Bowdlerizing Bond?

Apparently there are plans to reissue the Ian Fleming Bond novels later this year to mark the series' (and thus the franchise's) seventieth anniversary. (The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit print in 1953.)

It seems to me that this is more gesture toward the idea of the brand name "James Bond" attaching to an essentially coherent and thriving franchise than anything else given the lack of evidence for any audience for the novels themselves. Bond continuation novel author Raymond Benson himself acknowledged that the literary prose style of the Fleming originals (Fleming's writing the adventures of James Bond as if he were writing Madame Bovary) by itself suffices to make the books unsalable today, while even when Benson and his colleagues produced more accessible, brisker, more action-packed books they did not exactly set the bestseller lists on fire. (Indeed, so far as I am aware John Gardner's Win, Lose or Die was the last Bond novel to grace the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, way back in 1989, since which time there have been no fewer than eighteen more novels, none of which seem to have managed the feat.) And if anything the odds against a comeback only decline with time, as the public shifts away from print toward audiovisual media for its entertainment generally, and its dose of action-adventure especially.

It has also come to my attention that the books are being bowdlerized. Specifically there is an effort to edit out the more overtly racist material.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, in the hierarchy of concern among the status politics-minded sensitivity in matters of genders comes ahead of sensitivity in matters of race, and even were that not the case I would imagine that there is more offense taken at how he handled gender than race. (Indeed, while our culture warriors love to think of the '50s as right-wing heaven the ultra-Establishment Edwardian Tory Fleming was already being called out as a reactionary by the feminists of his day, and Fleming's reaction to them such that I suspect that Fleming sometimes played the troll--as in Goldfinger.) Certainly it would seem to say something that, to cite one of those more recent continuation writers, Anthony Horowitz went to extreme, in fact wildly anachronistic, lengths to make the gender politics of Trigger Mortis conform to the expectations of what we now call the "woke" (to the point of undoing Bond's "conversion" of Pussy Galore to heterosexuality, and subjecting Bond to a speech on gay liberation), but kept Bond's casual racism. (This was not least in his remarks about Slavs as a race into which "cold-bloodedness and contempt . . . seemed to be built"--which, no matter what Whoopi Goldberg thinks "racism" means, most certainly are racist, as we especially should not forget when discussing a book that hit print in a moment in which the Brexit-loving right whipped up hatred against Poles, and the most dangerous conflict of the post-Cold War era was brewing on the shores of the Black Sea along lines that make just how Westerners see Russia a matter not to be taken lightly.)

However, there is also the matter of—again--the way in which the books are written. The more inarguable racism in Fleming tends to consist of offhand remarks on the part of the characters or the narration, which can be easily cut out without affecting the larger narrative. By contrast what would appear offensive in the treatment of gender from the standpoint of entertainment-industrial complex standards in 2023 is deeply rooted in the stuff of the novel. A story like Casino Royale (and certainly Goldfinger) would be reduced to shreds if one tried to "fix" it, such that it would not be a matter of excising a little material here and there, but of a full-blown rewrite--after which pretending Fleming is the author of the result would be an empty piety by even the debased standard of these times. And so those are the adjustments they have elected to make.

Of course, to say that they can more easily make those adjustments is not the same as saying that they should do so--and I have to admit that I disapprove. While I certainly don't endorse Fleming's social attitudes (Bond's sneering attitude toward young people and the working class in the first pages of Thunderball, if not what causes controversy these days, were already an unpleasant surprise, and proved no anomaly) the fact remains that the books were written long ago by an author in no position to make decisions regarding his work. To me that in itself seems enough reason to leave things as they are. At the same time that the books have in their way become artifacts of cultural history--with the alteration not merely disrespect for an artist's creation (however we may judge the art), but an attack on the memory and understanding of the past, a thing even less forgivable.