I feel like the more that I reread the James Bond novels, the less I feel I understand Ian Fleming as a person. I mean it's obvious that there are certain elements of the bond novels that would not be considered acceptable, for example the diatribe about how women getting the vote caused homosexuality to flourish or the random and seemingly out of place line in Casino Royale about how Bond's sex with vesper would always have the "sweet tang of rape," so it'd be easy to write stuff like this off as the rantings of a deeply prejudiced man, but at the same time I find it difficult to just do that because of how inconsistent such elements are throughout Fleming's writing.
A good illustration of this appears in the novel Live and Let Die. Fleming makes a point of having 2 different characters at different points of the novel give a speec about how African-Americans are just as capable as white people are, so it seems clear that he's trying to make a point about the inherent equality of the races, but inbetween those two points his characterizations of PoC seem to mostly consist of harmful stereotypes, and with the more fleshed out characters (Mr. Big and Quarrell) Fleming makes a point of telling us that either thay have white blood in the case of mister big, or in Quarrell's case that his features do not appear "negroid" (that word makes me cringe, and it is Fleming's word rather than mine). Also later in Dr No, he has a character characterize Jamaicans as "lazy" and "child-like". which seems to directly contradict the speeches Fleming gave us in LaLD.
Furthermore in Goldfinger he includes some very bigoted sentiments towards Koreans (though always given through a character rather than exposited by a narrator), and makes the character of Dr No a blatant "yellow peril" style villain, but then later goes on to write You Only Live Twice which is essentially a love letter to Japan in the form of a james bond novel. I guess theoretically he could just be prejudiced against the Chinese and Koreans while being perfectly fine with the Japanese, but somehow that seems unlikely to me.
Then we get to the sexist undertones of the books. So on top of the aforementioned "sweet tang of rape comment" and the diatribe against giving women the vote, Fleming is quite fond of using the "rape as backstory" trope for his female characters. He also seems to have an affinity for making his female protagonists entirely uninterested in men until bond comes along, at wich point they fall for his charms. Obvious examples here would be Tiffany Case, Solitare (potentially. It's stated by Mr. Big that while she Lived in Haiti she was completely uninterested in men, which is how she got her nickname, but later she specifically states that she's always wanted to be with a man), Pussy Galore (who is specifically stated to be a lesbain), and potentially Vesper Lynd but I may be misremembering that one. Running counter to that though, is the fact that outside those tropes Fleming typically depicts his female protagonists as very capable individuals, with Solitare escaping from the villain's clutches on her own in the first half of Live and Let Die, Gala Brand being depicted as an extremely talented agent of Special Branch in Moonraker, and Honeychille Rider (if I remember correctly, it's been years since I've read Dr. No, and i've not yet reached that one in my rereading of the series yet) being depicted as essentially a female tarzan, being very physically capable and demonstrating great knowledge of the local area despite Bond's sexist attitudes toward her.
Due to this it's very hard for me to get a handle on who Fleming was as a person and what his attitudes were, and it's also making it very hard to get through the series again at points, as the more positive aspects can draw me in and put me at ease, allowing me to essentially be sucker-punched as a reader by the negative, prejudiced aspects of his work.