I used to spend a lot of time with Sean Connery. We’d hang out, talk about my life. He’d give me advice and I’d ask him what it was like being James Bond. He loved that and told me everything. I know some people might find it incredible that a hugely successful superstar who was then in his fifties should spend so much time in a small village in the north of England talking to a twelve year old. But that’s the thing about imaginary friends: they stick with you, they’re there for you.
I first got Sean Connery via Outland. Then as James Bond on television. Roger Moore was my cinema Bond. But I never warmed to him as an imaginary friend. Sure, he came around now and then, but he just talked about polo and smoked dreadful cigars. Connery was a fascinating character. He was funny, tough and yet comfortable, friendly, easy, trustworthy.
When I came to write Connery: a Novel, I used a lot of my own memories. The main character Sam Coleridge comes from the same area of England and is roughly my age, but unlike me – hopefully – he’s a psychopath. I’m not saying that chlidren are psychopaths, but they have certain psychopath tendencies and I made him by imagining that a lot of my childhood fantasies had continued through into adulthood and had in fact been the deciding factor in my major life decisions. For instance, as a child I loved the idea of the army. The 80s was the decade of the training montage in cinema – The Karate Kid, the Rocky films – and I believed I could transform myself from the weed I was into a “killing machine”. That was the other thing, I really wanted someone I could kill. I was brought up a Roman Catholic and despite this also a pacifist, so I’d pray sometimes to God to give me an enemy I could kill without feeling bad about it. Orcs, Stormtroopers, Ruskies and Nazis, that sort of thing.
We often portray the loss of our childhood dreams as a bad thing, but believe you me in my case maturity saved lives. As my brain developed and I got to know people and the world around me with more clarity and empathy, my fantasies appeared to me not only wild and stupid but also slightly disgusting. Sam Coleridge never had that change.
There are some literary precedents for the kind of character I wanted, though most of these I realized only retrospectively. Bret Easton Ellis gave us the inside of a rapist and serial killer with American Psycho, but before him Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson both depicted protagonists – the former especially with Tom Rilpey – who were essentially sociopaths who murdered with a moral carelessness that gives the reader a terrifying exhilaration as the dramatic structure of story determines we must to some degree will them on and want them to get away with it.
I hesitate to call Connery a crime novel, though crimes are committed in it. There is the possibility when someone seems to be in the grip of fantasy that Coleridge could be a Billy Liar/Walter Mitty character. Does he ever really meet Connery? Does he ever really commit the crimes he reports in the pages? The unreliable narrator is one of the most boring ideas in literature, but still there is an ambiguity there. I’d point out that his namesake produced the phrase “the suspension of disbelief” which means that every narrator has to be unreliable. After all, what would be the “what really happened” of any story, given that it’s a story?
And it is true that there are other genres the book inhabits. The family memoir is certainly one with Coleridge’s “wrong beginnings” – to use Larkin’s memorable phrase – casting a long shadow through the book. There are elements of spy thriller. And (hopefully), there is a degree of sly dark humour that satirizes our violent longings and the violent longings of our culture. How many violent deaths do we witness in the course of a year, a week or a day on screens and in books? When we experience real violence, the visceral response comes as a surprise. The feeling of sickness which Alex experiences after the Ludovico Treatment in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange has been my personal experience when I’ve witnessed real violence on the streets of Barrow-in-Furness or Liverpool, (I’ve never once witnessed any violence in the twenty-five years I’ve lived in Italy, nor in my many trips to the reportedly crime-ridden capital of London.) This revulsion has in no way turned me off the violent films I watch. Fantasy trumps reality, which is what makes it so dangerous and so alluring.
Some might feel the book missells itself as there isn’t as much Connery as they’d hoped, but he’s the tabasco not the tomato juice. You only need a little to give it a kick. For those who find this excuse not good enough, be content: I am doing my penance writing a biography of Sean Connery, provisionally entitled Self-Made Man: The Life of Sean Connery in 2027. You heard it here first.
Connery: a Novel by John Bleasdale is available from Plumeria here.
