I met the journalist and writer Carlo Baroni, editor-in-chief of Evening courier(to which our common births bind us in everyday life Future and the Inter faith) on a trip organized by a mutual friend in Lebanon: a good-natured, sagacious, acute, very cultured and above all very nice guy. He seemed to me to have a peaceful nature and not a particularly well-trained physique, so much so that after two days of wandering one knee progressively became inflamed.dragging himself on a crutch and stoically enduring the pain from museum to museum. I couldn’t imagine that under this nature (perhaps a cover role) there was a 007 soul beating within him. I discovered it by reading his book dedicated to the spy invented by Ian Fleming in times of the Cold War, also very useful in light of the fact that Netflix is re-proposing the entire series of films, starting from “License to Kill – Dr. No” starring Sean Connery (1962) up to “No time to die” with Daniel Craig (2021).
Jokes aside, this book has a rare quality: it takes an over-consumed icon like James Bond and brings it home, that is, inside the man. “Being James Bond. Identikit of a secret agent” (published by Ares editions), is not yet another manual for fans nor a parade of tuxedos, cocktails and pistols with silencers. It is rather a serious – and successful – attempt to answer a question that we have been asking for seventy years without really listening to the answer: who is James Bond, when he is alone?
Baroni does something against the current, therefore valuable: he dismantles the myth without destroying it. He observes him closely, almost with modesty, and discovers that behind the agent with a license to kill there is a man with a license to suffer, introverted, restless, agitated (not mixed, but the joke was easy). A precocious orphan, an elegant loner, a professional of control who fights every day with internal disorder. Other than superman: Bond is a tightrope walker who walks the tightrope between duty and desire, between discipline and melancholy.
The writing is cultured but never pedantic, narrative without becoming indulgent. Baroni intertwines cinema, literature, the history of British intelligence and psychology with a naturalness that makes everything seem simple – which is always the sign of things done well. The pages dedicated to Casino Royale(the best film of the saga for introspection and adrenaline-filled action according to the majority of its fans) to Vesper Lynd, to the relationship with M and to Bond’s education in the elite English schools give a more fragile and therefore more credible character
The strong point of the book, however, is another: the idea that James Bond is not nostalgic for the past, but a man forced to defend it while the world changes faster than him (in Skyfall it is very clear). This is where the character stops being just a paper hero and becomes a mirror. Because Bond resists, not for the sake of tradition, but for loyalty to a code. Not always right, not always successful, but consistent. And today coherence, even in the secret services of double and triple games, is more revolutionary than any gadget. «The Bond who doesn’t age is not just a cinematic gimmick», writes Baroni, «With him the myth of immortality returns. In this case the certainty of immortality. The spiritual dimension of James that always peeks out. There is something beyond and beyond death.”
Ultimately, Baroni suggests that James Bond is not liked because he shoots better than others, but because he always pays a price. And he pays for it alone. It is a book that will appeal to Bondians, it will certainly enrich them, but above all to those who suspect that behind every lasting myth there is a well-hidden wound. And that 007’s real secret is not his weapon, but his character.
