Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.

On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

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.

Dr No - a BBC Radio drama

Based on Ian Fleming’s novel, BBC Radio 4’s Dr No stars Toby Stephens as James Bond and David Suchet as Dr Julius No

I grew up on radio dramas—mostly religious ones like “Adventures in Odyssey” or “Patch the Pirate” or, when, to my grief, I woke up in the deep watches of the night with WRAF on my clock radio, the harrowing “Unshackled”—and have enjoyed rediscovering them as an adult and a father. My own kids are getting to know the town of Odyssey’s large cast of characters, and we especially loved “Odyssey”-veteran Paul McCusker’s joyous and intelligent radio drama The Legends of Robin Hood.

But BBC Radio’s literary adaptations have become particular favorites of my family. We’re a third of the way through their classic Lord of the Rings starring Ian Holm, and we have enjoyed their radio adaptations of Treasure Island and the Richard Hannay adventures The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. And there is a great favorite among my kids, The Mark of Zorro, starring Val Kilmer, which I reviewed here a year ago today. Last weekend, I finally delved into their James Bond series.

The first in this series adapts—like the first Bond film—the fifth of Ian Fleming’s original novels, Dr No.

Dr No takes place several months after From Russia With Love, which ends on a stunning cliffhanger requiring Bond, in the followup, to have undergone extensive convalescence. The radio drama opens with Bond’s briefing from M, who wants to make sure Bond is fully recovered but still gives Bond what he thinks will be an easy assignment. One Commander Strangways, a key intelligence operative in Jamaica, has gone missing along with his secretary. The gossips have already concluded that the pair created false identities for themselves and eloped, but M wants Bond to make sure.

Bond departs Britain both relaxed and resentful. He is glad to be back in the Caribbean and working with a Jamaican local, Quarrel, who gave him life-saving assistance in Live and Let Die, but his familiarity with Jamaica and his resentment of the simple job given to him by M cause him to let his guard down. He immediately regrets it. A Chinese girl claiming to work for the Daily Gleaner snaps his photo as he arrives at the airport, and reappears when he and Quarrel have dinner and drinks at a Kingston dive. His suspicions are aroused and never allayed.

Bond encounters another Chinese girl working as a secretary for a local contact. The contact informs Bond that Strangways had been investigating one Dr Julius No, the reclusive owner and operator of a guano mine—which he works exclusively with imported Chinese labor—on nearby Crab Key. Asked to retrieve the files on the case, the secretary reveals that they are missing.

Though Quarrel warns him off of approaching Crab Key, which has a bad reputation—especially after a series of strange accidents involving representatives of the Audobon Society, who have taken an interest in the rare birds that nest on Dr No’s island—Bond decides to investigate more directly.

Quarrel and Bond make the 20-mile voyage to Crab Key by night and, the next morning, meet Honeychile Rider as she gathers shells on the beach. When Dr No’s men arrive and machine gun Honey’s canoe, the three form an ad hoc team as they work both to uncover what Dr No is doing and to survive long enough to escape the island. Not all of them will make it, and the danger will only grow crueler and more grotesque once Dr No captures them.

BBC Radio 4’s adaptation, first broadcast in 2008, hews very closely to Ian Fleming’s novel, even retaining many of the rough edges I would have expected to be sanded off in a modern adaptation—and kudos to them for letting the story be of its time and place. Sticking close to Fleming’s originals is always a plus. Dr No has always impressed me with its strong writing, characterization—especially for Honey Rider—suspense, and grim, brutal survivalist climax. Take what you imagine a Bond film to be like, remove the campiness of the worst of the movies, and cross it with The Most Dangerous Game, and you’re approaching the tone of this book. The adaptation conveys Bond’s doggedness and Dr No’s cruelty expertly, and the story builds steadily in excitement and intensity right up until the end.

The voice acting is excellent across the board. Toby Stephens, who played Bond villain Gustav Graves in the execrable Die Another Die and gave an outstanding audiobook performance of From Russia With Love, is very good as James Bond. Stephens’s Bond combines intelligence and a hard edge where screen Bonds often skew toward one or the other. Lisa Dillon and Clarke Peters offer solid support as Honeychile Rider and Quarrel—Quarrel and Bond’s strong laird and gamekeeper relationship is an often overlooked friendship in the Bond stories—and fans of certain British media will enjoy Peter Capaldi’s brief appearance as The Armourer, Major Boothroyd, the character who first equipped Bond with the Walther PPK and who eventually evolved into the films’ Q.

The standout, however, is David Suchet as Dr No. The villain only appears in the film third or so of the story and has limited “onscreen” time with Bond, but Suchet makes the most of it. His halting, metallic, alien voice is eerie and threatening, and the way he delivers his life story and cold, amoral, transhumanist worldview to Bond and Honey seems believable rather than the mere “monologuing” lampooned in The Incredibles. If, like me, you know Suchet primarily as Poirot, this performance should prove a startling surprise.

Dr No also features good sound effects that set the scene well, especially scenes on the beaches, in the mangrove swamps, and in the warehouses, subterranean quarters, and deathtraps of Crab Key. The adaptation’s original music by Mark Holden and Sam Barbour is a nice accent to the story, invoking the sound of classic Bond film scores without aping it.

For those with children, Dr No may be on the intense side. I listened to it with my kids and they were engrossed by it, finding the story unbearably suspenseful and Dr No unbearably creepy. I selected this one to listen to with them both because it was the first in this series and because I knew the novel had more action and less sex than some of the other stories. That held true for the adaptation, too. Aside from a scattering of mild language—most of it rather blunt discussions of Dr No’s bird guano—it was a good listen for my kids.

If the adaptation has any flaws, it is only through sins of omission rather than commission. This radio drama is just under ninety minutes long, and so while all the major events of the novel are present, they have been streamlined. The novel’s characters are presented well and excellently performed, but some of the depth of the novel has been lost. Bond’s resentments and his interiority are downplayed. Honey tells a shortened version of her tragic backstory—which I wrote about briefly a few months ago—but her goals and her reason for being on Crab Key are not elaborated upon. Likewise, I know why Bond was in the hospital for so long before the events of this story, but someone less familiar with the novels may not. I had to explain a little bit of that to my kids. But these are minor complaints.

The upside of this short adaptation is precisely that it is short—right at an hour and a half, an hour and a half spent on a perfectly paced and executed action-suspense story, perfect for a shorter holiday road trip or a quiet evening listening to the radio.

I had heard lots of good things about these radio adaptations of Fleming’s novels, and now I know why. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, the 2010 dramatization of Goldfinger, starring Stephens as Bond and Ian McKellen as Auric Goldfinger. You can listen to Dr No, Goldfinger, and the rest of the series in this YouTube playlist.

If you’re traveling over the holidays I hope BBC Radio 4’s Dr No will give y’all a good hour and a half of thrills, and that you’ll go on to listen to more, as I plan to. Even better, read some Ian Fleming in the new year! Regardless, have a merry Christmas, and thanks for reading.

Particularity redux

A few weeks ago, in asking what it is that novels are supposed to do, I brought up the particularity of storytelling. Particularity—specifics, details, “proofs” that the story “is actually happening”—is one of the non-negotiable necessities of good storytelling. Even minimalist fables or didactic stories like Jesus’s parables begin with “a certain man.”

Yesterday I came across this episode of “What’s the Difference?” a YouTube series comparing books to their film adaptations. It’s a relatively new one covering Dr No, the sixth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels but the first in the film series. The first half of the video impressed me, doing an excellent job of explaining Bond’s physical, psychological, and—one might suggest—spiritual degradation by that point in Fleming’s novels as well as the reserve of endurance that keeps Bond going.

But then the video’s two narrators, whom I call A and B below, introduce Honey Rider (Ryder in the film) this way: Upon arriving on Crab Key in the film,

A: Bond discovers Honey Ryder collecting seashells on the beach in what would become one of the most famous bikinis of the twentieth century.

B: In the book, Honey Rider is completely nude, save for the knife belt at her waist, and sports a badly broken nose. It’s a real sticking point with her character that she’s ashamed of the nose, and just really wants to be pretty? She also shares with Bond her ambition to move to the US and be a prostitute until she’s rich enough to move back to Jamaica and get married, so… it’s just real in line with what a dude writing a sexy spy novel in the fifties thought of women.

A: Right. But the movie in the sixties wasn’t much better.

There’s a lot going on here—not least the dismissive reference to Fleming as “a dude,” which has become a noticeable leftwing verbal tic—but I want to focus on the idea of Honey Rider as what Fleming “thought of women.” Women, categorically.

I’m not here to defend Fleming’s beliefs or attitudes about sex or the sexes—though I probably have a completely different set of objections to his morals than the people who made this video—but I have to point out one major problem with his facile take on the character: Honey Rider is not women. She is a specific, particular woman.

Honeychile Rider has an entire personal history that she gets to relate, herself, in the course of the novel, and her own independent set of motivations, goals, and needs, and these are specifically her motivations, goals, and needs. She’s smart, tough, and capable even if ignorant of much of the rest of the world, but that’s only because she was orphaned at a young age, left essentially homeless to be raised by an old nanny, and finally sexually assaulted by a violent drunk—which is how she got her broken nose and why she’s so self-conscious about it. She has few options, but she’s doing what she can to get by. She is one of the most well-realized, compelling, and tragic of Fleming’s characters, and that is all down to the specifics of who she uniquely is.

But the video’s creators ignore all this. It’s funnier to pass over this well-rounded, compassionately-presented, and interesting character as just another bimbo dreamed up by an old-timey misogynist. It also fits an acceptable narrative and a particular style of online posturing.

A few months ago I ran across a line from Malcolm Muggeridge in which he presciently criticized “thinking in categories, rather than thinking.” This kind of thinking, especially about storytelling, elides the specifics that are “the life blood of fiction” and collapses the particular into the general, so that you end up the kind of person who sees Honey Rider and thinks only “woman” before moving on to condemn Fleming and Bond. Or perhaps “white,” and then condemning all three.

Talking about specific characters as avatars of entire classes of people is lazy, incurious, unfair to both art and artist, and—perhaps worst of all—destructive of the imagination. If you find yourself talking this way, especially to make a flippant joke, stop.

I wrote a longish Goodreads review of Dr No when I last listened to it about two years ago. You can read that for more on one of Fleming’s most suspenseful, action-packed novels here.

Whither 007?

James Bond pauses to reflect in Scotland’s Glen Etive in Skyfall (2012)

It’s been a little less than a year since Daniel Craig’s final performance as James Bond arrived, and thanks to an interview with the Bond series’ producers in Variety, 007 was briefly back in the news this week. So, much like Bond in the final act of Skyfall, I’m cleaning house. The following is a grab-bag of thoughts on the future of the Bond film series, most of which I’ve been mulling over since No Time to Die came out last fall.

The search for a new Bond

The Variety piece in question is based on an interview with Eon Productions heads Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson and primarily concerns the hunt for Craig’s replacement.

Naturally, since internet memes now rule the world, it takes only two paragraphs for Idris Elba to come up. Variety calls him a “long-time Bond candidate” when it would be more accurate to say “a Twitter favorite,” but Broccoli and Wilson are noncommittal. In what they must have known would be seized upon by the purveyors of clickbait, they say only “He’s great. . . . We love Idris.” Sure enough, this is what got Bond back in the public eye for about five minutes. But given the way movie studios and film producers intentionally stir the pot for publicity now, this may have been the whole point of the interview.

Elba is a talented, imposing actor with great natural gravitas. (I wish he’d had more time to inject a little reality back into “The Office,” for example.) But he’s inappropriate for Bond. The character as created by Ian Fleming is a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, Anglo-Scottish-French man. Invoke diversity and all the other usual bromides, but all literary characters must have some immutable properties and traits. Change too many of them, reduce the character to a name that you can apply to whatever set of fashionable traits you like, and you give away that what you’re talking about is a brand, not a character.

The satanic temptation of treating art as “content” is the endlessly interchangeable parts. Call Bond the Spy of Theseus.

Most of the rest of the Variety interview is pap. I’m not sure how seriously to take a lot of what Broccoli and Wilson say; they’re old pros, having inherited the Bond franchise from their father, and they know how to say what people want to hear even if it doesn’t make sense. For instance:

Both Wilson and Broccoli, who is a director of the U.K. chapter of women’s advocacy org Time’s Up, have left their mark on Bond, particularly in humanizing the once-womanizing spy and ensuring more fulfilling, meatier roles for the female stars of the franchise. These are qualities that will continue in the next films, says Broccoli.

“It’s an evolution,” she says. “Bond is evolving just as men are evolving. I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.”

Pardon me, but I thought womanizing was a human quality. And there’s the standard pablum about men “evolving.” This is content-free rhetoric.

I’ve been thinking about this more deeply for a while, especially since reading this humorous but incisive piece by James Lileks written during virtually the same tedious, self-congratulatory debates about race-lifting and gender-swapping and other “reimaginings” a year ago. Here Lileks reflects on the evolution Broccoli invokes above:

The old days of swank Bond are long gone. The modern series is worthy; Daniel Craig has an unruffled precision that summons up the classic Bond, and he adds a bit more steel than Connery had. But for the rest of our days we will have an endless debate about whether Bond should be a woman next, or black, or both, or biracial and gender-fluid. Their name’s Bxnd. Jxmxs Bxnd.

(As a measure of how predictable these controversies are, I remembered Lileks’s piece as coming in response to all the “non-binary Bond” clickbait last year. But that story broke after Broccoli—remember that bit about saying things people want to hear?—floated the idea on a podcast in December, and Lileks wrote this two months earlier.)

More constructively, Lileks has an answer both to the question of changing Bond’s race (“The answer is, of course, no. That would be Scottish erasure”) and the implicit question of diversifying stories like the Bond series, the answer I’ve been shouting for years: “Another British secret agent who’s not a white male would be fine. They just can’t use the Bond inheritance. Make someone new! We’ll watch.”

Yes! Create your own things! That’s how we got Indiana Jones. And where would the fantasy genre be if everyone insisted on endlessly repurposing Tolkien’s creations rather than coming up with their own? (Okay, bad example. But the point stands.)

Of course, creating your own things requires creativity, and in our age of envy, fanfic, and Melkor-like vandalism everyone wants to control but not to make. As Lileks puts it, “The old characters have to be remade by a form of cultural parasitism that burrows into the host and consumes it completely.”

Let’s hope something survives. In the meantime, those of you who can, be creating new things.

Learning from Craig

Lileks is right about Craig’s “unruffled precision” and his “bit more steel than Connery,” who had quite a lot of steel. But revisiting his essay, I couldn’t help but connect it to this other comment from the Variety interview:

With [Craig], when we had the conversation at this very table about, you know, [whether he was] going to do it, he said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it. I really want to be a part of it, the whole thing.’ And he lived to regret that,” says Broccoli with a burst of laughter.

When Craig was committed to the part, his Bond was fantastic. I rank Casino Royale and Skyfall in my top five Bond films. But he quite publicly struggled with caring about the character and somnambulated through Spectre, which has scenes in which he visibly doesn’t give a crap. (Watch this scene. Imagine the panache Connery or Moore could have brought to the sly salute Bond gives the villains. Now compare everything Craig does in the plane to how well he sells annoyance at the beginning of the scene.)

Broccoli and Wilson act lighthearted about it, but it appears—and one certainly hopes—that Craig has taught them that they need to convey what a huge commitment the role is, and that they will look for someone who doesn’t treat it with contempt after three films.

More seriously for both the series and its individual movies, I think the continuity built into Craig’s films, most especially through Mr White and Madeleine Swann, was a mistake. Departing from the series’ historically episodic structure overcomplicated the stories, required a more casual audience to remember who characters like Mr White were, and led to the unconvincing, tone-deaf love story that No Time to Die relied upon for its emotional power. This also retroactively cheapened Bond and Vesper Lynd’s relationship in Casino Royale, as well as undermining the transformation Bond undergoes at the end of that story.

I felt something of this when I reviewed No Time to Die but I believe it firmly now. With the standard exceptions of recurring characters, Bond’s status as a hardened veteran, and just two women—Vesper Lynd and Tracy Bond—everything else should be episodic, with each film standing alone. This was the model from Connery onward and both makes the series easier and more fun to watch and—if you need to go deeper—reflects the way Bond actually lives his life.

Finally, stripped-down, lower-stakes stories may be in order. Part of the appeal of Casino Royale was its grounded feel: an international crook screws up, loses an African warlord’s money, and is trying to get it back before anyone notices. By the end of the Craig run we have murderous DNA-reading nanobots spreading across the world via rocket. The series has laudably stayed true to its tradition of good action, real stunts, and practical effects where possible, but scaling the threats back can only help the next man to don 007’s tuxedo and shoulder holster.

My contenders

Everyone has their list of actors they’d like to see as the next James Bond. Since everyone’s doing it, here are mine.

For years—ever since I gave up on Clive Owen, my go-to imaginary Bond in college—my favorite for the part has been Michael Fassbender. I’ve thought this for a decade now, ever since he put on a tuxedo to go undercover with Gina Carano in Haywire—which is also an excellent example of the kind of no-frills, small-scale, but well crafted spy movie the Bond franchise would do well to learn from. Fassbender is how I imagine Fleming’s Bond, matching him closely in appearance as well as carrying himself with the kind of simultaneously attractive and scary attitude that Fleming describes. He can do action, he radiates intelligence and hidden depths, and can be both charming and menacing at the same time.

However, he is only five years younger than the much-ballyhooed Elba, so unless he were to crank out a movie every other year I doubt his tenure would result in many movies. Alas for my imagination, Fassbender’s time may have passed.

I’ve seen a lot of other proposed Bonds on the internet, and, cutting through the trolling and I-dare-you-to-object candidates, a few good options include Dan Stevens, who did a marvelous Casino Royale audiobook reading, and Henry Cavill, who was misused as Superman but exuded a lot of Bond-like charm in The Man from UNCLE. He’s also only 39, so that decade that Broccoli and Wilson are demanding of their next Bond would be easier on him.

The only other serious candidate I’ve mentally entertained is Tom Hiddleston, who is apparently another internet favorite for the part. I’ve been open to the idea since watching “The Night Manager,” based on a novel by the anti-Fleming, John le Carré. Hiddleston is smooth, charming, and intelligent in that series but also convincingly tough. His Bond would be lighter than Fassbender’s, which is also where the challenge for a Hiddleston Bond would lie: Hiddleston is a very, very funny man—probably one of the traits that gives him such precise timing as an actor—and that wit and comedic sensibility would have to remain securely in its proper place. Letting it run wild would turn a Hiddleston Bond into late-70s Roger Moore self-parody.

But who knows? If the search goes anything like the one that landed Craig in the role, we’ll never predict the final choice.

A modest proposal

In their interview with Variety, Broccoli and Wilson emphasize that the Bond series is and will remain theatrical, seemingly ruling out any kind of streaming series for Bond. I was glad to read this and support their position completely.

But…

If they want to carry on with Bond as a theatrical film franchise and dip their toes into prestige TV, streaming or not, I’ve thought for several years now that Ian Fleming’s Bond short stories, collected in For Your Eyes Only and the posthumous Octopussy, would make an excellent limited series.

As I noted in my essay on Fleming last year, the Bond short stories are among Fleming’s best work and are each expertly crafted little masterpieces. They are set in numerous interesting locations—the Caribbean, unsurprisingly, but also the Alps, the Seychelles, the mountains of Vermont, downtown Manhattan, the border of divided Berlin—and vary dramatically in form, tone, style, and genre. It’s an anthology series just waiting to be made.

Set them in their original mid-1950s to early 1960s period, keep them faithful to the source material—complete with the callousness and the seventy Morland cigarettes a day—and craft each as a standalone 60-90 minute episode, and I think they would not only play well for audiences but breathe some fresh life into the character by putting him back in touch with his origins. Everything old becomes new again.

For what it’s worth, it’s this idea in which I’ve most clearly seen Hiddleston as Bond (perhaps because he read the excellent audiobook version of Octopussy), but if they wanted to get really experimental with it they could change the casting from episode to episode. Or perhaps the strengths I pointed out in Fassbender above could be put to use here, as the aging World War II veteran of Fleming’s later novels.

Just a thought. Though I’m always open to receiving a finder’s fee.

Orbis non sufficit

Why does any of this matter? It probably doesn’t, except insofar as it reflects how and why people tell and enjoy stories today. And I think enjoyment is key. We’re storytelling creatures, so that matters. Hollywood, in its rush to make “important” movies—which being translated is propaganda—seems to have forgotten the basic craft and purpose of storytelling.

But Bond specifically continues to appeal because, with all his flaws, he has stood at the center of seventy years of compelling action adventure. A mere man from a past age will die; a literary character from a past age has the advantage of immortality in decades and even centuries of imaginations.

I want to give Lileks the last word. Here, reflecting on the charge that Bond is old-fashioned, too old-fashioned and problematic for the precise and delicate tooling and microscopic tolerances of the modern imagination, he reaches the same conclusion I did last summer:

Of course Bond is archaic. The very idea of a highly competent, serious intelligence agency that protects national interests seems quaint, at least to those of us in the West. A white guy who does secret-missiony things to preserve the stability of Western nations is just an exercise in justifying the colonialist order, no? There was that scene in Casino Royale where Bond really got worked over, and you hear bones crack—talk about your white fragility. But Bond endures, because he embodies necessary things.

More if you’re interested

You can read the whole piece with Broccoli and Wilson at Variety here and James Lileks’s humorous piece on Bond here. (If you only read one of them, read Lileks. It’s hilarious and insightful and even a little moving.) I wrote about Ian Fleming’s superb craftsmanship at the University Bookman almost exactly a year ago here, and reflected on the pervasive melancholy of Fleming’s stories here.

I’ve mentioned several of the excellent audiobook performances of Fleming’s original novels. Each is read by a superb British actor. I mentioned Hiddleston and Stevens, but among the other readers are Bill Nighy, Damian Lewis, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs, Hugh Bonneville, and Rosamund Pike. They’re great. Check them out here.

No Time to Die

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die

It’s clear to me now why No Time to Die’s release was delayed so often and for so long—who, at any point last year, could have really enjoyed a movie about an invisible microscopic threat that originated in a secret lab, that spreads person to person by close contact, that could potentially infect the whole world, and that you can’t remove once it’s tainted you?

The lab, in this case, is not in Wuhan but in London, and the microscopic threat is not a virus but a nanobot technology codenamed Heracles.

The story

At the beginning of No Time to Die, as highly proficient and heavily armed agents infiltrate the lab with the aid of a turncoat scientist, Heracles is referred to only as “the weapon.” Only later does it become clear what the weapon actually is, what kind of damage it’s capable of, and, crucially, who is stealing it.

Following the breach of the lab, M (Ralph Fiennes) sends for 007—but he doesn’t mean James Bond. Bond is five years into a long overdue retirement, whiling away his days fishing and sailing out of a luxury bungalow on the Jamaican coast. He has dropped off the grid following the film’s cold open, a bifurcated tale that is one part flashback for erstwhile Bond paramour Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux, returning from Spectre) and one part resolution to Bond’s leftover affection for Vesper Lynd of Casino Royale. We learn some of Madeleine’s tragic backstory, and we see an attempt on Bond’s life by agents of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in the Italian town where Vesper is buried. Bond assumes that Madeleine had something to do with Blofeld’s men finding and almost killing him, so he puts her on a train and disappears from her life—or so they both think.

When we catch up to Bond he’s had an unexpected visit from Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and an even more unexpected visit from the new 007—Nomi (Lashana Lynch). Leiter wants Bond to help him find the missing scientist from the lab heist scene. Nomi wants Bond to stay out of it. Bond can’t resist getting involved, and so he’s off to Cuba.

In Cuba it becomes clear that much more is going on than a simple laboratory theft, and even clearer that Blofeld and SPECTRE are not behind it. Bond and his contact in Cuba, Paloma (Ana de Armas), walk into a trap, and after extricating themselves from that and swiping the scientist from Nomi, Bond and Leiter are betrayed.

From here Bond returns to London and M’s office—now wearing a “Visitor” ID badge—and applies himself to some detective work. He gains an interview with the imprisoned Blofeld but must be accompanied by Blofeld’s psychiatrist, who turns out to be Madeleine. Her discomfort at seeing Bond again after several years is not all down to failed relationship awkwardness. She has recently been approached by an ominous figure from that flashback in the cold open, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who has a special request for her.

Events in London don’t end well, and so while Nomi tracks down a lead on a double agent, Bond is off to Norway to reconnect with Madeleine and learn more about the threat that is slowly and lethally revealing itself.

I can’t say much more about the plot without giving things away, but suffice it to say that the movie clips along brilliantly from Norway to its final destination, slowly gathering speed until the final confrontation and revelation.

The good

No Time to Die is a whole lot of movie. It’s two hours and forty-three minutes long but (mostly) keeps moving, helped along by a lot of traditional Bond globetrotting, energetic and well-staged action scenes, Hans Zimmer’s score, good performances, and a (mostly) intriguing plot.

The film is brilliant on the technical side. The costumes and sets look great, especially the concrete bunkers where Safin and Bond face each other down at the end, and the special effects and stunt work are outstanding. All of the action scenes are good, not only enjoyable but exciting. I particularly liked a fight in a foggy Norwegian forest, in which Bond is forced to improvised in much the way he did at the end of Skyfall, and the climactic sequence, set in a repurposed Cold War-era missile silo, feels like a level from GoldenEye for N64 in the best possible way. I really thrilled as the film approached the conclusion.

No Time to Die is also beautiful to look at, as it was shot on 65mm film and mostly in the real places where the film takes place—Italy, London, Jamaica, Norway, and finally the Faroe Islands standing in for “disputed islands” between Japan and Russia. The cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, makes full use of the format for Lawrence of Arabia-scale landscapes and beauty shots. The lab heist at the beginning, taking place high on a London skyscraper at sunset, is stunning.

The cast perform well from top to bottom, though I felt Ralph Fiennes could have used more screentime and Christoph Waltz needed either more or none at all. Like some others, I was worried about the direction the film would take Nomi as a “new” 007, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. Nomi’s got a big attitude, but after some genuinely enjoyable rivalry in the early going she and Bond learn to respect and work with each other. They even have some of the film’s best banter, with Bond often getting the last word. It’s also in this snipping back-and-forth with Nomi that we get the clearest glimpses of the Bond from the early Craig movies rather than the sleepwalker from Spectre.

And while I’ve seen a few people criticize Rami Malek’s Safin as a “weak” Bond villain, I disagree. I found him a real threat, and his first appearance since the cold open, in which he is masked, is genuinely menacing. What I do wish is that he had more time in the film and that his motivations regarding his ultimate plans for Heracles—moving from wiping out certain bad people to spreading it worldwide—were clearer. Is this a eugenics project? Racially motivated genocide—as his pet scientist hints he could do if he wanted? Pure nihilism? I’ve seen the movie twice and I’m still not sure about this.

The film also features some nice nods to previous films and even Fleming’s original stories. The porcelain bulldog willed to Bond by Judi Dench’s M in Skyfall shows up, for example, and Safin’s garden of poisonous plants comes straight from the novel You Only Live Twice.

The bad

I’ve hinted at a few misgivings about the movie. I’m not completely sure the plot involving Blofeld leading SPECTRE from prison makes sense. I got more of it on a second viewing—for example, how one of Blofeld’s henchmen wound up working as one of Safin’s henchmen later in the film—but I think the plot moves quickly through this to conceal its basic implausibility.

Unusually for Bond, he is also prone to speechifying in this film. Two scenes stand out—one about halfway through in which he opens his heart to Madeleine, and one in which he berates Safin as an “angry little man” who is “playing God.” Bond can care deeply about women he loves and loathe a hubristic enemy, but this has seldom been something laid out for the audience in soliloquy. This is not a big problem, but an oddity of the writing and one that doesn’t jibe with what we know of Bond. (The movie overexplains things elsewhere, too, as when the scientist, having gone rogue, says to himself what is happening, or when Q’s computer announces “Blofeld’s bionic eyeball unlocked,” a system message that deserves to become immortal.)

No Time to Die is overlong, and it is overstuffed. Its fast and well-managed pacing doesn’t fully resolve either of these problems (I’ll have a lot more to say about that below). When I write that M or Safin could use more screentime, I’m not arguing for a longer movie but a re-proportioned one, one that trims away or removes some sidestories and subplots that, while contributing to the plot, also add to the sense of bloat and diffusion.

And I think I know why this is, but I can’t examine that without giving things away. So if you’ve seen the movie, feel free to continue into the spoiler territory below.

My biggest misgiving—spoilers ahead

I need to set this complicated but ultimately rather mild criticism up with two spoilers: Bond and Madeleine have a five-year old daughter, Mathilde; and, at the end, Bond, infected with Heracles nanobots that would target and kill Madeleine and Mathilde if he so much as touches them, dies stopping Safin’s plan.

I think No Time to Die missteps by bringing Madeleine back from Spectre—and in giving her and Bond a child. The film would be shorter, tighter, and—in Bond’s death—more powerful without Madeleine.

Some of my criticism is purely practical. With the exception of Sylvia Trench, who disappeared after the first two Connery films, Bond has never had a girlfriend carry over from one movie to another. It’s out of character.

Furthermore, Madeleine being the daughter of Mr White requires the audience to recall who Mr White is and some of what he’s been responsible for if they want to understand Safin’s motivation. This is a tall order for casual fans. (My wife, for instance, was mystified by the connection.) While there have always been some continuities in the Bond series, the films mostly stand alone—for a reason.

(Also: I’m not usually the type to make internet neckbeard arguments about believability, but I did have to question the wisdom of Her Majesty’s government in clearing Madeleine to meet regularly with Blofeld, given that she’s the daughter of a known terrorist financier with ties to two other terrorist leaders. There are surely other psychiatrists in London.)

It also seems like the screenwriters never quite decided what to do with Mathilde, Bond and Madeleine’s daughter. After Safin kidnaps her, he uses Mathilde as a powerful bargaining chip, manipulating both Madeleine and, in one of the film’s tensest scenes, Bond. But when Mathilde becomes even slightly inconvenient he abandons her. Thereafter, Mathilde becomes what TV Tropes calls The Load, a helpless human cargo for the hero to heft along while also fighting the bad guy.

And that, the conclusion, with Bond facing his death, is the root of my biggest misgiving. As Bond, wounded and bleeding out and also infected with Heracles, calls in a missile strike to obliterate Safin’s stores of Heracles but that will also surely kill him, too, he has a tearful conversation with Madeleine by radio. She confirms that Mathilde is his child. He tells her he loves her. He smiles. The missiles home in and Bond dies a glorious death.

And it doesn’t quite work—at least not for me.

What the movie gets right is that Bond can’t grow old and harmless, withering into senescence in retirement. If Bond is ever to die, it must be in the line of duty, because it has always been duty—Queen and Country—that drives him, and he has always endured, with a stiff upper lip and a wry comment, as a result. Men like Bond come and go but England is forever, even with the collapse and irrelevance of the Empire. A brief exchange between Safin and Bond nails this. Called “redundant” by Safin, Bond begs to differ: “Not as long as there are men like you around.”

What the movie gets wrong is its diffusion of our investment in Bond’s sacrifice. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’s defeating an enemy of Britain and saving the world? That works. Are we pulling for Bond to succeed and weeping at his sacrifice because he’ll save but never again see Madeleine and Mathilde? That also works. Either of these things could have been fine, but not both together. Ironically, by bringing Madeleine back and giving her and Bond a child, presumably to give Bond a more intimate, personal stake in the plot, the screenwriters actually lower the stakes. This might have worked, because Skyfall did it—and did it better, because there the personal and the patriotic were united in the figure of M. Here, the two halves of Bond’s motivation are separate and distract from each other.

Trimming these subplots, especially replacing Madeleine with another character with no tie to the events of previous films, could have untangled some of the middle of the film’s plot complications and, in the conclusion, allowed the audience to focus solely on Bond’s confrontation with Safin.

The result, ultimately, is a fast-paced but overcomplicated plot that also doesn’t quite work tonally or in terms of Bond’s character.

Conclusion

That’s a lot of explanation about what I think doesn’t quite gel in No Time to Die, but there I’m minutely examining the difference between a B+ and a B- movie. Most of the film works, and works well. I just think it could have been even better. Even if long, slightly overcomplicated, and taking one too many missteps in the conclusion, its fast pace, excellent action, and great performances will keep the Bond name alive for a long time to come. It’s a worthy conclusion for Daniel Craig’s run as Bond.

I’m going to miss Craig as 007. For me, No Time to Die ranks below, but not too far below, the two masterpieces from his tenure—Casino Royale and Skyfall. I don’t know what will come after Craig, but I’m hopeful, and I appreciate what he brought to the character for fifteen years.

Thank you, 007. That’ll be all.

Bloody big ship

Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)

One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.

Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:

They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.

The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.

And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.

The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.

But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.

Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:

Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.

I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.