Making Sense of Midcult

In his essay "Masscult and Midcult," Dwight Macdonald offered a picture of a cultural hierarchy and its evolution over time. There is the enduring tradition of High Culture and its artistic products. Beneath is there was a bottom-up Folk Culture which in modern times gave way to a top-down, commercialized, even industrialized, Mass Culture he terms "anti-art" characterized by its "includ[ing] the spectator's reactions in the work itself instead of forcing him to make his own responses," and which is good only for distraction. In between he describes the emergence of "Midcult" in the twentieth century not as some simple mix of the two--he is in fact emphatic that it is not a matter of efforts to raise the level of mass culture--but rather that it is "outwardly High Culture but really as much a manufactured article as the cheaper cultural goods produced for the masses," and just as shallow as Mass Culture in its treatment of life--a stereotyped, industrialized use of the avant-garde that makes "use of the modern idiom in the service of the banal."

"Masscult and Midcult" is, on the whole, an underwhelming read, cluttered and meandering, and mostly fumbles and muddles the issue.

I certainly do not dispute that there is such a thing as High Culture (produced by and for a cultural elite which must often be educated to appreciation of the work in question), or Mass Culture (produced for a general audience), but I do find his characterization of them problematic. Contrary to what he claims, anyone who delves into the details of literary history finds that this is not a case of soulful artistes who produce solely as their Muse calls them to do under one heading (such that, as he puts it, "a serious writer will produce art when he is trying to function as a hack"), and the grinding, pandering hacks under the other as he suggests. The truth is that even a Shakespeare or a Dostoyevsky falls somewhere along a spectrum between those poles.

And of course, his characterization of Mass Culture is obfuscated by a raging snobbery. Media executives may want to render publishing, television, film and the like nearly automated industrial enterprises cranking out a regular product churned out impersonally by writers as dispensable as the most thoroughly de-skilled factory hands. And at times they get the public to swallow something distressingly close to their ideal (as with reality shows).

However, at the time in which Macdonald was writing, and even today, they remain a long way from monopolizing the field. Accordingly there remained and remains scope to produce art here, and indeed, much that is derided as Mass Culture is in fact Art by Macdonald's own standards (engagement with the actualities of life, self-expression on the part of the creator) which was never stamped with the label because of the snobbery to which critics conform if they wish to remain reputable.1 And even where ostensible Mass Culture falls short of this mark, his broader claims about Mass Culture (the impossibility of spontaneous response to it, its incapacity to entertain) is less careful assessment than another case of his confusing an extreme pole with a whole category. (After all, even the formulaic can have its pleasures.)

I also do not dispute that label-bearing High Culture can be cranked out in shallow, stereotyped fashion, and that this really is culturally damaging.2 Still, Macdonald's preoccupation with establishing a hierarchy, and closing the ranks of the High against the Low, obscured the issue, and led to his choosing a label more confusing than clarifying (the more so because of its seeming relation to Virginia Woolf's even fuzzier and more ostentatiously snobbish "middlebrow"). The fuzziness of the context, the snobbery in which this is all wrapped up, Macdonald's preference of self-indulgent rhetoric over analysis, result in the fact that while the essay does give some clear pointers (the quotations above seem clear enough), they fall short of the clear standard they should have offered. How does one, for example, tell the difference between the "pseudo-art" of Midcult, and art which is sincere but simply failed? Work which makes "use of the modern idiom in the service of the banal"--which ended up shallow, hollow, trite, pretentious--not because it is a "manufactured article," but simply because a perfectly sincere artist may simply have lacked the vision to bring the work off? Macdonald's discussion is more ambiguous than it should be in this respect, and the result is that what might have been a useful descriptor can seem merely a term of abuse critics can fling at art they happen not to like--while giving the real offenders a free pass. Indeed, to go by the sheer amount of work which uses the modern idiom in the service of the banal, one would have to conclude today that Midcult has altogether displaced genuine High Culture, while the would-be genuine artist is an endangered species apt to be hit with the label instead for all their pains.3

1. Certainly science fiction is one area where this has been the case--and indeed it seems telling that in a 1968 interview for Book World, "Portrait of a Man Reading," Macdonald remarked not once but twice within the same answer that he "never reads science fiction." (You can find it in Michael Wreszin, Interviews With Dwight Macdonald (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2003), 83-44.)
2. Virginia Woolf, in her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," called on her audience to "tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure" as writers searched for new ways of exploring the human condition. Alas, far from tolerating them we have wound up making a cult of them in a world where Modernism and postmodernism define High Culture--to art's cost.
3. The labeling of Mad Men Midcult by a few maverick critics is a rare, correct use of the term.

Of Ian Fleming and Thorstein Veblen

The James Bond series is often criticized for representing outmoded, backward attitudes. Contemporary politics being what they are, most critics seem to concentrate on gender, for example, rather than class. However, the books are quite striking in that respect, in ways that go well beyond Bond's much-noted snobbery. Indeed, rereading Ian Fleming's novels I found myself time and again thinking of Thorstein Veblen's classic The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Veblen's analysis posits that in an earlier era cultures the world over passed through a phase where two different factors converged. One was an unsettled and highly violent existence--where hunting big game was a significant economic activity, warfare between groups was constant, or both--placing a high premium on "exploit"--aggression, cunning, force. The other was the attainment of a certain minimum level of individualism, status differentiation and sense of property for meaningful social inequality to exist among the adult male members of the group.

The result of this convergence was that those who successfully displayed the qualities of exploit--who could display prizes from successful hunts or military campaigns testifying to their personal "prowess" (e.g. their knack for violence and trickery)--were honored as individuals. This led to a broader habit of equating wealth in goods with prowess, while the display of such wealth, with that prowess it implied, was regarded as honorable (in fact, the essence of honor), while becoming the core around which a great deal of cultural practice developed. Among them were conspicuous consumption and the conspicuous leisure associated with it, which had such expressions as forms of sport, religious observance and social etiquette which, being financially costly and very time-consuming, demand plenty of both; a penchant for useless archaisms (cults of antiquity, the centrality of a study of dead languages to an education); the notion that it is natural for those living by prowess (a warrior class) to rule over and live well at the expense of the humbler types living by diligent drudgery by working on inanimate nature with their hands (like the slaves who grow the food, prey to the predators on top); and respect for long association with these forms of privilege and their associated markers (like aristocratic titles).

All this, of course, remained in more settled, "quasi-peaceable," times, and in fact developed in "higher barbarian" cultures like that of Medieval Europe, where the tone was set by a titled, landowning warrior class, simultaneously greedy and impecunious, acquisitive and un-industrious, which jousted, built grand cathedrals, practiced "courtly" manners and liked to style itself after ancient Greece and Rome (as their serfs toiled). Moreover, even after feudalism passed from the scene, the idea persisted, if in changed form, to find expression in such things as sprawling golf courses where caddies carry the clubs, in "church clothes," in shrimp forks and the use of titles like "Sir" and "Madam" and Classical learning in the schools long after it had become less education than ornament.1

And indeed, the novels of Ian Fleming--most assuredly, a scion of a conservative, leisure class family with "Sirs" for great-grandfathers and a public school education--are shot through and through with such assumptions. Moreover, rather than being incidental to the tales, they are quite fundamental to them, accounting for many features that long familiarity with the character has caused us to take for granted--not least, why Bond should be regarded as quite so special an agent. Certainly he has an undeniable physical daring and toughness, and an assortment of skills (he is an exceptional gunman, card-player, swimmer, etc.) that prove handy on his missions. He also has a way with women that enables him, quite frankly, to use them. Yet, it is all rather a far cry from the ridiculous batteries of skills with which writers commonly equip their Gary Stus. He lacks anything that might be considered significant in the way of technical knowledge. His linguistic talents are also limited enough that often he does not speak the language of the country to which he is sent, or the enemy he must combat. (The Bond of the novels, at any rate, has no Russian.) And when it comes to investigations, he is no Sherlock Holmes. (Indeed, on the "heroic secret-agent scale" he struck Kingsley Amis as pretty average.)

What really distinguishes Bond is the idea that underlying all his real talents is an intrinsic, generalized prowess transcending any one skill (or its lack); an ability to come out on top when those special, prowess-revealing traits--aggression, cunning, force--are what count most. Of course, a close reading of the tales can make that prowess seem ambiguous. Time and again Bond screws up, and pays the price for it. Often others rescue him, sometimes those who might least be expected to do so--his first adventure ending with a SMERSH agent shooting Le Chiffre before he can kill Bond off, and cutting a distinguishing mark into Bond's palm for the purposes of later identification. This might be thought more good luck than anything else. Yet, as Veblen notes, this package of ideas contains a "belief in luck," such that being "lucky" is a personal virtue.

And at any rate, adherents to the leisure class ethos have not been much given to critical, rational discernment of material practicalities and chains of causality, happy to treat eventual success as the only proof that counts.

This accent on such prowess in the Bond adventures, which is conceived as specially belonging to a gentleman-sportsman--and especially, a British gentleman-sportsman like Bond--is why even the more lavishly supplied American CIA need 007's help on a regular basis.2 The Felix Leiters, after all, just can't cut it by themselves--as Leiter's fate in Live and Let Die makes clear, and the Soviets make clear again in From Russia with Love, where they are nearly effusive in paying tribute to that special, indefinable something that enables the British do so much more in this field with so much less than the richer Americans.

Fleming is as explicit, and rather more profuse, in his revisitation of the theme in You Only Live Twice. M sends Bond to Japan, a country with which he is completely unfamiliar, not because he has any special qualification to secure the desired intelligence-sharing agreement, but because he has previously displayed a "knack" (ill-defined but taken very seriously) of completing difficult assignments that makes him suited to the "impossible" job. And when he does arrive in Japan, Tanaka offers him very particular terms for getting the agreement--his assassinating Shatterhand, which is not a mere quid pro quo, but a test of the prowess of the British elite that Bond represents, on the theory that his accomplishing the goal set for him would prove his people worthy allies. It is a spectacularly irrational basis for making such an arrangement--but perfectly in line with the "theory of the leisure class."

In the leisure class scheme of things, Bond's penchant for luxury is not a contradiction of this quality, but a complement to it, his prowess (and the resources it wins him) equally manifest in his cultivation and indulgence of expensive tastes--and also his begrudging such indulgences to lesser folk. Reading Thunderball it seemed to me appalling that Bond resented his cab driver's making twenty pounds a week. Yet, from this standpoint it is only natural that a gentleman-of-war such as himself should drive a Bentley and eat caviar, while the cabbie doing his little task should "know his place."

The "leisure class theory" also accounts for many of the odder features of the nearly ritualistic formula of the Bond plots, which can be regarded as not just an occasion for displays of prowess, but as an elaborate contest matching Bond's prowess against that of his enemy in ways broader, deeper, more varied and more complex than a straightforward, head-on violent collision. Bond engages the enemy in games, and tends to win--specifically those games with which he is familiar as a gentleman (baccarat in Casino Royale, golf in Goldfinger).3 The games, moreover, tend to accentuate his prowess by giving him a chance to triumph even when the enemy--a man of considerable prowess himself as testified by his wealth, rule over many subordinates, ruthlessness, etc.--cheats. And of course, what happens in the game of cards or golf is a prelude to deadlier sorts of gameplay between them, as Bond goes about unraveling their secrets and disrupting their plans with the same skill he used to win at the gaming table or on the golf course--an endeavor partaking of both hunting and war.

Of course, Bond is apt to end up the enemy's prisoner at some point, but in captivity the villain will have a chat with him going past a mere interrogation, perhaps even going so far as to have him over for dinner (as Dr. No does). In the course of it the villain is likely to reveal something of his plans--a reflection of the monstrous vanity without which they would never have concocted their scheme, but also out of a desire to impress this particular prisoner, who may be in their power now but is also the formidable opponent who offered such challenge to them, and whose prowess they must accordingly admit. It is also an occasion for hero and villain to display the subtler forms of their prowess yet again in the consumption of luxurious food and drink, in a display of wide interests, and mastery of the art of conversation--with the display becoming especially competitive as they match wits.

Afterward, they continue the contest on different terms. Instead of simply disposing of Bond in a straightforward and relatively foolproof manner, they subject him to yet another game--a gauntlet of tortures, an elaborate death-trap. The device is yet another conspicuous display of their leisure and wealth (they had the time to think this up, the money to pay for it), as well as a test of their ingenuity against Bond's. They may intend to kill Bond, rather than test him, but the point is that the devices give him a chance to prove himself the superior man by escaping the trap. And when he gets away, it typically leads to Bond's smashing their plans, the final, triumphant move in the game.3

This view of Bond's significance and Bond's adventures, this idea of the gentleman-sportsman engaged in these games for the fate of the world, and winning the contest because he is such a natural at games (and because, however formidable the enemy, they are no match for a British gentleman-sportsman), seems eccentric as anything but symbolism or fantasy--a reminder that Ian Fleming built his series on ideas already dated in his time, and which seem the more so six decades on. Of course, that is not to say that leisure class attitudes have vanished from the world. Far from it. Indeed, with the world's broad turn toward anti-egalitarianism, irrationality, tradition, much of the package unsurprisingly seems more rather than less of a cultural presence (in the worship of wealth and celebrity, for example). Still, that presence often seems superficial, fragile, confused, even forced. And this particular, ostentatiously aristocratic expression of it is a tougher sell than it used to be.

1. Veblen contends, among other things, that in line with the mobility and anonymity of modern, urban life, the stress on conspicuous leisure has weakened in favor of conspicuous consumption more effective at advertising one's status to strangers. He also notes that the ethos has weakened and overt expression of it become less acceptable in a more practical, "technocratic" modern world, such that the exaltation of leisure is more apt to be subtly concealed behind superficially useful activities; but also that the blurring of class lines has led to these values filtering further down the social ladder.
2. Fleming's antecedent H.C. McNeile made the value of the gentleman-sportsman background explicit in the first of his Bulldog Drummond novels, declaring "the combination of the two . . . an unbeatable production."
3. While they were not a significant part of the Fleming novels, this also goes for the gadgetry that has come to be associated with the character. These are, of course, created by a technical acumen far outside Bond's ken. Yet, from this standpoint the possession of such a gadget is in an important way the possession of that technical prowess--and that he has acquired it is yet another, if less direct, testament to his own prowess. (This is, of course, in stark contrast to the idea that the gadgets reduce Bond to a button-pushing mediocrity.)

A Dirk Pitt TV Series?

I continue to be struck by how many people come across my blog looking for word about a new Dirk Pitt movie--and the strong feelings that some fans have on the subject.

I've already got in my two cents about the problems Sahara faced, and the challenges facing anyone trying to take a third crack at a Dirk Pitt movie franchise. However, recently I found myself thinking--what about a Dirk Pitt TV show instead?

The blend of maritime-flavored action-adventure and historical mystery has an obvious attraction, and Dirk, Al, the Admiral and the rest have the capacity to win an audience. And if successful, a Dirk Pitt series could easily be turned into a multi-show franchise with relative ease, given the abundance of material, and built-in audiences, for them--the NUMA Files books (of which there are thirteen as of this year) and the Oregon Files (ten books) for a start.

Still, just as with the films, much of the material is problematic. The producers could not easily shoot a story today where old Nazis menace the world, for example. And the handling of issues like immigration in Treasure or Flood Tide could come across like provocations. Additionally, one of the most attractive features of Cussler's novels is their extensive international travel and spectacular action sequences, which would be costly. In fact, they might not be able to do justice to the action with even the most lavish of TV budgets.

However, a single problematic episode is a much smaller risk than writing such tales into films, while many of the stories afford some scope for updating or polishing. Indeed, the filmmakers could limit themselves to taking the basics of the set-up (NUMA, the lead characters), and building up their own episode plots from scratch with carefully selected items from the books. And if the producers displayed sufficient ingenuity with the action the series could satisfy on that level, especially if its presentation of its stories and characters was intriguing (perhaps developing season-long arcs out of the more readily modified books).

In short, the odds on such a show seem better. Still, a show would face at least one major obstacle in the way of a new Dirk Pitt film, the biggest of all--the specter of Cussler's fight with the makers of Sahara. And the prospect of anything like that legal battle is enough to make the project a non-starter.

"The Name is Skywalker, Luke Skywalker."

George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) is one of that handful of mid-'70s films celebrated, and attacked, as giving us the contemporary blockbuster. However, when asked about the matter in one long-ago interview, he remarked that "It was more James Bond than 'Star Wars' that brought in the 'adrenaline' movies."1

The Bond films have, of course, been a prominent part of the pop cultural landscape of the last half century. And Lucas is far from the only one to remark them as having been important in the development of the action movie, something of a consensus existing about their importance.

Still, it is rare that anyone explains the reason for that. To put it simply, it was the makers of the half dozen '60s-era Bond films that, looking to extend and amplify the style of prior thriller-makers like Alfred Hitchcock, sought to give the audience a shock, a thrill, a "bump" every couple of minutes, and accomplish this in part with a new cinematic structure (pre-credits scenes, a swifter pace leading from one shock to the next), while also working in large, complex set pieces of a kind previously unseen in contemporary-set thrillers. They also revolutionized the photography and editing of such set pieces with the use of close shots, "jump cuts," undercranking and exaggerated sound effects to intensify the action.2

Of course, in considering the Bond films' influence it has to be kept in mind that they were not really a Hollywood product. They were financed by United Artists, and involved the participation of some Hollywood talent, like veteran screenwriter Richard Maibaum, but were generally made by British-based (if expatriate) producers at Britain's Pinewood studios, with British directors and (mostly) British stars.

That limited their impact, even when, with Goldfinger, the movies started to get a little respect from tinseltown, which shamelessly imitated them, while usually missing what was most important about them. The multitude of '60s-era Bond imitations were mostly cheap-looking parodies (I was shocked when I learned the Derek Flint movies cost almost as much as Goldfinger--proof, I suppose, that basic math skills were scarce at the big studios then as now). The big action movies that followed--Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971)--tended to be crime dramas which tossed a bit of action into a more conventionally structured, slower-paced narrative.

It was only Star Wars that really brought all the elements of James Bondian action (structure, pace, set pieces, editing technique) to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking.

Indeed, one can see much of the famous "formula" of the Bond films in the movie's structure.

Just like the Bond films, Star Wars hits the viewer hard with a flamboyantly stylized opening image (the title, the crawl) set to a now-classic musical score (John Williams' theme), which quickly gives way to an action scene that reveals something of the plans of a bizarre-looking and apparently psychotic villain—Darth Vader pursuing Princess Leia's smaller consular ship in his colossal Star Destroyer.

As it turns out, the enemy is operating out of a vast, high-tech, apparently impregnable fortress from which they are controlling a super-weapon that can destroy a world. In the course of their mission our hero is issued a gadget by an older, wiser figure (Obi-Wan, light saber), heads out to the destination to which he has been summoned (Alderaan), gets captured (tractor beam, Death Star), faces the villain (Darth), escapes from the fortress with knowledge of what must be done--with a new female ally, incidentally (Leia)--returns with allies in a military assault (X-Wings) that narrowly destroys the facility and the super-weapon as the clock ticks down to the destruction of a world (Yavin).

And of course, by this point the Bond films had already made repeated use of space themes that look like even closer precedents for Lucas' film. The most pointed were of course You Only Live Twice--which also opened with a larger spaceship capturing a smaller one--and Diamonds Are Forever--which put a super-laser in the heavens that the hero took out mere seconds before it delivered a catastrophic blow at the planet below at the film's climax.

Just about all that was missing was the sexuality. But then Princess Leia did wear that gold bikini in Return of the Jedi--for many a Star Wars fan, the equivalent of Ursula Andress' arrival on-screen way back when. So much so that watching that episode of Friends all those years ago, many must have totally expected just what fantasy Ross was going to confess to Rachel even before he said a word.3

1. Lucas' comment can be found in David A. Kaplan, "The Force Is Still With Us" Newsweek, 20 Jan. 1997, 56.
2. You can read a lengthier discussion of this history in The Forgotten James Bond, which discusses the movies' place in the development of the action film.
3. The title of the episode is actually "The One With the Princess Leia Fantasy," but I didn't know that at the time.

Win, Lose or Die and the British Techno-Thriller

The military techno-thriller is more British in its origins than anything else. Even overlooking the tradition of the "invasion story" from the nineteenth century that got underway with George Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" (1871); the equally British genre of the spy novel to which the invasion story gave birth through its merger with the detective story; and the increasingly frequent high-tech intrigue in examples of that genre like Ian Fleming's Moonraker (1955) and Thunderball (1961), or Martin Woodhouse's Tree Frog (1965); the fact remains that it was Britons Frederick Forsyth, Craig Thomas and John Hackett who laid down the genre's essentials in the 1970s.

Forsyth was a pioneer in applying the "epic" mode to the story of political intrigue, making the story in The Day of the Jackal (1970) not really a duel of wits between the titular assassin and Detective Claude Lebel, but rather a larger struggle between the OAS and the French security state related through a vast cast of (mostly minor) viewpoint characters, then scaled the approach up to the superpower level in The Devil's Alternative (1978). Meanwhile, Craig Thomas's Firefox (1977) centered a thriller on a next-generation fighter jet, and the battles that ensued after the theft. And John Hackett depicted large-scale, high-tech fighting between the superpowers in The Third World War (1978).

However, the genre flourished in the hands of Americans like Tom Clancy, because, as the details of the plots of the books listed above suggest, Britain--the obvious and natural focus for a British thriller writer--could, given its no longer being a first-rank, global military power, less and less be at the center of a high-tech military scenario.1 One result was that rather than techno-thrillers, the "SAS Novel" became a prominent British genre, the guys who save the day not airmen or sailors operating massive, expensive weapons systems of the kind where Britain did not compete with the U.S. and Soviet Union (or even France, still making its own fighters and ballistic missiles), but its special warfare troops, less constrained by the limits of national resources from being more than a match for their counterparts in the services of more affluent powers. Indeed, when Forsyth wrote a novel of Desert Storm in techno-thriller fashion, The Fist of God (1994), the protagonist is British Special Air Service soldier Mike Martin.

John Gardner's James Bond novels reflected the broader trend. His books tended toward smaller-scale, and often more domestically situated plots, as seen in books like No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987) and Scorpius (1988), in which Bond spends much more of his time inside Britain itself, and the villains are plotting mayhem on a scale which pales next to SPECTRE in its heyday. However, at the height of the fashion back in the late 1980s, John Gardner wrote a British techno-thriller in his next Bond novel, Win, Lose or Die (1989). This time the bad guys (for all their similarities to Scorpius' people) target an Anglo-American-Soviet conference hosted aboard a British aircraft carrier amid a massive, international military exercise--while the man assigned to stop them is none other than Bond himself, as a Royal Navy officer ostensibly back in uniform, and stationed aboard the carrier.

Of course, there are ways in which the diffuse, relatively grounded storytelling of the typical techno-thriller, and the tightly focused but over-the-top character of the Bond novels, do not gel well. However, added to this is the strain involved in placing Britain's armed forces at the center of such a story in so conspicuous a fashion, evoking Britain circa 1942, rather than 1989.

As in the Second World War, Britain is again a member of a "Big Three" grouping with the Americans and Soviets (when, among others, China, Japan, West Germany, France, would have been equally or even more plausible as the third member of such a group).2 This status is underlined by the presence of the leaders of all three countries in person--George Bush, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev--which implicitly equates them with Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. (The equation of Bush with Roosevelt, Thatcher with Churchill, Gorbachev with Stalin can seem so unlikely as to appear another bit of trademark Gardner self-parody, but if that is the intent Gardner is more than usually subtle about it.)

That Britain hosts the meeting aboard its largest and most powerful warship underlines the emphasis on Britain's past standing by evoking its history as the world's dominant naval power. Of course, the book's centering on the Invincible and its Harriers also evokes more recent memories--of the last high-tech sea war Britain in as a principle, the Falklands conflict (1982). (Indeed, the Invincible was the most prominent fighting ship from that conflict still in British service.3) However, one can see in the evocation of the Falklands an indirect evocation of World War Two, given the ways in which the British government attempted to cast the conflict—to sell the fight against the "Argies" as somehow analogous to the earlier struggle with "the Hun."

All of this makes the high-tech novel at the same time relatively and awkwardly backward-looking--even by the standard of the later Bond books. However, the idiosyncracies lend the book an interest as novelty, even where it does not quite work.

1. In Firefox, British spymaster Kenneth Aubrey cooks up the scheme to steal the MiG-31 "Firefox" fighter, and uses British intelligence's assets in Moscow to pull it off—but needs an American pilot to fly the plane, because only an American pilot would have had the requisite experience (as a Vietnam veteran, and flyer of "aggressor" aircraft in American training exercises). In The Devil's Alternative, it is up to British agent Adam Munro (and a team of Special Boat Service soldiers) to save the day—but saving the day is all about pulling the Americans and Soviets away from open hostilities. And Munro's spy work even depends on American technology at a crucial instance, namely his reliance on an American SR-71 spy plane to spirit him to Moscow during a crucial stage of his activities.
2. If geopolitical and military weight were at issue, the third party ought to have been China. If economic and financial weight were what counted, it would have undoubtedly been Japan (itself a considerable naval power). If this was to be an essentially Atlantic-European affair, the Big Three might have included West Germany, in light of its status as Europe's leading economic and industrial power, as well as the implications of its geographical position and the size of its army for the East-West military balance; or possibly France, given its combination of economic and military weight, and its readiness to pursue a policy relatively independent of Washington in the past.
3. The other purpose-built carrier which served with the British navy in the war was the HMS Hermes. As the flagship of the operation, and as a vessel actually laid down during World War II, it would have been richer in symbolism. However, the ship was decommissioned in 1984 and sold to India, which it has since served as the INS Viraat.

Review: Role of Honor, by John Gardner

New York: Putnam, 1984, pp. 304.

In John Gardner's Role of Honor, the British Secret Service stages a spy scandal which has Bond rather publicly leaving the Service. Afterward Bond, under the pretext of being a free agent, trains in computer programming, the better to enable him to infiltrate the operations of a Pentagon computer expert who apparently faked his own death, Jay Autem Holy, who is thought to be involved with the Soviets in something nefarious . . .

As the premise of the novel suggests, Role is Gardner's biggest break with the familiar pattern of the Bond adventures up to this time. The months-long mission, the highly public spy scandal in which Bond is involved, his having to learn how to code, are all inconceivable in a Fleming novel—or a Bond film. Indeed, the early chapters do not feel much like a James Bond adventure at all, and it is quite some time before the book is on more familiar ground.

Interestingly, even as the novels break with the usual pattern of the adventures, they do repeat the pattern of Gardner's. SPECTRE, first reintroduced in For Special Services, is back yet again, this time under the management of Tamil Rahani. Just as in Licence Renewed there is a bit of nuclear age do-gooderism-gone-wrong in Holy's plans to neutralize the superpower arsenals—the concept presented as dangerously destabilizing on its surface, and then even that idea demonstrated as really just Rahani's cover for his real objective, neutralizing just the U.S.'s arsenal, and so handing nuclear supremacy to the Soviet Union on a platter (not unlike SPECTRE's plan in Services). There is, too, the way in which Bond comes upon the plot, sent to join a group of people, among which he has to decide whom he can and cannot trust.

Also in line with the pattern Gardner increasingly followed after Licence Renewed, the story as a whole is light on action, which is confined to a few brief bursts of violence dispersed throughout the book. Following the opening heist scenes (in which Bond does not appear), there is a brief and quickly foiled carjacking a fifth of the way in, until Bond's kidnapping another fifth of the way in. Thus does it continue, with the most elaborate set piece taking place in the middle of the book. Still, after a somewhat confusing opening the book is brisk, smooth and lucid, and has its share of appropriately Bondian touches, like the villain's use of an airship in his scheme, and a final run at 007 that demonstrates that Ernst Stavro Blofeld is not the only SPECTRE chief to live to fight another day—with Bond taking the battle up again in the follow-up, Nobody Lives Forever (1986).

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

Reviewing the Posthuman Prospect

It was about the turn of the century that I first took notice of the whole transhuman-posthuman-Singularity dialogue, reading the books of authors like Moravec and Kurzweil.

Their arguments did not make me a confirmed believer--but they did interest me. It seemed to me that if thought was indeed a physical process, then at least in theory that physical process could be replicated technologically--so that Searle's "Chinese Room" argument, or Penrose's suggestions about cognition did not seem to me persuasive counter-arguments on that level.

Penrose's argument, however, pointed to the possibility that even if there is no theoretical barrier to creating a strong artificial intelligence, the practical obstacles may be very high indeed, in ways that the optimists do not appreciate. (Indeed, those whose specialty was the human brain generally seemed much less bullish about the Singularity than the tech types.)

Still, I did find the arguments of Moravec and Kurzweil sufficiently intriguing to warrant serious consideration. And as it happened, each of them went beyond mere prediction to making forecasts--what the philosopher Nicholas Rescher in his book Predicting the Future called nontrivial, nonplatitudinous predictions, the kind where you get specific enough that you have to stick your neck out in the process. So I spent the years that followed watching the signs and the dates, and . . .

Well, not much seemed to be happening. Indeed, when 2009 rolled around I (like many, many others) looked at the list of predictions that Kurzweil made for that specific date. I (apparently, unlike many, many others) focused on the nontrivial, nonplatitudinous ones, and reviewed them comprehensively. And by and large, the disparity between what he predicted for technologies like neural nets, and their commercial, consumerist applications in areas like personal computing, translation software, virtual reality and personal transport (the real proof that something has been accomplished)--and what the state of the art really was in those things--convinced me that I was right to feel that he was way, way too bullish. In fact, I wrote a piece about that for the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2011.

And for once, I didn't feel totally out of step with the times, many others seeming to be thinking along the same lines, the exuberance of the tech boom given way to much greater reserve, and I must admit, less interest in the issue on my part.

Today, however, I find myself looking at Amazon's Echo, and Google's Glass, and the Oculus Rift. Personal assistants, ubiquitous computing, virtual reality. Of course, what we are seeing 2015 is considerably less developed than what Kurzweil expected us to have six years ago. And there is no guarantee that these particular devices are not flashes in the pan; that they will really prove useful enough to proliferate, let alone that we will see significant improvement on them in the near term. Yet, for the moment it seems safe to regard them as real steps in the direction he envisaged. I also find myself looking at a news story from just this the past week--the digital reconstruction of a rat brain by the Blue Brain project, which may be an even more important step toward a world of "spiritual machines."

And so while I remember the exaggerated expectations of 1999 all too well, I think that I will be following these developments a bit more closely than I have in many years.

At least, for a while.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn

New York: Bantam, 1991, pp. 361.

I first read the books of the Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command) what now feels like a very long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and must admit that I have not thought about them very much since. It had been many years since I read very many tie-in novels, or for that matter, took much interest in the Expanded Star Wars universe.

Still, the approaching release of Episode VII, and the associated clearing of the decks with the branding of literally hundreds of tie-in works "Legends" rather than "Canon," drew me back and I decided to take a second look at Zahn's novels. I must admit that I had not expected very much. My memories of the books were favorable, but I was a far less demanding reader when I took them, quite able to enjoy fiction that, when I revisited it, later seemed appalling.

On the whole, though, Zahn's novels proved a pleasant surprise, starting with the first of his trilogy, Heir to the Empire. Of course, as a look at the back cover reveals that the premise is reasonably robust. (Five years after the Battle of Endor the Empire is down but not out, still in control of a quarter of the galaxy, and the New Republic in the ascendant not without its frailties as the former Rebels cope with the business of governance--giving the villainous imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn a chance to reverse the tide of history.) The relation of the events that unfold from it is brisk, helped by not just the promised abundance of action and intrigue, but rapid intercutting between one storyline and another. And the prose is sufficiently lucid and polished to keep the reader from tripping over awkward word choices and phrasing (as they do in so much commercial fiction).

However, these are more or less straightforward matters of craftsmanship, and not very much to ask from a veteran writer of this type of fiction like Zahn. What really impressed me was that the story genuinely feels like it belongs to the core of the Star Wars universe. Heir is not only rooted in the material of the original, canonical trilogy (replete with its characters, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Lando all central characters), but succeeds in making the newer content grow organically out of that, rather than a repetition of old content, or a painful grafting of new to old.

In this there is much use of the settings and situations of the original trilogy. A central mystery has Luke flying to Dagobah with R2 in his X-wing, and reentering the "Cave of Evil," where he has a vision of his rescue of Han on Tatooine at the start of the Return of the Jedi. Afterward he flies off to an exotically situated business enterprise of Lando's, where Leia and Han were also headed just before the Empire came calling.

Fortunately, such scenes prove not to be repetitions of earlier situations, but rather evocative bridges from the old to the new, that at their best also put the old in a new light. Luke's return to Dagobah provides addiitonal insight into just what the Cave is (and the broader history of the Jedi), while the vision he has inside, while reinforcing the connection of this tale with what came before, foreshadows an important connection with a new character who is smoothly retconned into the narrative. Other episodes, which only to a lesser extent build on the familiar, likewise have the virtue of deepening our knowledge of what we already saw, as with Chewie and Leia's journey to the Wookie home world of Kashyyyk.

This all occurs not only on the level of the overall plot, accomplished as it is in this respect. Zahn has clearly gone some way to imagining Lucas's galaxy "to saturation," reinforcing the connection in the smaller details--a spoken reference here, a recollection there, like the revelation of a compartment on R2 that makes Mara Jade think that this must have been how Luke smuggled his light saber into Jabba's hideout.

It helps, too, that most of what is more thoroughly invented is fairly compelling. Particularly striking are the two principal villains, namely the megalomaniacal Dark Jedi Master C'baoth, and Grand Admiral Thrawn, the latter an especially tricky character to write as a result of his being a "military genius."1 Most writers of such characters, unable to think of what a genius would say or do, either keep repeating that the characters are, in fact, geniuses (groan), or resort to intellectual displays that are caricatured, irrelevant or both (groan again). Zahn takes a subtler path by, among other things, providing successive opportunities for Thrawn to base his decisions on Sherlock Holmes-style deductions, with his subordinate Admiral Pellaeon playing Watson to the Great Detective (as when Thrawn fails to be fooled by Han's attempt to sneak Leia off the Millennium Falcon). He also proves artful enough to bring the act off, and displaying a flair for charismatic, polished schemers in general, imbues the smuggler Talon Karrde with his own considerable interest.

None of this is to deny that the book has its weaker points. In contrast with the original films, the story, without anything like Luke's earlier journey to Jedi knighthood to center it, seems relatively diffuse, with such unity as it enjoys derived from the villain's plan. Mara Jade is a one-note character through the book (careerism and revenge seem to be all there is to her), and her scenes with Luke are more tedious than tense, while C'baoth seems underutilized. And the conclusion is a bit abrupt and ambiguous, just when the reader might have expected fireworks. However, after finishing Heir to the Empire I was much more enthusiastic about turning to Dark Force Rising than I thought I would be when I first thought of revisiting the series.

1. The back stories of C'baoth (or rather, the original C'baoth) and Thrawn, as well as the initial meeting of the two men, is detailed in Outbound Flight, a review of which you can read here.

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.