Jose Oliva |
Barcelona (EFE).- The British writer Kim Sherwood, the first woman to be commissioned to write a new trilogy about agent 007, created by Ian Fleming, believes that “James Bond can evolve and adapt to changing times, even though he is an iconic and popular character, that everyone knows”.
The twist that the author has given to the saga has consisted of “socializing” the prominence of the series, now “more choral”, distributed among three “more inclusive and multicultural” heroes: Johanna Harwood, 003, of Franco-Algerian origin, Joseph Dryden, 004, of Jamaican origin, deaf in one ear and the first openly gay agent, and Sid Bashir, 009, who belongs to an ethnic minority, while 007, who is missing, is only evoked by his bosses and fellow section members. .
In an interview with EFE, Sherwood (Camden, United Kingdom, 1989) has recognized that “Fleming’s shadow is long, because his character is deeply rooted in popular culture” and as a fan of the well-known spy series, both in the books as in his films, his purpose was “to honor Fleming and see where his style and mine shared DNA and give a fresher vision.”
Sherwood believes that “the context is the key, because Fleming has been speaking since the 1950s, when the great danger for the West was communism”, while she has been speaking since contemporary times, but “it has been shown that Bond as a symbol of Great Britain it is capable of evolving; Pierce Brosnan’s has nothing to do with Sean Connery’s”.
In “Double or Nothing” (Rock), the first novel in Sherwood’s trilogy, Bond is missing after being threatened by vengeful forces in a world torn between climate collapse and the geopolitical upheavals of the 21st century.
New roles for women
If Bond had been a field dominated by men and, in the movies, with large doses of sexism, in this installment, in addition to a new agent, Sherwood has given a “promotion” to the eternal Miss Moneypenny, who “is now the head of the Double 0 section”.
Sherwood wanted “a heroic female character,” because when she was little and playing, “she always wanted to be 007, she wanted to rescue, not be rescued.”
Apart from the instructions of the Fleming family, who wanted to incorporate a new cast of agents, the author was inspired by the British MI6’s own advertisements, which “look for people with different backgrounds, who speak different languages and who do not necessarily have to be white nor educated at Eton”.
Sherwood acknowledges that when writing the saga “it is inevitable not to keep the films in mind, because Fleming himself was already very visual and influenced the film versions of his novels, and these in my style, with which the circle is closed”.
The war in Ukraine, the missiles from North Korea or the balloons from China mark a current situation that, in his opinion, makes “the spy genre more attractive, and therefore the popularity of the genre in the Cold War, since Faced with a faceless reality of warring countries, Bond provided a human scale that could be comforting.”
Sherwood does not think that the Bond novels should be rewritten to adapt them to our times, because “if we rewrite history we run the risk of not learning from the past.”
There is no shortage of an antagonistic villain, in this case Sir Bertram Paradise, who claims he can reverse climate change through cloud seeding, “a character who emerged during lockdown” when he began writing this first novel, who “could well be one of today’s tech billionaires.
“The climate crisis seems to me a terrible reality that makes many people suffer while a minority benefits from it, as also happened in the pandemic,” the author points out.
In his interest in bringing fresh air to the saga, Sherwood has removed 007 from the story, who is mentioned by the new leading agents, who have had a relationship with him, and by Moneypenny’s memories.
From the Middle East to London
The action takes place in a multitude of settings, from the Middle East to London, and with an essential role for Barcelona in chapter 13, “an iconic setting that has a recognizable architecture and profile, despite the fact that Fleming paradoxically hated modernism” .
Sherwood admits that the appearance of the Jason Bourne saga was “revolutionary” and had a decisive influence on the 007 series: “‘Die Another Day’ has nothing to do with the next one, ‘Casino Royale’, in which one more Bond appears muscular, with more frenetic action, but it is also true that Bourne, Jack Ryan or Mission Impossible were themselves influenced by the Bond saga”.
Another contribution of the Bourne series, he adds, was “to show Europe as a scene full of shadows and dangerous.”
When he wrote “Double or Nothing” he couldn’t help but put faces to his characters: “For the action scenes I thought of Daniel Craig, I was also inspired by Sean Connery’s panther gaits and for seduction the benchmark was Brosnan.”
Writing a trilogy will allow him to “explore long time arcs of the characters”, he has a clear roadmap for those three novels but everything can change with the evolution of the world: “To Timothy Dalton’s Bond of the 80s, in the middle of the crisis of the AIDS, in which there were no sex scenes, was followed by Brosnan’s in the 90s, which was the complete opposite.
Sherwood does not give up her most personal books, and after her debut, “Testament”, inspired by the life of her grandparents, one of them a Holocaust survivor, she has just published in the United Kingdom “A wild and authentic relationship”, a novel story about a woman dedicated to smuggling.”
