A look at the original Ian Fleming short story makes much more sense of the odd title phrase.  It also sent me on a weeks-long odyssey through the literary world of the original international man of mystery.

Fleming’s James Bond novels haven’t aged particularly well in many cases, as they reveal the casual racism and misogyny rooted in his early 20th century, upper-class British background.  This year’s centenary of the author’s birth, however, has been celebrated with new editions of the 14 Bond books, complete with awesomely retro covers that at least still revel in unapologetic sexism.

“Quantum of Solace” is a real oddity among Fleming’s works.  The short story was first published in Modern Woman magazine, of all places, in 1959, and it finds James Bond sitting quietly in a Caribbean mansion listening to an elderly diplomat’s odd tale of a broken marriage.

The Bond novels and short stories described a much colder, crueller Bond than has been portrayed on screen, but in “Quantum of Solace” the jaded spy is surprisingly confronted with the difficult realities of actual human relationships.  The mathematical formula that inspires the title may have reflected its author’s own well-publicized marital problems.  In the story’s calculation, when the quantum of solace is reduced to zero, love is dead.

This story can be found with four others in the short story collection For Your Eyes Only, which features the reliably exotic settings and stylized violence that made Bond a cultural icon.  I can’t imagine the film, opening Nov. 14, will bear much resemblance to the rather haunting original story, but for its rare attempt at fleshing out the humanity of the usually one-dimensional James Bond it is well worth a quick read.