It’s been a long, long time since I read any of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and I don’t think (I may have read Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun) that I have read any of the “continuation” Bonds written by other authors. I never quite saw the point. Fleming’s Bond was, well, Fleming’s Bond. Moreover, he was a creation rooted in a certain time and place, and like, say, Jeeves and Wooster, that is how 007 should stay, at least in print (with the films, that’s long been a lost cause).
The latest “Bond” book is On His Majesty’s Secret Service, by Charlie Higson. And this article by Niall Gooch in the Spectator does not give me many reasons to abandon my avoidance of continuation Bonds. Higson has written a series of books about a young Bond, but this is his first shot (so to speak) at the older 007.
Gooch:
The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the chief antagonist in the most recent James Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international skulduggery is known as Athelstan; a former City trader with a Kentish accent, he espouses a boisterous, saloon-bar English nationalism of the kind usually ascribed to the former Ukip leader. . . .
Our hero has somehow become the modern age in arms, a Centrist Dad with a sidearm: he frets over articles about gut health in the New Scientist, and disdains big corporations for their supposed use of child sweatshops. His casual lover — unseen and conveniently relaxed about his extra-curricular sexual adventures — is an immigration lawyer.
I suppose the fact that this Bond is still allowed “extra-curricular sexual adventures” is something.
Gooch:
[Bond] muses . . . about how the ‘far right’, which here means anyone to the right of Tony Blair, is identical to the ‘far left’, i.e. anyone to the left of Tony Blair. In a Budapest hotel, he opts for a healthy continental breakfast instead of a full English, like a middle-aged husband trying to shed some excess pounds before a family holiday. Not that Higson’s Bond would ever think of his weight in pounds: this archetypal British hero has allegedly ‘never known imperial measurements. . . . The metric system seemed to make a lot more sense’ . . .
There is even a bizarre section where Bond reacts to Athelstan’s chauvinistic tub-thumping by mentally rehearsing the ‘waves of immigration’ theory of British history, in which Englishness is some transient, flimsy construct with no meaningful content.
Then again, Bond is half-Scottish.
In Gooch’s view, the book is “a work of propaganda,” but, to be fair, the same might be said, at least in certain respects, of the original Bonds. What matters more is whether it is an enjoyable read, but Gooch clearly doesn’t think so:
I admit to being somewhat surprised by quite how leaden and didactic this book was. Are there no editors left, I asked myself as I waded through the underpowered, hectoring prose. Perhaps, however, that is a function of how hegemonic Higson’s views are among the creative classes.
After all, goldfish do not know they are wet, and people who conform instinctively and wholeheartedly to contemporary pieties — about borders and gender and free speech and identity — find it very difficult to understand the extent of their epistemic bubbles. We seem to be entering an age when didactic pro-establishment propaganda with little merit is not only everywhere, but goes unremarked and uncriticised because the people with cultural power generally agree with each other about almost every issue of importance. There is less intellectual diversity in our creative classes — less genuine openness to opposing ideas — than there has been for well over a century. Even in Victorian, Edwardian and interwar theatre — under the supposed hegemony of old uptight Christian Britain, where the Lord Chamberlain’s pen hovered ominously over the playwright’s desk — there were many searching and well-written attacks on the dominant social conventions and taboos.
This cultural hegemony is not so far advanced in the U.S. as in the U.K., although we seem to be heading rapidly in the same direction, a depressing thought. To cheer myself up, I turned to my copy of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a 1965 printing priced exotically and non-metrically at six Australian shillings, and started reading, only to come across this:
James Bond was not a gourmet. In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad.
Salad? Ian Fleming’s James Bond ate salad? The signs of rot were already there, even back then.