There is little doubt that if Ian Fleming were alive to celebrate his centenary he would be less than impressed with the country that his fictional hero James Bond is still defending. “Bond never got along with people who didn’t smoke, or who frowned on it,” Fleming wrote in Live and Let Die (1954), his second Bond novel. In context this was a blunt, manly statement. Writ large next to a glass case at the start of the Imperial War Museum’s big 2008 exhibition, it serves as an apology for a mannequin clasping a Morland cigarette.

So here we are, in at the birth of Bond. Confronted with the problem of hosting an exhibition about two men, the creator and the character, the curators have chosen to begin in 1952, more than halfway through Fleming’s life, but the beginning of Bond’s. The early rooms contain the manuscript of Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond book, and a recreation of Fleming’s study at his Jamaican island hideaway Goldeneye, where he wrote all the Bond novels. To the right of Fleming’s typewriter, “sunlight” streams in through a blind, casting a shadow on the floor that will remind all Bond film aficionados of Ken Adam’s stunning set designs for Dr No, the first Bond film.

Despite its catchy title, this is a remarkably sober investigation into a life that seemed to be going nowhere. If it’s bullets, stunts and invisible cars that you’re after, you will leave disappointed. There is a lot to test the patience – and reading ability – of young Bond fans in the first half of this show.

First, we are led back through the early years of Fleming’s life via family photos and mementoes, from his childhood through to the wartime experiences that would eventually remould the man and his work.

By 1939 Fleming had a successful career as a Reuters journalist and a failed one as a stockbroker behind him. In the story that unfolds one can feel Fleming’s keenness to make his own mark in the Second World War through a variety of ingenious, some might say crackpot, schemes.

These, and the characters he encountered, would resurface in the Bond novels, which sold well, but became a sensation in the wake of the film adaptations, which began in 1962 with Dr No. A wall of international paperback editions of the Bond novels serves as a marker.

At this point the exhibition, like James Bond, leaves Fleming behind. After the minute details of the Fleming section, the Bond films are disappointingly glossed over. The star exhibits here, such as the rocket belt from Thunderball and Little Nellie, the gyrocopter from You Only Live Twice, bear as little relation to Bond’s creator as Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore do to the dark enigma of the novels.

But then who is James Bond, if not the sum of his creator’s parts multiplied by all the actors who have portrayed him? There is no one answer, but this exhibition wallows thoughtfully in the unexpected complexity of the question, bringing adult analysis to a character too often dismissed as hokum.

Opens April 17: 020-7416 5320

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