenian plan to assassinate Queen Victoria and the entire British cabinet by bombing Westminster Abbey during the monarch’s jubilee celebrations. In 1903 he resigned,to everyone’s surprise. In reality,he had been recruited into the nascent secret service bureau. To protect his cover,Melville simply used his initial — M. And thus a legend was born,the “monogrammatic superior” of all field agents.

M is also at the heart of the new Bond film Skyfall. The tensions between an agent and his superior are a rich source of drama. Skyfall’s plot hinges on exposing intelligence agents in terror organisations. But terrorists have been present from the start in Bond’s genetic makeup — foreigners out to imperil the Sceptred Isle. Bond villains are usually the fears of the ruling elite made flesh.

The early 20th century is a time when “fretful dreams settle upon the empire’s brow”,as Alan Moore puts it. A “peer competitor” was emerging — Germany. As both sides began a massive armament programme,gathering military intelligence became vital. The British government sanctioned 19 military intelligence units — of which MI5 and MI6 are the only ones known to have survived. Melville was locked in a struggle with his opposite number,German spy-chief Gustav Steinhauer.

It didn’t take long for popular culture to reflect these silent geopolitical struggles. Spymania kicked off the same year M started his new job,with Erskine Childers’s novel,The Riddle of the Sands,where Englishmen foil a German invasion plot.

Spymania was reflected in “story papers”,like The Gem or The Magnet where plucky public school boys ferreted out agents and foiled the Kaiser. To such a generation,Bond would have been a “bounder”. He would know the codes of a gentleman but not always follow them. This legacy can be seen when Robert Shaw’s character in From Russia with Love kills a British agent and impersonates him. At dinner he orders red wine with fish. Bond immediately figures out that Shaw is not “one of us”.

The world was plunged into war when the “Guns of August” boomed in 1914. And the resonances were felt by Bond too. During the war,Steinhauer had devised a plot to blow up the Bank of England. This supposedly inspired Goldfinger’s plot to blow up Fort Knox. The Russian revolution ensured that for the next 70 years,thriller writers had a reliable enemy. The British government was determined “to strangle at birth the Bolshevik State”,in the words of Churchill.

This is where Sidney Reilly,the original inspiration for Bond takes his bow on the stage of shadows. Born Georgi Rosenblum in Odessa,he emigrated to England after a run-in with the Tsarist police. Recruited by M,Rosenblum made a career transition from the underworld to the secret service,reborn as Reilly. He became central to a grand British operation to stage a “counter-revolution”.

Reports of a Monarchist secret organisation filtered through,and Reilly was invited to Russia to ignite a conflagration to bring down the Soviets. The organisation was a sham,complex five-year effort to “liquidate” Reilly. Betrayal,fake organisations,spy-hunting secret units,defiant to the last — the architecture of the Bond plot was ready.

Bond has come a long way from the “anonymous,blunt instrument” used by the government. The Bond in Skyfall is close to the original,what critic Steven Rubin sums up as “a candidate for the psychiatrist’s couch — a burned-out killer who may have just enough energy left for one final mission. That was Fleming’s Bond — a man who drank to diminish the poison in his system,the poison of a violent world with impossible demands.”

This mix is perhaps seductive. Indeed,the hype around Skyfall has seen a rush of applicants to MI6,prompting the normally reticent organisation to put out a full page ad,“If the qualities that make a good spy were obvious,they wouldn’t make a very good spy”. M couldn’t have put it better.

Unudurti is a Hyderabad-based writer

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