Woke Bond is boring Bond

Earlier this week I read a short piece by Niall Gooch at the Spectator called “The terribleness of a progressive Bond.” It’s a review of a new Bond novella by Charlie Higson, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, which was written to coincide with the coronation of Charles II. The story, insofar as it has one, involves Bond traveling to Hungary to infiltrate a nationalist plot to overthrow Charles and install a pretender claiming direct descent from Alfred the Great.

Gooch was not impressed. In addition to poor plotting and writing (“It makes Dan Brown look like a master of nuance, understatement and subtle characterisation”), Higson’s novella is overtly political, with a menagerie of baddies gathered from the most fevered imaginations of left-leaning Twitter types. The villains are cartoonishly anti-immigration, anti-EU, and vaccine-skeptical, and needless to say they’re all inarticulate white men who like guns and beer. Gooch:

None of them is a genuine character. Instead they are mere empty vessels, onto which he projects his bizarre fantasies about the motivations and beliefs of conservatives. People who are sceptical about mass immigration or transgenderism or the erosion of free speech are simply itching to engage in mass terror attacks in the heart of London, apparently.

But long before this becomes explicit, you’ll feel it. They’re interested in Anglo-Saxon history? They like Hungary? If you are left wondering why a London businessman calling himself Athelstan of Wessex would organize his plot in Hungary, you are not part of Higson’s political bubble, and On His Majesty’s Secret Service is not written for you. It is, Gooch writes, “clearly a work of propaganda.”

As it happens, I read On His Majesty’s Secret Service this summer, and there’s a reason you didn’t hear anything about it here. Gooch’s review is wholly accurate.

I thought it perhaps better written than Gooch did, but that’s damning with faint praise. My one thought through the entire first half of the story was “Okay, I see what you’re doing,” which was personally irritating and, artistically, meant that the second half held no surprises. And I agree entirely that the staid “Centrist Dad” Bond of this novella—a man who is in a carefully worked out and consensual open relationship; whose self-satisfied inner thoughts range across a litany of studiedly correct leftwing opinions on everything from English nationalism and Viktor Orban to sweatshops and gut health; and who is comfortable dropping terms like “toxic” and “far right”—is a diminished Bond. For Gooch, this is “cringeworthy.” My word was “annoying.”

It’s also boring.

Why? The key word comes in Gooch’s final paragraph:

It is perhaps some consolation that there must eventually be a reaction against the smug, complacent tone of of the contemporary cultural scene. Until then, it seems like we may be in for some very bad films, books and TV shows, praised not for any artistic merit but for their ideological conformity.

Complacent. You could never call the original Bond complacent. He was not a happy man. Despite his smarts, skills, strength, love of the high life, and success with women, Bond was always a bit out of step with the modern world, ever more so as time went on. When Judi Dench’s M calls Bond a “dinosaur” in GoldenEye it is meant as an insult but accurately captures a fundamental aspect of the original character. This is because Fleming’s Bond—and, to a lesser but still palpable extent, the Bond of the films—was a relic of the Empire. His fate all the way through Fleming’s series is to risk all and suffer much on behalf of something that was crumbling anyway, often preventably and therefore pointlessly.

And so Fleming’s Bond grows more bitter and the novels more poignant and reflective as the series goes on. By the time of You Only Live Twice, the penultimate original novel, Bond is so alienated, so disillusioned with his work and what Britain has become, that the only person left who can understand him is a former enemy, a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Both know not only what it means to lose, permanently, but to survive to no apparent purpose.

By contrast, a Bond who shares the views dominant in media and academia is comfortable, static, and smug in a way Fleming’s Bond never could be. The original Bond is fighting what Tolkien called a “long defeat,” a doomed but heroic defense of something that will perish but is worthwhile anyway. Higson’s Bond critiques everything he sees from the lofty height of his own detached correctness. He would be more likely to process his trauma with a therapist than find a friend in a past enemy. He has nothing to learn, nothing to lose, and nothing to die for. He is right where he—and, indeed, everyone else—should be.

Blame the author. Fleming put a lot of himself into Bond; hence not only the womanizing and love of scrambled eggs but the bitterness, weariness, and disillusionment. Fleming was a dinosaur, too, and he knew it. Higson, on the other hand, and his Bond belong. Gooch:

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.

If a literary or even cinematic Bond is to retain any shred of his antiheroic character—or even to remain merely interesting—he’s going to have to become ever more an outsider in his behavior and opinions. He can do that simply by remaining himself. Whether the people at the levers of publishing and filmmaking will allow that is another question entirely.

Gooch’s entire review is worth reading, not only for its critique of Higson’s book but for its insight into the present cultural hegemony. I’ve written about Bond along similar lines several times before: here on the blog about the vein of melancholy running through Fleming’s stories as Bond watches the disintegration of the world he is defending, and at the University Bookman about Bond’s arc and Fleming’s craftsmanship. I’ve also speculated about what is to become of the film series and its Bond here.