The Lifeline

The Lifeline is a book by the splendidly-named Phyllis Bottome that was first printed in 1946. The author and her husband ,former MI6 officer Ernan Forbes Dennis ,ran an experimental school in Austria whose most famous pupil was a young Ian Fleming and it's been said that The Lifeline and it's main character Mark Chalmers in particular were the inspiration for his James Bond books.

In 1938 Chalmers is a teacher at Eton who is asked to do a friend from the Foreign Office a favour for British Intelligence and pass on information to an agent in Nazi-occupied Austria. Once there Chalmers finds himself increasingly involved in intelligence work and taking on more and more risky assignments.

I was particularly interested to read this book as I recently read some of the early Bond books so I was eager to compare.
Well there are similarities in the main characters but this is superbly-written and far from the pulp fiction that is the reality of the first 007 books. Chalmers is cultured,a deep thinker and a very humane and insightful man, the early Bond isn't much more than a brutal thug with his brains below his beltline. Fleming never wrote prose like this, he wrote books,this is literature.

There are places where the speech is dated,and there is the odd word that wouldn't be used now,for example the inhabitants of a psychiatric hospital being referred to routinely as "idiots", that's hardly surprising in a book written 80 years ago. Aside from that,and characters occasionally "speechifying" as James Lee Burke calls it,it still holds up well as a great piece of writing and I'd love to read more of Phyliss Bottome's work.

I enjoyed getting to read the inspiration of James Bond. It had a great overall feel to the genre, and that it had a great adventure element that I enjoyed overall. It uses the spy element perfectly and thought it was written well.

This book can definitely be enjoyed on its own merits. It is a reissue of a title by this author who is credited with teaching quite a lot to Ian Fleming. Here she tells her own thrilling tale of espionage and derring do.

The story takes place in 1938 at a difficult time in the world. A schoolmaster is recruited by the Foreign Office and accepts an assignment. How will he fare? find out in this good read.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Muswell Press for this title. All opinions are my own.