Review: Win, Lose or Die, by John Gardner

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989, pp. 319.

In Win, Lose or Die, the British carrier Invincible is set as the site of a secret conference between the British, American and Soviet leaders during the Landsea 89 military exercise. However, British intelligence discovers a threat to the conference from a formerly obscure group named the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism (BAST). M responds by assigning 007 to protect the conference personally, a job that requires Bond to return to shipboard service in the Royal Navy.

As might be expected from such a premise, Win is another unusual Bond novel, after the pattern of John Gardner's earlier Role of Honor (1984), in Bond's taking a long undercover assignment (year-length in this case) for which he has to master a highly technical task (piloting Harriers).

Additionally, the job requires the normally solitary Bond to formally head up a very large personal security detail--and a combined Anglo-American-Soviet operation at that. There is, too, the fact that where even in Role Bond got to live it up in Monaco, for much of this story Bond trades his tailored suits and tuxedos for a Royal Navy uniform; his metropolitan restaurants, nightclubs and casinos for a base canteen and shipboard accommodations; and our usually lone, high-living operative is subject to military discipline and the structure of an armed forces environment. Indeed, Gardner depicts Bond's training to fly the Harrier at length, and then sets the full second half of the book aboard the Invincible.

Making things odder still is the prominent appearance of real-life political figures—instead of generic British, American and Soviet leaders, or characters clearly alluding to those occupying the relevant offices, Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev are not only described, but named, and rather than remaining part of the background, actually interact with Bond during two scenes. Besides the novelty of using such figures, this also dates the book's events in a fairly precise fashion.

Just as the Bond films were emulating American action films in these years, so was this book an obvious response to the box office success of Top Gun in 1986, and the booming of the military techno-thriller genre during the mid- and late-1980s in the hands of writers like Tom Clancy. Essentially what Gardner did was to take Bond and stick him in a techno-thriller centering on the British navy.

The blend ends up being problematic on both counts, as military techno-thriller, and Bond novel. To be sure, Gardner's handling of the relevant story mechanics is on the whole competent. The flying sequences in particular balance technical detail and action, and retain their coherence through the inevitable thicket of jargon and frenzied aircraft handling. However, the loose, episodic structure normal for techno-thrillers of this kind is awkward. Their diffuse plots tend to give more or less equal time to the multiple viewpoint characters they track through the unfolding of a crisis--the real subject of the book--the narrative checking in with them only as they become privy to something interesting.1 Win keeps the usual focus on Bond, though, so that instead of the usual of tightness given by rapid cutting back and forth among various story threads, the reader is much more conscious of reading a year-long chronicle of the events leading up to the climactic attack; of the hurrying over the dull stretches to get to more interesting bits not easily tied together into a whole. Additionally, where techno-thrillers typically strive for the illusion of realism, Win is packed with even more than the usual number of over-the-top plot twists associated with this kind of story--as in its Italian episode, which can seem like a bit of the self-parody toward which Gardner so often inclined in and out of this series.

At the same time, the book leaves much to be desired as a Bond novel. If the sense of the book's looseness undermines its effectiveness as a techno-thriller, it is even worse for the book's effectiveness as a Bond thriller. The villain Bassam Baradj and his BAST organization appear just grandiosely scaled-up repetition of the previous Gardner novel's titular Scorpius, like him a man of obscure background who made a fortune selling arms to terrorists, cultivated a fanatical following, and behind the pretense of realizing a chiliastic plan, is just after the money--specifically looking to pull off a big score after which he intends to retire in comfort. The scaling up of the idea from suicide bombings to taking over an aircraft carrier merely makes the idea look sillier.

This is the more so because of the villains' plans for getting their money for the release of Bush, Thatcher and Gorbachev. Where SPECTRE was very specific about the manner in which it wanted its ransom money delivered in Thunderball, here the way in which the sum is supposed to be paid is never made quite clear, and Bond in fact points this out to the villain, who has no answer to offer to the charge--with the result that the extravagant numbers Baradj's people throw around seem like more self-parody (and that of a kind no more subtle than Dr. Evil's).

It does not help that the final confrontation between Bond and Baradj is so anti-climactic. (Baradj doesn't even get to make the customary Big Speech.)

And personally speaking, the high-living Bond never seems quite right to me when he is leading a more spartan existence; the individualistic Bond never quite right when he has to properly be part of a team (rather than just the special operative working with a team). It seems that he did not entirely feel right about these things himself, to go by the blimpishness he displays. After his return to more conventional naval duties, Bond walks about Woodstock looking with contempt at working class young people and thinking that

he would, if pushed, like to see the countless young people crowding those very bars banished to some kind of National Service--preferably in the armed forces. That, he considered, would take violence off the streets of country towns, and make men out of the louts who littered pavements and got drunk at the sniff of a barmaid’s apron.

Of course, such sentiments are not totally unprecedented on Bond's part. Still, never did the charge of "Octogenarian!" that Bond once had occasion to fling at Tanaka seem more applicable to Bond himself. One can take that as yet another joke Gardner has at Bond's expense, and so again, as with many of Gardner's books, it seems to me that the question of whether one is prepared to laugh at Bond is a major determinant of whether one can get into this particular edition of his adventures.

1. It is worth remembering that in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, only a third of the text actually depicted Jack Ryan and his activities. Excepting Patriot Games (more conventional spy story than techno-thriller), the narratives of the later novels tended to be even more diffuse.

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.

Just Out . . .

My new book, James Bond's Evolution: From Casino Royale to Spectre.

Where my recent The Forgotten James Bond focuses on overlooked aspects of the James Bond series, Evolution traces, in linear fashion, the development of the franchise from its origin with Fleming to the books and films of the present.

You can preview it on Google, here, and also check it out on Amazon.

Book Review: Death is Forever, by John Gardner

In the opening pages of Death is Forever we learn that Cabal, a hugely successful Anglo-American spy ring run in East Germany during the Cold War, completely ceased to operate within the week of German reunification—without any orders to do so from its British and American controllers. Two years later the British Secret Service and the CIA send the case officers who had run Cabal--Briton Fred Puxley (code name, "Vanya") and American Elizabeth Caerns (code name, "Eagle")--back to Germany to find out why. After arriving in country both those officers are killed within a week of each other, and under unusual circumstances, suggesting murder by Cold War-era methods long out of date--Vanya apparently "flyswatted" by a driver in Frankfurt, while Eagle was killed by a cyanide gun. This eliminates any doubt of enemy action and makes getting to the bottom of the whole matter the more urgent, so the two agencies send another pair of operatives to continue what Puxley and Caerns began. The CIA sends Elizabeth Zara ("Easy") St. John to become the new Eagle, and the British send James Bond to be the new Vanya. On the ground they soon discover that some party, out to get them, has also been picking off the network's members, all on the way toward realizing bigger plans . . .

In placing a German spy ring at the center of the plot, Death is Forever recalls the earlier No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987), but with its classically Cold War Central European setting, and emphasis on "tradecraft" (dead drops, safe houses, secret signaling methods, the mechanics of tailing and evading tails, etc.), which actually go along with a downplaying of Flemingesque extravagances (a murder attempt using Fiddlestick spiders apart), this makes this post-Cold War story feel even more Cold War than Gardner's actual Cold War adventures.

The result is that while this is in a sense the first truly post-Cold War Bond novel, it is also the most backward looking entry in the series to date, starting with the outmoded killing methods used against Cabal's case officers. The shadows of Markus Wolf, Bogdan Stashinsky, Lavrenti Beria and Joseph Stalin loom large over the events, every one of these names repeatedly cropping up in the story, while Bond himself makes an explicit comparison between the post-Cold War and the post-World War II era in which the Cold War was born, thinking of the way "the various secret agencies had their work cut out sniffing around for Nazis hiding in the woodpile of freedom."

The backward glance is evident, too, in the more than usually pronounced metafictional aspect of the novels. At one point Easy is described as "dressed right out of a '60s spy movie." Preparing to ride the Ost-West Express, Bond remarks "Night train to Paris. Sounds like a 1930s movie title," which is not the only evocation of the latter. Later, Gardner writes that this is Bond's first trip "on a continental railway train for years," one which brought back to him "the noises, sights and smells" of "criss-cross[ing] Europe on the great network of express trains while on operations at the height of the Cold War." Still, if it is the heavy evocation of Cold War culture in the broad that is most conspicuous, there are numerous, specific references to earlier Bond books--the epigram from Diamonds Are Forever, which clearly inspired the title, actually the first words after the title page. Later Bond casually mentions that his looks had once been compared to Hoagy Carmichael's (as Fleming had done way back in Casino Royale, and Gardner had only done in his exceptionally determined effort to evoke Fleming in For Special Services), and even has occasion to give detailed instruction about the preparation of his martini to a server, and be complimented by the server for having done so (again, just as in Casino Royale).

Perhaps unsurprisingly the book's choice of villains, and their scheme, likewise reflect the past more than the present--a collection of Stalinist die-hards who think that assassinating the leaders of the European Union's member countries as they ride aboard a train through the newly opened Chunnel will produce a power vacuum the Communists can somehow fill, achieving final victory for their ideology. The idea would have been silly in 1982, let alone 1992 (just where were the Communists who were actually supposed to be doing the vacuum-filling?), so much so that I have wondered if this too was not a bit of parody, though I saw no sign of comedic intent this time. Rather it seems to me that amid the collapsing market for spy fiction Gardner, like many others, had his doubts about the future of the fictional spy in the post-Cold War era, and Bond with him.

Interestingly this all happened as Gardner displayed a more nuanced attitude toward Soviet history than I expected to see in the Bond novel. Rather than just the orthodox Anti-Communism Fleming, and Bond, displayed, we see Gardner write of Stalin as "the true evil, which had . . . overtaken the ideology of Marx and Lenin," and "warped and bent the system into a new dogma of terror," "twist[ing] Communism" into what it eventually became--implying, in contrast with that standard right-wing view, that Marxism, Communism and the rest of the package cannot be reduced to Stalinism-according-to-Robert Conquest. (Indeed, Gardner the former theater critic writes of the famed Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht as "the late, great Bertolt Brecht.")

Perhaps Gardner had a leftish streak all along which could in this more relaxed moment be more easily displayed (such a streak would certainly have been yet another reason for him to have a hard time taking 007 seriously)--but especially given that up to this point he had been quite content to offer up as his Soviet baddies conventional Cold War caricatures of the kind with which Fleming would not have had a problem, it could simply be that he found it easy to be charitable toward the old enemy as it passed from the scene, and even came to be missed, if only as the old enemy, and only for lack of a focus for one's hates.

At the same time there was a sense of losing, along with old enemies, old friends, at least to go by how Bond's CIA colleague Easy is written. Where earlier novels tended to present the skillful but cash-strapped British working with the callow but cash-flush Americans, the latter were no longer so flush as they once were, while still being as inexperienced as ever. Easy, whose career back at Langley had her working behind a desk, is utterly unprepared for the field--but after this becomes worrisomely apparent to all concerned (not much past the first tenth of the book), what drives her to tears is her fear of being fired amid a time of service cuts and economic recession. If in an earlier era Fleming's Bond had been disappointed in the political reliability of the Americans as partners (in You Only Live Twice their ceasing to share information is a key plot point), at that point the Americans no longer have so much to bring to the table even when they were willing. Indeed, given how Bond ends up partnering with European allies in the old network and European governments' security forces in saving the leadership of the European Union (in what can seem a symbolically freighted climax occurring in the very "Channel Tunnel" physically linking Britain to Europe), it can seem that the European Union is imagined here as Britain's next natural partner (perhaps with a German "Leiter" rather than an American one connecting Britain's greatest spy with the financial and technical resources only others' expertise, and continent-wide industry, can supply). As Bond will in the next two novels see himself become very close indeed to a continental counterpart, professionally and personally, it does not seem that one can wholly rule that out--and if so Gardner would appear to be breaking with the conventional expectations of a Bond novel again in his rejection of that disdain for Europe so euphemistically referred to as "Euroskepticism." (Such an impression would seem to be affirmed by the heavy evocations of the memory of the world wars throughout the book, and especially its last portion--the very disasters that a European Union was supposed to relegate to the past, a feat which its proponents are quick to credit it with having accomplished.)

Still, whatever one makes of the creaking anachronism, the shakiness of the premise, or the perhaps more-than-meets-the-eye politics (a look ahead to the future after the glance back at the past?), I have to say that as Gardner's forays into spy vs. spy territory go this is easily his most successful--in the pacing, the intricacy of the plot, the melding of story and action (certainly more so than was the case with the most comparable prior book, No Deals, Mr. Bond). Indeed, it may be about as satisfying as any of his contributions to the series on that level, and as fitting a "close to an era" as could reasonably be hoped for, Gardner's subsequent Bond novels a very different thing on the level of conception and action, starting with the very next book, Never Send Flowers.

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.

Review: How Fiction Works, by James Wood

New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008, pp. 288.

First things first--the book's title will strike many as a misnomer. In the strictest sense, How Fiction Works is not a comprehensive, nuts-and-bolts manual to reading or writing fiction, but rather an exposition of a number of ideas about some aspects of literary technique--in particular various aspects of narration and characterization.

Some may see these as all one really needs to know about "how fiction works"--particularly if they accept as a given the conventional ideas about what "serious" writers and readers should concern themselves with. Wood most certainly does, in his analysis stressing form and character over, for example, plot, action or idea. (Indeed, there are no chapters on those things.) Additionally, where the issues he discusses are concerned, he tends toward the usual, "respectable" positions, both on what makes writing good, and who exemplifies this--the writers he cites the most canonical of the canonical.

A book that effectively spells out basics that, frankly, even the experts themselves tend to abide by unthinkingly can only be written by an expert among experts, so much at home with these matters that he can explain them in concise and straightforward fashion, and Wood proves himself up to the job. How Fiction Works explains these matters lucidly, and illustrates its explanations with illuminating examples, making it perfectly clear just what the techniques Wood describes really do for fiction--and why those writers who most fully and expertly utilize them are so revered. (Anyone unsure as to Gustave Flaubert's place in Western literature need look no further.)

Yet, an expert's being so steeped in his subject can also be a liability--and this, too, is the case here. While excelling at his explanation of the received wisdom of the field, Wood gives little thought to its limitations--to the weaknesses of the modes the critics typically exalt, let alone the possibility of valid alternatives. (Only in a defense of the value of "flat" characters does he challenge the prevailing opinion.) Still less is he inclined to consider the presumptions underlying these ideas (as in his view that omniscient narration is "obsolete"). It might be noted, too, that not only does he stress the most canonical of the canonical in his examples, but that his literary imagination at times seems painfully rarefied, John le Carré's Smiley's People as "lowbrow" as Wood dares to go (!), with even the reference to that work unfavorable, and even patronizing. ("Nice writing for sure . . . by the standards of contemporary thrillers . . . magnificent," but ultimately a "coffin of dead conventions" is all that this work of "commercial realism" offers--which will come as a shock to all those who have struggled with these novels.)

The result (as a survey of the Customer Reviews on a site like Amazon demonstrates) is that many a reader will regard Wood's concerns as limited, minor, obscure, or simply "snobbish," and for any and all of these reasons simply not relevant to how fiction actually works for them. Even those who find the book's narrower range of concerns to be of interest to them may wish it contained a more critical attitude toward its material--a thing for which they would have to go elsewhere. Still, even as one who has been appreciative of the case made for other standards (such as H.G. Wells so skillfully offered), in this book Wood excels at the task that (the title notwithstanding) he actually set himself, and in the process renders the student of literature a considerable service, one which made me wish I had encountered the work much earlier than I did.

Our Literary Friends . . .

Graham Greene once wrote,

How seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a debt of gratitude except to the great or the fashionable, who are like those friends that we feel do us credit. Conrad, Dostoyevsky, James, yes, but we are too ready to forget . . . all who enchanted us when we were young.

The writer who had enchanted him above all others was H. Rider Haggard, the author of classics like King Solomon's Mines, and She.

I was glad he wrote that. This was not only because I've found Haggard worthwhile (like Alexandre Dumas, he's one of those nineteenth century adventure writers who remain highly readable as entertainment), but also because of his challenge to the literary snobbery of which there is always far too much about. And especially that absurd form of which in which people claim an attachment to a Great Name from some very early age--that they breathlessly ate up the complete works of Shakespeare when they were four years old, or somesuch.

Ironically, Greene himself became the kind of friend to which people pay a debt of gratitude, because he does them credit, while those writers who enchanted them when they were young go unmentioned. Ian Fleming was among them. He was much more given to identifying his aspirations and influences with Greene (or Maugham, or Ambler, or Hammett), while slighting the pulpier writers (the Sappers and others) without whom I cannot imagine James Bond having taken the shape that he did. Still, in Fleming's defense, his affection for those friends he was happy to mention was genuine, however little it may have helped get him taken seriously by the upmarket critics.

Reading the Midwest

Reading early twentieth century American literature--Sinclair Lewis for example, or Theodore Dreiser, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or any number of others--I find myself struck by just how large the Midwest loomed in the country's imagination in tht period, much more than today.

Of course, those who pay any attention to current events hear about the economic and demographic decline of the Midwest all the time, but their fiction drives the changed picture home in a way that the general declarations don't.

So do the statistics showing how certain cities became less populous and prominent--and others, more so. A comparison of the U.S. Census Bureau's lists of the biggest cities over time--or even just the top fifteen positions on those lists--tell much of the story.

Chicago, which was the second-biggest city in the U.S. in 1950, fell to the number three spot some time in the '80s, while its population actually shrank by a quarter by 2013. And in that same time frame, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee (ranked #5, #7, #8, #12 and #13 in 1950) all got knocked out of the top fifteen entirely. The same happened with the former #15, Buffalo, New York, which, as part of the "Great Lakes Megalopolis," might be regarded as at least marginally associated with them.

By and large, their places on the more recent lists have been filled by the metropolises of the Sun Belt (and in particular, California and Texas). Los Angeles moved up from the #4 spot to #2 (edging Chicago out) in this same period. Houston leaped ten places from #14 to #4. Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Austin (Texas) and Jacksonville, not one of which made the top fifteen in the 1950 list, occupied the #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11 and #13 spots respectively in 2013.

Of course, fiction does reflect the fact. There is no question that Los Angeles came to loom larger and larger in our imaginations as the twentieth century progressed and gave way to the twenty-first (helped by the fact that it is the center of American movie and TV production). Still, to say that someone looking back from the future at the fiction of our time will be as impressed with the presence of the region as a whole in it seems to me something else. (And it seems still less likely that they will get much sense of the deep changes in the Midwest itself.)

That seems to me less a matter of the changes in life than the changes in what the reputable consider to be "serious" fiction. The social novel, the political novel, the sorts of fiction that a Lewis or Dreiser or Fitzgerald wrote and which provided that sense of a world, have long since been marginalized. A generation ago E.L. Doctorow remarked in a fascinating 1988 exchange with Bill Moyers, "we tend today to be more Miniaturists than we used to be," and a generation on one would be hard-pressed to show this has changed.

The Macropolitics and Micropolitics of Spy Fiction

In discussing the concern mentioned in my title, I suppose I should define my terms.

By "macropolitics" I mean the the international scene that is the reason for the existence of intelligence services in the first place. The question of whether or not a government sees other countries as threatening, which countries those might be, and the nature of that threat could all be thought of as macropolitical.

By "micropolitics," I mean the politics of the intelligence service itself. I would put such things as the office politics ongoing within its corridors, its rivalry with other intelligence services of the same nation, its dealings with legislative oversight, its concern for public relations under that heading.

Both have been part of the reality of intelligence work from the start, and neither is new to the genre, with the two commonly figuring in the same plots. The novels of Ian Fleming present a convenient example, as with Moonraker. That novel centers on Hugo Drax's building a ballistic missile system for the British government, and its plot gets properly underway after a murder at Drax's facility. The threat from the Soviet Union in the early Cold War years supplies the novel with its macropolitics. The jurisdictional questions raised by Bond's investigating a question of domestic security, the frictions between the Secret Service and Special Branch, the concern for Drax's image as a celebrated public figure, are micropolitical.

However, by and large the attention given to micropolitics has risen over time. An obvious reason for this is that such services became increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized in the twentieth century, as a result of which the life of organizations simply became a bigger part of the realities of espionage. (Already Maugham, writing of his experience in intelligence during World War I, wrote of the spy as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine.")

Another is that this same transformation of spying into an affair of large, permanent organizations made espionage and its workings better known to the public--while writers drew on the little details for the sake of achieving verisimilitude in the eyes of a more sophisticated readership. (Moonraker, notably, opened up with a lengthy account of the Service's workings.)

And still another is the development of the more politically critical tradition within the spy story, which regards the workings of that machinery with skepticism and distrust. (Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, for example, is a satire of the backward-looking imperial romanticism, bureaucratic ass-covering and sheer stupidity that he found in the British Secret Service--which also defined the novels of John le Carré, whose work included, among other things, an homage to Greene's book in The Tailor of Panama.)

Still, that hardly seems to be all of it. It often seems that as it becomes harder to portray the macropolitics as a titanic struggle against barbarian hordes on the verge of crashing through the gates, the micropolitics get more attention. World War Two spy stories, for example, rarely seem to devote much time to that sort of thing--in part because a real, colossal, life-and-death shooting war was being waged against an enemy acknowledged by nearly everyone to be so genuinely threatening,  and so horrific, as to justify almost anything in many minds.

By contrast, Cold War spy stories, because they are set within a "cold" war, contain greater room for doubt about just how dangerous the enemy is, just what the rights and wrongs are. The war never went hot, after all, and the aggressiveness and power of the Soviet Union were never what the hawks said--the Stalinists a realpolitik-minded group relatively accepting of the status quo, and the Bomber and Missile Gaps pure fantasy. Consequently, despite the status of militant anti-Communism as a default attitude in much of the Western world, there was room for greater introspection of this sort, greater sensitivity to the complexities of the situation, with even an undisputed hawk like Tom Clancy able to own that the Soviets had valid security concerns of their own, and look forward to the dismantling of the strategic nuclear missile forces at Cold War's end.

The post-Cold War era saw even less consensus regarding the international scene, the mainstream finding the challenges to the prevailing order more ambiguous, more diffuse. Some still saw Russia as threatening, but it was economically and militarily a shadow of what it had been, and in any event, shorn of the ideology that made it so objectionable to orthodox opinion. China remained Communist in name, but not in any other sense. Its economy was much more dynamic than post-Soviet Russia's--but most realized it was to be quite the while before that rapid growth translated into very much state power, widening the scope for observers to watch the trend with as much optimism as fear, especially as Western companies profited from trade and investment, while many hoped that economic liberalization heralded political liberalization. Iraq and North Korea, despite the grandstanding, were easily dismissed as small-timers, and non-state terrorism was even more easily dismissed than that.

Accordingly, the proportion of micropolitics to macropolitics in our spy fiction went up yet again--with the updates of works originally created in the Cold War period making this especially obvious--"continuation" Bond novels like John Gardner's SeaFire (where the Secret Service is thoroughly overhauled for the post-Cold War), or Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche (where Bond begins his career against the backdrop of the War on Terror) particularly noteworthy in this regard. This was at least as much the case in the cinematic adaptations of the series after the reboot. These gave James Bond some external enemies to fight (a vaguely imagined terrorism, the Quantum organization behind it), but in Skyfall the villain was an ex-operative looking to avenge his personal betrayal against M herself, nothing more and nothing less.

One might see in this the ascendance of that tradition of political critique that undoubtedly played its part. Still, relatively little recent spy fiction has taken such a line, least of all in the more popular work. And despite a flirtation with a more critical view in Quantum of Solace, the Bond films in particular remain an endorsement of the idea that we "need these guys," Skyfall in particular exalting the continuing value of operatives like Bond (any irony in the menace coming from an ex-SIS operative with a grudge apparently unintentional).

What it really seems to suggest is an anemia on the part of the print side of the genre, which on the whole has not been so fresh or innovative or had the cultural impact that it did before, while the movies deal less in the old essence of spy fiction than in its hollowed-out forms and trappings.

Still, as the success of Kingsman, Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5 (or is it 5 million?) has already demonstrated this year, and as Spectre will almost certainly demonstrate again this autumn, writers and audiences still seem to be having fun doing that.

Bond and the 'Sixties

Over the years, Bond parodies have often blended the send-up of 007 with a broader evocation of the '60s. Austin Powers, for example, is an "international man of mystery"--whose cover is that of a fashion photographer who freaks out at the happening that is the Electric Pussycat Swingers Club, a man possessed of countercultural credentials that Dr. Evil openly mocks.

More recently, the Big Time Rush movie opened with the members of the band dressed in tuxedos and acting out a secret agent fantasy while singing the classic "Help!"

What, one wonders, could be more 'sixties than this blend of Bond and the Beatles?

And yet, what could be more dissonant and unlikely?

Of course, both the secret agent and the band were icons of the decade. Yet, the simple fact is that the 'sixties was not all one thing, no more than any period is one thing, Bond and Beatles the product of different, frankly conflicting currents. One thinks "1961-1969," and the stereotype is youth culture and counterculture, but Bond is a far cry from that, even the Bond of the films. Yes, they looked very fresh and modern, with their hedonistic, sexual, irreverent hero, their fast pace and flashy visual style, their jet-setting narratives and futuristic technology and visceral action, brought to you through the magic of Technicolor and Panavision.

Yet, even the Bond of the screen remained at bottom an updated clubland hero of the kind granddad enjoyed as a kid. A bowler-hatted, suit-wearing, middle-aged civil servant who not only works for an organization run out of a wood-and-leather office by an uptight, pipe-smoking Victorian, but expects to wear black tie for night life, snaps at the nearest Black Guy to fetch his shoes and remarks the inappropriateness of red wine with fish. He even takes a swipe at the Beatles themselves, remarking that they should only be listened to with earmuffs on. Youth culture? It was the kind of thing that Bond was reacting against, explicitly in the novels (think the cab ride in the early part of Thunderball), and only somewhat more subtly in the movies.

With his usual incisiveness, Simon Winder remarked the contradiction between Bond and that broader image of the 'sixties at some length (and some of the recent continuation novels have acknowledged it in little ways, like Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care), but by and large the realization seems to escape most of those looking back at the decade. The humor in the Austin Powers films was at times subtle. (Even in an era when it seems everyone is bragging about being a black belt in some martial art, I suspect that the utter nonsense that is the "Judo chop!" went over most people's heads.) At times, it was even sociologically astute. (The exchange about how there is no world for Dr. Evil to take over anymore is priceless.) However, I never got the sense that Mike Myers' blend of secret agent and Swinging London was meant to be taken ironically--and this seemed still less the case in the Big Time Rush movie.

Still, it has been good for a laugh.

Review: Outbound Flight, by Timothy Zahn

New York: Del Rey, 2006, pp. 453.

Timothy Zahn's original Thrawn trilogy apart, I've read very few of the Star Wars tie-in novels. However, as the launch of Episode VII approaches, I've found myself taking another look at them, starting with those books most closely tied to the Thrawn saga. The first that I picked up was Outbound Flight, which dramatizes the titular event referenced in the Thrawn books--the attempt, led by Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and backed by the government of the New Republic, to establish a colony outside the galaxy, which went awry in ways that factored into Zahn's earlier cycle.

As it happens, Outbound Flight runs to some 453 pages, which naturally reflects its having a complex plot tying together multiple threads. As is so often the case, this means that a certain amount of patience is expected on the part of the reader during some rather lengthy exposition. It may have demanded more than it should have, in fact. Much of the first third of the book or so is devoted to an intrigue on Borlak that fed into the main plot, but was in itself relatively minor. It seemed all the more marginal because its principal viewpoint characters were Obi-Wan and the young Anakin--who simply drop out of the story of Outbound Flight prior to its climax, rather than playing any role in the key events later in the tale.

Still, when I got to those events they did justify that patience. Offering plenty of plot twists and action, they culminate in a multi-sided confrontation involving Darth Sidious' agents, Outbound Flight, the Chiss and a party of human smugglers caught in between (among all of whom there are still other, smaller divisions). In writing it Zahn pulls off the considerable feat of making this climax intricate, briskly paced and lucid all at the same time in a technical tour de force that far exceeds anything in the Thrawn trilogy. The book's presentation of the original C'baoth, and the future Admiral Thrawn as a young officer of the Chiss Ascendancy's Expansionary Defense Force, also have their interest, both within these events, and as background to the other books--their depictions lengthier and fuller than the Thrawn trilogy offered. All this helped to make the result a lot more satisfying than I expected, as both an elaboration of the Expanded Universe, and plain old pulp space opera.

Just Out . . .

My new book, The Forgotten James Bond.

It focuses on those aspects of the franchise that tend to get overlooked, or which most who talk about the series seem to know only vaguely--like exactly how the '60s-era Bond films helped shape the action movie, the special place of the 1967 Casino Royale movie in film history, and the continuation novels that came after Fleming.

It is now available in both e-book and paperback editions.

You can also read it at the Kindle Library.

If you'd like a preview, you can get one over at Google Books.

To everyone who's taken an interest in my writing, here on this blog and in my books: again, thank you.

That Jinx Johnson Movie . . .

The idea of a movie starring a female James Bond type is nothing new.

It wasn't even new in 1962 when the Bond series began.

Ian Fleming's biographer Andrew Lycett reported that back when Ian Fleming was shopping Bond around to the studios years before the first Bond movie hit theaters, Walter Wanger of Twentieth Century Fox suggested Fleming develop a female version as a vehicle for Susan Hayward. The idea didn't inspire him, and that was that as far as he was concerned, but it has popped up here and there over the years, various authors trying something similar. (Walter Wager, for example--now fairly obscure, though he wrote Telefon, and his novel 58 Minutes was the basis for Die Hard 2--tried his hand at one with Blue Moon.)

And of course, Everything Or Nothing productions--producers of the main Bond film series--toyed with the idea itself, Die Another Day conceived as at least a potential launch pad for a series centered on the Jinx Johnson character, with a Jinx movie perhaps appearing in the off-years between new editions of the main series.

Of course, EON backed away from the idea. In fairness, the Johnson character had been less than universally acclaimed, but it seems that the underperformance of the sequels to Charlie's Angels and Lara Croft in the summer of 2003 was decisive (or at least, an excuse to be decisive), their lower-than-hoped-for receipts taken as proof that the moviegoing public was less enthusiastic about woman-centered action movies than the studios. And as it happened, the track record for female-centered action movies did indeed prove shaky. Certainly movies like the Resident Evil (2002-) series starring Milla Jovovich; the Underworld series (2003-) starring Kate Beckinsale; and Angelina Jolie's continued career, which included the post-Lara Croft hit Salt (2010); made them a real part of the scene. However, these have generally been lower-grossing and lower-budgeted affairs than the $200 million summer releases that remain kings of the genre.

Of course, the estimated budget for the Jinx movie was not so high as that for the contemporaneous Bond films (I recall talk of something on the order of $85-90 million), but that too was a potential difficulty: lower-budgeted spin-offs of a bigger action series, centered on a character who was a supporting player in the prior film, are a risky proposition, suffering by comparison with the more established, more lavishly produced original.

There was, too, the fact that Berry's own career was peaking. Hollywood stars tend to go through a period where the press absolutely fawns on them, followed by an equally excessive backlash, and her backlash was well underway by the time a Jinx movie would have hit theaters. That it would have followed Berry's flop Catwoman also would not have helped. Nor the fact that it would have been at odds with the fashion for more grounded spy movies emergent in the wake of the Jason Bourne films (which, soon enough, contributed to the rebooting of the Bond series itself, which would have left the Jinx Johnson adventures in a very awkward position).

On the whole, the kind of success that would have produced a solid supporting franchise seems a long shot, and it is probably best for EON's bottom line that it canceled the project when it did. Still, one can wonder at what might have been . . .

William Haggard's Yesterday's Enemy

William Haggard (1907-1993) is relatively obscure today, but in his day was regarded as a master of the spy story, and often compared with the best of the field in the 1950s and 1960s. Julian Symons, in his classic study of the mystery Bloody Murder, actually considers Haggard alongside figures like Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

Such an appraisal seems to me overgenerous. Haggard lacks the knack for action, atmosphere and travelogue Fleming displayed at his best, and Fleming's sense of fantasy as well. At the same time, he falls far short of le Carré's realism, humanity and facility with complex intrigues. Rather what seems to me most distinctive about Haggard's writing is his highly idiosyncratic outlook, expressed through his longtime protagonist, Colonel Charles Russell of the imaginary Security Executive.

Where the last is concerned, take Haggard's politics. His contempt for the left is unremarkable in itself, but it does take him in a surprising direction. While some Western leftists saw in the course Soviet history took the disappointment of their hopes for human liberation, and went so far as to characterize it as "Red Fascism"; and conservative anti-Communists frequently used such a characterization as part of their arsenal of arguments against the Soviet bloc, Communist parties, Marxism and the rest (and especially their attempts to present the Soviet Union as equivalent to Nazi Germany); he takes the Soviets for the "hard, hard Right"--and admires them for it. Indeed, Russell wonders at one point if he doesn't now "think of orthodox disciplined communism as the saviour of a decadent Europe" from the real "disease of a degenerate nation . . . something called egalitarian socialism. Which hardline communism destroyed at sight."

This view is central to the plot of the novel from which I took that quotation, Yesterday's Enemy. There Russell, now in his sixties and retired, is approached by a Soviet spymaster (known simply as the "Colonel-General") with whom he has a long acquaintance for assistance with a problem--the possibility that somebody is trying to make it appear as if West Germany is building nuclear weapons. Should the deception succeed, the hawks in the Soviet high command would resort to force to stop the program, with World War III the result. Accordingly, the Colonel-General wants Russell to help him show that the "German Bomb" is actually a con. While initially skeptical about the enterprise, Russell takes on the job, which eventually brings him to Switzerland, where he ends up working with Helen Monteath (a Soviet agent that Russell himself had actually recruited for them) and Molina (a former dictator of Argentina who has fled with his loot in the face of a CIA-backed revolution) to investigate the plot. This falls far, far short of reinventing the familiar formula--but it certainly does give it a different twist.

Review: The Italian Navy in World War II, by James Sadkovich

Westport, CN: Praeger, 1994, pp. 416.

It can often seem as if no historical subject has been more thoroughly, minutely, exhaustively examined than World War Two--and yet, even here glaring gaps quickly appear when one searches the material in a thorough way. One of these is the matter of the Italian armed forces, and their performance in the conflict, about which little of substance has been written.

There is an extent to which this is unsurprising. Italy was economically and militarily the weakest of the three principal Axis powers. It also fought the war for the shortest period, entering the war only after the fall of France in 1940 and dropping out in September 1943--just a little over three years, with the end coming nearly two years before VE Day. Additionally, its actions were generally confined to a single theater, the Mediterranean; the fighting on land occurred on a much smaller scale than what was seen on the Eastern Front, the fighting on sea than what happened simultaneously in the Atlantic and the Pacific; and the implications of these battles seem marginal next to what was happening in those other regions (Stalingrad or Midway more important than El Alamein).

There is, too, a tendency to see Italy's war as having been relatively one-sided--and not in its favor. It is commonly claimed that the Battle of Punto Stilo enabled much more aggressive British forces to achieve a "moral ascendancy" over an Italian navy that became unwilling to fight, that the raid on Taranto achieved strategic dominance in the region for the British, and that Britain's dominance in the theater was reaffirmed by the "decisive" Battle of Cape Matapan. Reading a typical account of the fighting in the Mediterranean, one gets the impression Italian warships left their bases only to be sunk, and that the war there went on as long as it did is due to German intervention, pure and simple.

However, James Sadkovich argues in The Italian Navy in World War II that this version of events does not fit the facts. Examining the actual course of these and other clashes, he concludes that the Italian fleet remained more daring and aggressive than they have been given credit for, the British more cautious. Despite their allegedly crushing triumphs (and even during them), British forces consistently avoided operating without cover of night and bad weather, and in all weather held back from engaging Italian naval fleet units near their land-based air support, while eschewing head-on clashes with the Italian navy even on occasions when they had numbers on their side. Indeed, Sadkovich describes the British Navy as having fought a "corsair war, hitting and running before the Italian forces in the area could react" (134), and that even while following this practice, it inclined toward actions valuable principally for propaganda rather than offering real tactical or strategic advantage ("small, easy victories" over "decisive encounters").

All of this reflected the fact that more decisive action was time and again deemed too difficult or risky to undertake--implicit but powerful proof of the actual willingness and ability of the Italian navy and air force to fight. And indeed, any actual evidence of some great shock to Italian morale as a result of early battles like Punta Stilo is lacking--the record clearly demonstrating that Italian forces remained ready, willing and able to seek battle. Moreover, on close examination such successes as Britain enjoyed in sea-fights appear to be due less to any advantage in morale (or for that matter, superior training or seamanship) than to intelligence from Ultra, technical advantages like radar (about which the Italian navy did not even know early in the war), and "dumb luck" (134). If Italian submarine losses were high, so were those of the British--a fact Sadkovich chalks up to the clear, shallow water in which they tended to operate. If Italian industry was no match for Britain's (and the Allies more generally) when it came to quantity, it was capable of high-quality production, not least in aircraft, its best fighters a match for the Spitfire, letting Italian pilots hold their own in dogfights. Sadkovich also credits Italian commanders with a sound strategic sense (hampered as their range of actual choice was by their limited resources), and logistical excellence (their Navy achieving wonders with the limited shipping available to it).

The result was that, with only "sporadic help from their German ally," the Italian navy and air force sustained a war effort in North Africa for three years, besieged Malta, and for considerable periods dominated the central Mediterranean. And in the end it was wartime attrition, American entry into the war and the Axis's general declining fortunes (like Germany's setbacks in Russia) which overwhelmed the country's more limited resources (that smaller industrial capacity, and weaker access to raw materials), and the Allied invasion of North Africa (by way of Vichy-held territory), rather than the heroics of British ship captains, which decided the fight on that continent.1

To support these contentions Sadkovich marshals a vast body of highly detailed evidence, from comprehensive assessments of warships and other weapons systems, to minute accounts of the fighting, to close-reading of orders of battle and statistics on losses. Indeed, he can seem to have almost too much evidence, the data at times nearly overwhelming Sadkovich's ability to present it in organized, readable fashion--as in an early discussion of the specifications of the cannon used on British and Italian warships. However, it does not overwhelm his analytical skills, and his case appears overwhelming.

All this being the case, one may wonder why the image of Italians

at the mercy of that bombastic fool and master of bluff and braggadocio, Mussolini [making] only an occasional appearance in order to throw down their arms and be meekly led away to a POW camp, or . . . lose their ships to superior British seamen and their aircraft to superior British pilots (xiv)

has been so enduring and unquestioned. Certainly one factor would seem the racism with which the Allies (and the Germans) viewed the Italians, which shaped early historiography. Another, Sadkovich holds, is the fact that many wartime secrets remained secret for decades--like Ultra, which let British forces read Axis naval codes and enabled many of their successes against Italian forces. The secrecy surrounding it made British forces appear that much more competent, the Italians that much less so (and the belated revelation of Ultra's role in the 1970s, which should have been a corrective, came long after perceptions had become well-established).

And of course, alongside the warping of the record of Italy's performance by bigotry and secrecy, there is also the perception of Italy's principal enemy here, Britain. Nationalistic British historians, and writers from other English-speaking writers inclining to their view, have been prone to apply a double-standard. As Sadkovich observes, "While Britain's defense of Malta is extolled as heroic, Italy's ability to keep the supply lines open to Africa and the Balkans is discounted as unimportant" (331)--though "if so much is made of the few convoys that managed to reach Malta, much more should be made of the many that kept the Axis war effort in Africa alive" (349). Indeed, the fighting as described by Sadkovich--that image of a hit-and-run corsair war--clashes unacceptably with the image of the fighting sea-dog spirit to which Corelli Barnett paid a thousand-page tribute in the text and title of his history of the Royal Navy during World War II, Engage the Enemy More Closely.

Unsurprisingly, two decades on, the discussion of this subject remains much what it was before--with the result that Sadkovich's book still comprises a relatively large and up-to-date portion of the literature specifically focused on Italy's armed forces, and a crucial debunking of myths about the war in this theater.

1. In the whole first year of the war British forces sank 12 of 334 Italian merchant vessels--just one ship per month, despite this being a major theater of operations.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the Market for Retro-Science Fiction

In 2014 a fairly slow early summer gave way to a late summer season packed with surprising commercial successes (Guardians of the Galaxy).

2015 has proved a more typical year in that respect, with the bigger successes appearing early on, and the latter part of the season seeing the piling up of disappointment after disappointment--with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lengthening the list.

It seems safe to say that one factor was the degree to which the late spring and early summer, packed with colossal successes (Fast and Furious 7, Avengers 2, Jurassic World) sated the audience's appetite for big action.

Indeed, 2015 had already sated the appetite for as specific a taste as that for '60s-style spies, with this spring's hit Kingsman, this summer's Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5--not just a '60s-style spy adventure, but one which, just like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was spun off from a '60s TV show, and came out just two weeks earlier. And not incidentally, was yet another hit, so much so that it actually ended up making more money during The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'s opening weekend than the new movie did.

In short, the timing of the movie's release was terrible.

However, the film had two other disadvantages as compared with Mission: Impossible.

The first has to do with each show's presence within the pop cultural universe.

The original show's run had begun in 1966 and continued for seven seasons and 171 episodes, to 1973. Then there was a two season, 35 episode revival, beginning in 1988 and running to 1990--just six years before the first of the Tom Cruise films hit theaters, and exploded at the box office, after which that movie was followed up by a money-making sequel every few years.

By contrast, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had just a four year run, from 1964 to 1968, and apart from a single reunion TV movie in 1983, has not produced anything since. So basically this is a show from a whole half century ago, which incidentally does not seem to have left any trace quite so recognizable as, for example, Mission: Impossible's famous self-destructing messages or Lalo Schifrin's theme music.

The result is that not only has that property simply been less visible, but Hollywood made the mistake of waiting much, much longer to get the movie made, making it that much more obscure.

The second was the fact that Mission: Impossible got updated to the present, while Man From U.N.C.L.E. stuck with the original period setting. In short, it is an atompunk film, as the publicity made clear. That genre has been a tough sell to audiences, even when it has been attached to a successful franchise, as the underperformance of X-Men: First Class and Men in Black 3 demonstrated. I wondered for a time if this would be the movie to change that, but unsurprisingly a movie based on an obscure franchise dropped into the marketplace at the end of a season crowded not just with action, but with '60s-style spy action in particular, did not prove to be that film.

"The 25 Most Hated Sitcom Characters of All Time"

Interesting list up at Complex--not at all new, but new to me as it happens.

I haven't seen all the shows on the list, and don't remember all the shows that I did see. Some of the choices seemed questionable. The inclusion of Holly Tyler from What I Like About You may simply reflect the overblown backlash against Amanda Bynes, while Robert Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond was merely one unpleasant character on a show packed with them who, appalling as he could be, nonetheless fit in very well with the Barone family's dynamic.

Also questionable was the fact that of the only two shows to land two characters in the top twenty-five, one was Married . . . With Children, and that one of them was not an actual character, but rather a persona briefly adopted by Bud Bundy (a character the list's makers seem to rather like, dubbing him the show's second-best), which was meant to come off as being just as silly and obnoxious as it seemed. (The other character is Marcy D'Arcy, whose #12 ranking seems to me to be way too high up the list.)

However, it did not surprise me at all that where most of the featured characters from older sitcoms were supporting characters (or even just personas of supporting characters), many of the more recent characters were the leads of their own shows--with three particularly annoying characters from three particularly annoying CBS sitcoms earning well-deserved places in the top ten. Leonard Hofstadter of The Big Bang Theory made the #1 spot, Charlie Harper #5, Ted Mosby #7.

I'm taking it as evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks TV writing is getting more obnoxious by the year. Indeed, it seems astonishing that Married . . . should have got two notices, while (among others) Big Bang got only one. However, even if Sheldon Cooper and the rest went unrecognized, it is worth noting that the list contained so many characters presented as "high IQ"--Leonard (and in his more over-the-top intellectual displays, also Mosby) accompanied by Stuart Minkus of Boy Meets World, Screech Powers from Saved By the Bell, and by way of yet another persona, Steve Urkel of Family Matters.

The point bears repeating: Hollywood seems incapable of portraying intelligence without making it grate unbearably, and as the list above shows, the only thing more annoying that its presentation of "grown-up geniuses" is its handling of "child geniuses."

Is it all deliberate anti-intellectualism? Probably not. But such trite, lazy writing contributes to it all the same.