Oh, That Fleming Feeling

Few hotels in the Caribbean have the stardust of GoldenEye, where Ian Fleming wrote his Bond books. It was time to see...

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

The serene, open-windowed spa at GoldenEye.

Generalizing about an entire country, even a small one, on the basis of a tiny sample of several days spent is, we're told, dubious. But our eyes and ears and consciousness are never so alert and awake as they are in our first days in a new place, before they are submerged in the ocean of ourselves, impressions flooded by our own drearily familiar consciousness. The first blink often is the deepest. Arriving in Jamaica after a lifetime's imagining the place, to stay at GoldenEye—the Ian Fleming villa and extended property near the town of Oracabessa—produces observations quickly arrived at and therefore conceivably true.

First, there are the sounds of the place. There is the local speech: Many of the characteristic phrases of the island patois have a humane inflection in reality that the constant caricatures of them can’t supply. Jamaicans really do say “Ya, mon!”—but it is a mumbled, warm, self-reflecting affirmation, not at all the snappy, stoned greeting of bad comic sketches. And there is the music. In no place I know is there as constant a stream of local (that is to say national) music as in Jamaica. At a time when American pop, often decades old, still dominates the world, in Jamaica any beachside bar—or, for that matter, any car—has local music playing. It is a sign of their seriousness of purpose that Chris Blackwell—rum entrepreneur, reggae evangelist, and owner of GoldenEye—and Ricardo Hewitt, his hyperserious manager, insist on having real, serious Jamaican music on the property. Just as they insist on having real Jamaican food on the menu. (You can begin the day with the much-praised ackee and salt fish.)