It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve read Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and I don’t think (I may have read the book by Kingsley Amis Colonel Sun) that I read one of the “continuation” links written by other authors. I never really understood the interest. Fleming’s Bond was, well, Fleming’s Bond. Plus, he was a creation rooted in a certain time and place, and like, say, Jeeves and Wooster, that’s how 007 should stay, at least in print (with the movies, that’s been since long a lost cause).
The latest “Bond” book is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Charlie Higson. And This item by Niall Gooch in the Spectator doesn’t give me much reason to give up my avoidance of continuation obligations. Higson has written a series of books about a young Bond, but this is his first shot (so to speak) against the old 007.
Gooch:
The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the main antagonist of the last James Bond book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international machination is known as Athelstan; a former City shopkeeper with a Kentish accent, he espouses a raucous, saloon-bar English nationalism of the kind usually attributed to the former UKIP leader. . . .
Our hero has kind of become the modern age of guns, a centrist dad with a handgun: he worries about gut health articles in the new scientist, and despises big business for their alleged use of child sweatshops. Her occasional lover — unseen and conveniently relaxed about her extracurricular sexual adventures — is an immigration lawyer.
I guess the fact that this Bond is still allowed to “have sex out of school” is something.
Gooch:
(Bounce) thinks. . . on the fact that “the extreme right”, which means here anyone to the right of Tony Blair, is identical to the “extreme left”, that is to say anyone to the left of Tony Blair. At a Budapest hotel, he opts for a healthy continental breakfast instead of a full English breakfast, like a middle-aged husband trying to shed a few extra pounds before a family vacation. Not that Higson’s Bond would ever think about his weight in pounds: this archetypal British hero would have “never known imperial measurements”. . . . The metric system seemed to make a lot more sense. . .
There’s even a bizarre section in which Bond reacts to Athelstan’s chauvinistic bathtub shots by mentally rehearsing the ‘waves of immigration’ theory of British history, in which English is a fleeting, fragile construct with no content. significant.
Again, Bond is half Scottish.
According to Gooch, the book is “a work of propaganda”, but, to be fair, the same could be said, at least in some respects, of the original Bonds. What matters most is whether the reading is enjoyable, but Gooch clearly doesn’t think so:
I admit I was somewhat surprised by the leaden and didactic character of this book. Are there no more editors, I wondered as I scanned the underpowered, authoritative prose. Perhaps, however, this is because Higson’s views are hegemonic among the creative classes.
After all, goldfish don’t know they’re wet, and people who instinctively and wholeheartedly conform to contemporary pieties — about boundaries, gender, free speech, and identity — have a hard time. understand the extent of their epistemic bubbles. We seem to be entering an era where pro-establishment didactic propaganda, without much merit, is not only pervasive, but goes unnoticed and uncriticized because people with cultural power generally agree with each other on almost every the important questions. There is less intellectual diversity in our creative classes – less genuine openness to opposing ideas – than there has been for more than a century. Even in Victorian, Edwardian and interwar theater – under the supposed hegemony of strained old Christian Britain, where the pen of the Lord Chamberlain hovered menacingly over the playwright’s desk – there were many thorough and well-written attacks on prevailing social conventions and taboos.
This cultural hegemony is not as advanced in the US as it is in the UK, although we seem to be heading in the same direction rapidly, which is depressing. To cheer myself up, I turned to my copy of On Her Majesty’s Secret Servicea 1965 print that was priced exotic, not metric, at six Australian shillings, and I started reading, only to come across this:
James Bond was not a gourmet. In England, he lived on grilled sole, boiled eggs and cold roast beef with potato salad.
salad? Ian Fleming’s James Bond ate salad? The signs of rot were already there, even then.