Ian Fleming’s Quantum of Solace is the strangest of all his James Bond stories. In it, Bond is merely a minor character. In place of the traditional Bond fare of spying, violence, women and dry martinis, Fleming served up a profound reflection on longing, marriage, society and passion. The “quantum of solace” to which the title refers is, bizarrely, a mathematical measurement of love.

The story, first published in Modern Woman magazine in 1959, has Bond sent to the Caribbean to sabotage a ship running guns to Castro’s army (an assignment that he takes on reluctantly because he has some sympathy with the Cuban rebels).

In the Bahamas he attends a dull dinner party at the Governor’s Mansion, where the elderly governor tells him a story about a man named Masters who married an air hostess. The marriage started well but soon the wife began a torrid and very public affair with the son of a wealthy island family.

It is at this point that the governor explains his theory: the quantum of solace, he says, is a precise figure defining the comfort, humanity and fellow feeling required between two people for love to survive. If the quantum of solace is nil, then love is dead.

Bond, who understands the limits of love, catches the governor’s meaning at once. When mutual solace falls below a certain point, 007 reflects, “you’ve got to get away to save yourself . . . when the other person not only makes you feel totally insecure, but actually seems to want to destroy you”.

The governor continues his story, describing how Masters left his faithless wife for six months. When he returned she wanted to go back to him. He treated her icily, even dividing their house in half so that they did not need to speak to each another. The quantum of solace had been reduced to nothing.

Quantam of Solace was Fleming’s attempt to write a more serious story, in the manner of Somerset Maugham. But it was also a reflection on his own turbulent marriage, which was troubled by infidelity and periodic coldness.

Fleming’s tale is a brooding study of the emotional realities of colonial life and takes place in one building; not much is likely to be reproduced in the new Bond film. Yet the original does offer flashes of the lighter Bond, including its opening line, in which one of Bond’s less well-known tastes is revealed: “James Bond said, ‘I’ve always thought that if I ever married I would marry an air hostess’.”

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