Is Writing Turning into Rewriting in the Age of the Chatbot?

Anyone who has had much experience of writing knows that it is hard, time-consuming work, which is why anyone who buys a book "by" a celebrity who takes it for granted that the celebrity on the cover actually wrote it is very, very ignorant, gullible, or both.

One reason for this is that writing is in large part rewriting, a notoriously tedious and painful process.

Still, as people increasingly rely on chatbots to generate "content," with the artificial intelligence pouring out lots of words that they must then polish, the polishing seems likely to be ever more of what it means to "write."

In considering the situation we should remember two truisms about writing, namely:

1. You can't rewrite well unless you know how to write well in the first place--and people do not pick up that skill just cleaning up chatbot content.

2. Most people who take pleasure in writing at all take pleasure in the experience of writing, not the rewriting, which they are apt to experience as a chore, and want as little as possible to do with.

Together 1. and 2. mean that increasingly relying on chatbots for text creation will leave people with less of the skill needed to polish that created text--and the wherewithal to go about that polish properly (which comes down to a readiness to tough out the tedious, painful process because they care about the quality of the content). The result may well be a decline in the quality of written content from what we get today--especially if the required skills go faster than the improvement in chatbot functioning that would make up for them.

The Decline of the B-Movie Star

Ordinarily when people speak of the "decline of the movie star" these days they have in mind the way in which Hollywood no longer produces "bankable" head-liners of the "A-list" type whose casting as a lead in a major feature film (within reason) can deliver a healthy opening weekend gross.

They speak much less of the B-movie star. This is, in part, because the B-movie itself went into decline--as A-movies became really big B-movies with great technical resources and Big Names attached, and as other forms of small-screen production exploded, as with serial television, leaving less room for two-hour-oriented content of any form. However, the B-movie stars would also seem to have suffered from the same factors that overshadow the stars in the A-movies, including the films having to be sold on some basis other than the appeal of the leads, like brand-name franchises, which has its echo in the "mockbusters" in which the Asylum specializes--like Almighty Thor, Independent Day, Tomb Invader and Top Gunner. Amid all that it is not so easy for the would-be B-movie to stand above the evocation of the big movie, any more than the leads in the A-movies can hope to be bigger than their franchises.

It's Only Politics When the Left Does It

Irving Kristol, attempting to distinguish the neoconservatism of which he was the "godfather" from other ideologies, argued that neoconservatism was overtly and explicitly ideological--setting it apart from other forms of conservatism that treated ideology as a uniquely leftist trait (and intellectual sin).

The same seems to me to extend to the way in which those who sniff about the inappropriateness of injecting politics into art approach the matter. People are far more likely to object to politics there when those politics are not their own--and given who has the command of the review pages that generally means that (especially outside the culture war) it is the injection of the left's politics into art that gets artists a hard time from critics for having committed a supposed sin when the reality is that, as George Orwell put it, "All Art is Propaganda."

Learning to Think By Learning to Write

Looking back on my own schooling I know how much I learned from the process of having to research material and organize my thoughts about it required by an assignment to produce a thesis-centered paper. In fact, it taught me that thinking is central to the writing process, so much so that when I got around to writing a book about composition it was on the thought process that I centered it.

Today, with students, and even scholars and scientists, counting on chatbots to generate content in this manner I suspect that that kind of training is a lot less likely to happen.

What do you think?

Of the Quasi-Middle Class

Recent years have had me thinking me a lot about the term "middle class"--starting with the awkwardness of the "New" middle class concept which completely overlooks the whole issue of property and independence to treat people who work for a paycheck at the pleasure of a master ("boss" is just a euphemism for master, because apparently someone thought saying it in Dutch made it different) as a privileged stratum.

The idea was that they enjoyed a higher level of material consumption, more security, more opportunity to get ahead than other people working for a boss for the sake of a paycheck--but on close inspection it seems that while in the post-war era and after a great many people had houses and cars, this was a matter of having a mortgage and making car payments rather than owning things outright, all as (in part because of their indebtedness and its perils) they had relatively little of the security and opportunity promised. And all in all I think a case can be made that what we speak of as the "middle class" is overwhelmingly just the "quasi-middle class"--and that we would understand the stresses of the present situation a good deal better than we do now if we started to recognize it as such.

Whither the Promise of Silicon Valley?

The '90s, as I find myself saying again and again, were a period of profound delusion. Many of the delusions had to do with the New Economy, in which a certain conception of "Silicon Valley" was central. For the information age-singing neoliberal Silicon Valley represented everything good and great about America (such that when its boosters speak of it they seem to be imagining heavenly choirs raising their voices them). Its people were--in line with their obsessive compulsive disorder-like propensity for invidious comparison--the country's "best and brightest" (which was to say that if you were not one of them, you were not best and brightest--you were worse and dumber). It embodied what they regarded as the finest American values ("entrepreneurship," "innovation," and many, many other buzzwords), which they held to be more strongly present here than anywhere else in the country or the world. (It may well be that the origins of the "If Cars Were Like Computers . . ." joke are not what we are told they are, but even so one could easily picture the executives in Detroit getting sick of hearing their counterparts in the Bay Area get talked up so much as to concoct something of the kind.)

Delusional, too, were the populist fantasies that the cheerleaders tried spinning around it. The market populists portrayed the tech billionaires as young upstarts, vaguely progressive and even countercultural--hippie techies out of the West Coast "Ecotopia" who wanted to make the world a better place. ("It's like, freedom, man!") Such people were supposed to be the redeemers on Earth of the neoliberalism that tore the guts out of the industrial base that was the foundation of American economic might--with an unceasing stream of INNOVATION! from which wealth would trickle down to all in ways from "good jobs" to day trading that would make every adult a rentier. And even as they made for a more productive capitalism than ever before they would make for a kinder and gentler one, too, greening our production and making our lives easier not only with their products and the income with which to buy them but their management style as our workplaces became kindergartens for grown-ups, full of beanbag chairs and toys contributing to a gentle, soothing, creativity-nurturing atmosphere.

Of course, it did not work that way. At all. Anyone who imagined that Silicon Valley by itself would make everything wrong with the American economy right found out otherwise in short order as Silicon Valley hype actually tanked the economy with dot-com bubble and bust--while the same old problems just went on getting worse through and after it, as Silicon Valley's INNOVATION! engine all but sputtered compared with the promises of the '90s. (The prospect of genuine advances like self-driving cars came to nothing, as they pushed things no one asked for and most people refused when offered them, like that Internet of Things they never shut up about.)

The populist fantasies looked especially ridiculous. Those supposed upstarts (rarely of such obscure origin as their PR people would have folks believe), who were supposed to have challenged the club of Old Men ruling the economy became a club of Old Men in their turn. And they, and the corporate empires they built, have become monuments to extreme and ever-more established wealth, and the inseparability and ultimate indistinguishability of the newest money from the oldest in connections, style, tone and even possessions (the onetime icon of tech wealth since become the biggest private landowner in the country). Monument to Wall Street paper profiteering and offshore banking and race-to-the-labor-standards bottom offshoring and sweatshop exploitation; to monopoly power and Orwellian surveillance and censorship; to hyper-elitism and contempt for the have-nots, in ways from the Josiah Bounderby pretenses and Ebenezer Scrooge callousness to the ideologies to which those to whom so much is given so easily incline, desperately trying to persuade the world that they are the supermen of Ayn Rand's inverted proletarian lit stories (with the media a very willing accessory as it promulgates their images of themselves as chess-playing math whiz child prodigies all growns up who will personally unlock the secret to immortality as Prometheus stole fire from the gods!).

It is increasingly difficult, and perhaps not even possible, to regard the Silicon Valley people were promised, always a delusion that one had to be truly gullible to be taken in by, as anything but that delusion now--and indeed there seems a certain symbolism in the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group being bankrupt, just like the hucksterism that may prove to be the place's single greatest cultural legacy.

What Will the Film Market Be Like in 2031?

Looking at Disney's recently revised schedule of releases I could not help but notice that Disney has Marvel Cinematic Universe films planned all the way through 2027--and Avatar films all the way through 2031.

I generally get the impression that business does too little long-range planning, rather than too much. (However much Establishment commentators like to pooh-pooh those who dare speak of short-termism, it really is an issue.) But it seems to me that the world of film in 2023, which looks quite a different thing from what it did in 2019, let alone 2015 (when Hollywood was orienting itself to China, when the possibilities of streaming were supposed to be unbounded, when Disney looked unstoppable and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was imagined to be replicable and the pandemic was just disaster movie stuff), could be very, very different in 2031, so much so that planning specific installments in specific franchises that far down the road is indicative of someone getting ahead of themselves.

What do you think?

James McDonald, and the Demand for "Strong Characters"

In recently surveying the literary scene and asking "Where is Our [Emile] Zola?" James McDonald, noting the extreme neglect of working-class life not only in the more popular genre fiction, but the ever more minute body of "literary" fiction purporting to offer something more than escapist entertainment, had occasion to consider the literary agents who are the field's gatekeepers, their standards, their tastes.

As he noted one commonly finds among the agents' hazily expressed preferences (in fairness, they're not really interested in having some unknown trying to cater to their tastes) a desire for "strong" characters. As McDonald remarks, these agents' "tastes represent an upper-middle class approach to literature," looking for "role-model ("strong") characters," who will somehow "overcome" some contemporary problem, typically of the more fashionable types ("spousal abuse, alcoholism, sexism, to take a few from the current bestsellers") on the basis of "[i]ndividual resilience, 'grit' (the term of the hour) and personal choices," even when purportedly writing realistic, adult fiction (which is rare enough, McDonald emphasizing the preference for "escape into childhood, magic and a romanticized past").

It is, in his view, a step backward from what we were starting to see in the nineteenth century with writers like that pioneer of naturalism, Zola--I would say, a step back into the eighteenth century, when the individualistic, bourgeois novel emerged.

Thus do we, in an age in which "Artificial General Intelligence" may have already arrived, carry forward literary ideals belonging to an era where the steam engine was scarcely becoming serviceable for industrial use, and pat ourselves on the back for how progressive we are in doing so.

The Working Class in Fiction, and the Working Class Author on Park Avenue

Recently writing about the near-invisibility of the working class and its life from literary fiction today James McDonald emphasized the tastes of the literary agents who are the publishing industry's gatekeepers.

These tastes certainly play a part in determining what may reach a publisher and what does not. However, given that McDonald was (rightly) insistent that one need not be working class to write well about the working class (just as, more broadly, people can, do and should transcend their limitations as they write about the world), he was less probably less inclined to emphasize the extent to which working-class persons are by and large not to be found in publishing, the Academy or anywhere else--while, contrary to the hopes endlessly raised about the slush pile by the colossal industry playing on the hopes of aspiring authors, barring a "platform" (i.e. the ability to answer "Yes" to the question "Are you famous enough that a commercially significant number of people will buy a book with your name on the cover?") personal connections are pretty much the only way in. Working-class persons are particularly unlikely to have connections of that kind--and what this means for their exclusion from traditional publishing, if far from the only factor in the invisibility of the working class in literature today, does contribute to it.

Review: SeaFire, by John Gardner

Compared with its particularly odd predecessor SeaFire can seem a return to form for the series, Bond once again up against a billionaire of dubious origin and dubious business practices who will shortly be revealed as an utter madman in an adventure which will have considerably more opportunity for jet-setting, chases, gunplay as we zip from London to Seville, from Munich to Puerto Rico, with a range of toys extending to an old World War II U-boat coming into play. (We even see--very rare for a Gardner Bond novel--Felix Leiter show up in an evocation of the old days.)

Yet there is also some fairly dramatic rupture to go along with the continuity. It was predictable that Bond's cooperating with Fredericka von Grusse in Never Send Flowers would eventually lead to her becoming more than just "his friend Flicka." What was less predictable was that she would get booted from her old job, and that M would give her a new one with Bond's own service, while cohabiting with Bond in a relationship that continues with them partners on and off the job. (Indeed, Gardner tells us that Bond himself was "astounded" at M's "out of character" acceptance of this foreign woman within his unit, and at least as much so, her "living in sin" with the agent on whom he so relied but whose antics he had so often deplored.)

At all this Gardner's Bond wondered if M was not "desperately trying to keep in step with the times," but it seems a safer bet that this is the series, not M, keeping in step with the times, not least in its depicting Bond in what the author seems at pains to persuade us is Bond's "entirely novel experience" with Flicka, unlike what he had before even with Tracy--"a deeper commitment," a "more mature understanding" which "had little to do with sex" and more with "[t]wo people blending together as one," with all this having its effect on Bond's "mode of life" more broadly. (The spendthrift gambler and mass adulterer Fleming described in Moonraker hardly seems even a memory anymore, with Bond to be found in the evenings not at the gambling table at some latterday Crockford's, but rather sitting on the couch in his apartment with Flicka watching some old movie--about which Gardner is so emphatic as to contradict himself, telling us that Bond was never much of a film or theatergoer before, in spite of Gardner having made him a veritable encyclopedia of theater trivia in the past books, including the adventure with Flicka immediately preceding this one.)

Similarly "mature," one supposes, is Bond becoming ever more the bureaucrat, with the old super-operative in the field now put in charge of a sort of resurrection of the old "Double O" section, the "Two Zeroes"--just one small part of a reorganization of the Service that has more than a little to do with the expectation of the post-Cold War as seeing secret agents more concerned with organized crime and small-fry terrorist groups than the old geopolitics. Indeed, Gardner, who is quite aware of what a comedown all that can seem for the international men of mystery (which had Flicka being sent to courses on "such relatively dull subjects as Accountancy"), nonetheless displays some relish for working out the associated minutiae, detailing it in the expository passages, and incorporating it into the adventure, with Bond not simply coming in to the office to get a quick word from M and then going off and doing his thing, but working out the next move, which is not just his own next move, in conference with other senior staff of the Security State (all to surprisingly little griping from Bond, compared to what anyone who remembers Fleming might expect).

The resulting concoction is not without its good points. The adventure is decently paced, avoiding dull stretches in spite of the concessions to a fuller portrait of Bond the Bureaucrat, and if much of the action is mostly standard stuff, it works, with Gardner showing some flair in the finale. Still, after all of the times when Gardner, despite acknowledging Bond's lone wolf nature, put him in a group anyway, I have to admit it still jarred. And the mechanics of the plot suffer by comparison with Gardner's prior work. Max Tarn and his scheme, if in respects timely in those years of German "reunification" and a resurgent far right, was a bit on the derivative side--another would-be Hitler, and a less successful creation as such than Icebreaker's Von Gloda, while also carrying with him some of the less than compelling elements of '80s terrorism-entrepreneurs like Win, Lose or Die's Baradj and the ecological wackiness of Licence Renewed's Murik. (Indeed, astonishing as it may sound, Murik's plan was, if clearly the more reckless and destructive, less totally incoherent, given that it came down to pure and simple blackmail, however lunatic the purpose or vile the means. By contrast Tarn's plan had him staging an oil spill at sea just so he could demonstrate a new technology for cleaning up spills, which did not actually exist, that would confirm his stature as some sort of political messiah, enabling him to become the new Fuhrer of reunified Germany--or something like that.)

I also have to admit that I found Bond's relationship with Flicka a bigger problem. I have to admit to not being a fan of the kind of smugly wisecracking crime-fighting duo for which Gardner was clearly going with them, while given how it ends up--all too predictably--it was not clear what the point of writing such a duo was here, really. Was it so important to show Bond in a "mature" relationship, however briefly, in the name of assuring the readers who care about such things that he is no longer the old 007? If so then it seems the sort of thing calling into question the point of anyone's continuing to write James Bond novels at all. But of course it was not the last such effort, Gardner confirming the other impression he gave of laying the groundwork for further adventures (surely he didn't expect us to learn all that stuff about MicroGlobe One and such for a mere one book?) by producing one more Bond novel--Cold Fall.

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

Review: The Facts of Death, by Raymond Benson

Like John Gardner in his sophomore effort, in his second novel The Facts of Death Raymond Benson shifts his approach from doing the utmost to make Bond contemporary to heavily evoking the character's past, drenching the reader in references to it to the end of connecting this adventure with the work that came before. Thus he includes in his second book not just Bill Tanner or Major Boothroyd, but James Molony, the now retired Miles Messervy, and Felix Leiter, and yet another ally from a different adventure in Stefan Tempo, while even giving Major Smythe from "Octopussy" a mention.1 Of particular interest Benson attempts to establish a single continuity between the works of Fleming, Amis and Gardner. The meeting with Messervy is at his residence Quarterdeck, previously featured in Colonel Sun, which is occasion to mention that book's episode. And if Zero Minus Ten hinted at at least a possibility of continuity in its reference to Messervy's retirement (Cold Fall ended with Bond on his way to meet the new, female M for the first time), this book removes any doubt about that, Benson mentioning, in passing, Bond's last trip to Texas--to face down the "last heir" of Blofeld--in an obvious reference to Gardner's For Special Services.

Still, it would be a mistake to exaggerate Benson's backward glance. Benson goes only so far in incorporating the material of the Gardner era, at least. There is no sign of Ann Reilly in his Q Branch, which, again, recalls the movies with Major "Now Pay Attention 007" Boothroyd the figure with whom 007 deals when visiting that section of SIS headquarters. And despite the mention of Bond's prior Texan adventure, and his meeting with Felix, there is not even a perfunctory "How are the kids?" mention of Bond's partner in that prior mission, Cedar. In fact I got the impression that this was an attempt to placate fans irritated by the apparent chucking of Gardner's amassed material the way many Star Wars fans were to later be aggrieved by Disney's designating the hundreds of novels and associated materials the franchise's Expanded Universe amassed over decades mere "Legends" rather than "Canon."

More significantly, where Gardner turned not just to a density of reference to the older works, but concocted a plot out of the elements of Moonraker and Goldfinger, here Benson pointedly writes a novel of the 1990s, taking its cue from film rather than Fleming's books where it really counts. Facts opens with a brisk account of several incidents hinting at a villainous plot that have Bond already abroad investigating the matter in his first scene, and then before that is over, caught up in a bit of over-the-top action--a much quicker start to the adventure which, as hinted here, is more swiftly paced, and more outlandish in its action-adventure elements, exactly as would be expected of one of the film series' famous "pre-credits sequences." Just the first time military hardware comes into play in the course of the story, the adventure also includes plenty of spy-fi gadgetry, above all a new Jaguar for Bond more fancifully upgraded than any preceding vehicle in print, and perhaps the movies. Bond's car now has, among other features, holographic projectors affording a host of possibilities for deceiving observers, its own drone aircraft, Chobham and reactive armor, and "heat-seeking rockets and cruise missiles." (It seemed to me that the author did not have an especially good idea of what some of these things were, that the terms sounded high-tech and fancy and he threw them around without worrying much about whether they could be discretely incorporated into a luxury car, but they do succeed in making the desired impression, while each and every one of them promptly comes into play.) Once more Bond finds himself at a gaming table with the villain of the piece (Konstantin Romanos), but rather than an intricately detailed game such as we got last time, there is a briefer, more accessible round of baccarat in which he seizes on the chance to afford a verbal provocation of his opponent (such that it recalled the film version of Thunderball rather than the print version of Casino Royale or Moonraker or Goldfinger). The adventure even has Bond trying to beat a clock at the climax, as he did so many times in the movies--while again, Benson was more casual than Gardner about involving Bond with various women through the story, typically along the cinematic lines again.

Moreover, it seemed to me that the novel's turn to the parodic also had a whiff of the cinematic Bond about it, not least Benson's making a crucial element of the enemy's plan a sperm clinic which Bond infiltrates as a prospective donor--an element that had me thinking of nothing so much as the then-recent third Naked Gun film, and which predictably brings its share of crude and sometimes self-aware humor. (Bond, after all, has to submit to a medical exam and account for the innumerable evidences of severe and often exotic injury in the course of his past adventures.) There is, too, in this period when metafiction-heavy pop postmodernism was still being passed off as something novel and "cool" a surprising density of pop cultural reference which extends far beyond the James Bond franchise. (One scene notable in this respect has Bond being menaced by a female captor tracing a knife over his face and cheek as she verbally references Reservoir Dogs, Basic Instinct, and Natural Born Killers in quick succession.)

Less parodic, but still characteristically '90s, was the geopolitical element in the story, and its mixing with Bondian supervillainy. The conflict between the Greek and Turkish ethnic communities on Cyprus, its connections with the broader conflicts between Greece and Turkey, and the ways in which Turkish politics intersect with those of its Middle Eastern neighbors (the country shares borders with Iraq and Iran), are all very real. As people looking at the headlines in those years were only too aware, so was the existence of violent religious cults, often highly idiosyncratic in nature, with Benson certainly taking this course with Romanos, a Greek Cypriot refugee who, believing himself a reincarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras taking direction from the Olympian gods themselves, leads a similarly-minded cult in the pursuit of a campaign of personal revenge, while at the same time caught up in a biotech company plot to discretely hold the world to ransom. (The result is hardly the deepest treatment of the conflicts roiling the eastern Mediterranean, but at the very least Benson would seem to rate points for originality in the villain's conception.)

Altogether the overall impression I got was of an unfilmed Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper--a fact which did not make it go over particularly well with Fleming purists. However, the adventure certainly works on those other terms it took for itself. Indeed, when these books were new, and I was coming to them as a fan of the movies disappointed in my contacts with Fleming and Gardner, I was very pleased to accept those terms, with the briskly paced, action-packed (and in respects surprisingly original) Facts perhaps Benson's most satisfying effort on that level.

1. Stefan Tempo is one of Darko Karim's sons in From Russia, With Love.

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

New Reviews of the James Bond Continuation Novels

I have had many an occasion to remark the decline of the print thriller, and especially the print action thriller--and I might add, the short half-life of such fiction, with yesteryear's genre-defining blockbuster, if called a "classic" by connoisseurs, probably little-read now by the standard even of older books.

In spite of the recent furor over the James Bond novels' reported bowdlerization the fact remains that few are likely to read their way through Fleming any time soon--while fewer still are likely to pick up the continuation novels. Still, they have their place in the history of 007, and I have recently opted to fill in the gaps with a slew of new reviews of them, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun.

Happy reading.

Review: Zero Minus Ten, by Raymond Benson

With the choice of Raymond Benson as John Gardner's successor the overseers of the James Bond continuation novels shifted course. Rather than a prominent literary figure who had had a rare chance to work with Fleming (not so easy a thing to find in the '90s), or an old hand at spy fiction who could be counted on to approach the work with a detachment and sense of irony that gave him a relatively free hand in updating and innovating (if with not always pleasing result), they picked a writer who, if undeniably a fan (a Vice-President of the American James Bond 007 Fan Club, in fact), had previously been known for work on games rather than novels.

Again one can see in this a recognition of changing times, as other media changed what people expected from their fiction. As Benson himself was to acknowledge in an interview, he did not write like Fleming, and did not try--Fleming's obliquely literary approach unsalable in a market demanding easier-to-read fiction. One might add that between the endurance of the Bond films' ability to generate hits at the box office (freshly reconfirmed with 1995's GoldenEye), the remoteness of that day and that market in which Fleming met with such success, the softening market for spy fiction generally and the Bond novels particularly, this series that had originated as novels was now being produced for a market coming to James Bond with cinematically-defined expectations. The result was that one could picture the continuation novels being received less as sequels to the now-unmarketable originals, but rather "tie-ins" to the films now at the heart of the franchise.

So did it go with Benson. By comparison with Amis, who defined his Bond adventure in opposition to the gadget-packed movies of the '60s, and Gardner, who may have been willing to go cinematic here and there but did not make a default mode of it, Benson's books were from the first intended to appeal to an audience accustomed to the movies, and the movies of the late '90s at that, as Zero Minus Ten demonstrates, down to its cast of characters. Not only does M happen to be a woman, as had become the case at the end of Gardner's last, but at least in her clipped speech and overt disdain for some of the better-known aspects of Bond's character "as a feminist," strongly calls to mind the conception GoldenEye presented. Reading the scene of Bond's visit to Q Branch--the banter between a flippant Bond and an irascible Major Boothroyd who regards him as irresponsible with the equipment he provides--I found it impossible not to hear the voices of Pierce Brosnan and Desmond Llewellyn speaking the dialogue on the page as I read it. (Benson's Q actually says "Now pay attention 007.") The tendency to give the reader the Bond of the films rather than of Fleming's books is similarly evident in the writing itself. Even more than Gardner he goes for straightforward storytelling, while taking a minimum of interest in the minutiae of Bond's daily life, or Bond's propensity to ruminate. He was also more inclined than Gardner to write the Bond girls in cinematic fashion (with Sunny Pei coming across as the "Bond girliest" Bond girl the novels had presented in a long time).

Still, Benson is a Bond fan whose affection for the series extends beyond the movies to the books, and if his writing often feels like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper, there is plenty of Fleming as well in this first go. There is something of Fleming's Live and Let Die in the mixing of Bond up with foreign gangsters in a great foreign metropolis and getting caught up with their women; and something of "Risico" too in the task Bond agrees to perform on behalf of one of them against his enemies. There is also something of Casino Royale, and other Bond novels, in two bits left out of the pre-reboot films that were all that existed in Benson's day, namely an extended account of Bond's playing a game with the enemy (mahjongg), and Bond's enduring a bout of torture (in this case a caning, a practice which had then been recently drawn to wide public attention in the English-speaking world by the arrest of Michael Fay in Singapore). It might be added that while the pace is brisk and the action plentiful, the adventure is relatively grounded, rarely going over the top in the manner of Bond's screen adventures (or the way Benson's novels would soon be doing). The acknowledgment of what came before is also present in Bond's physical appearance. The minute flecks of gray Gardner noted in Licence Renewed are now grayness at the temples--fudging the chronology (in 1997 Fleming's Bond would have been seventy-nine years old), but not altogether denying that Bond is getting older.1

As all of this suggests Benson's first book can seem a concoction of familiar ingredients, some of which I, for one, found more welcome than others. (As no fan of the long accounts of games and long torture scenes, I could have done without the long mahjongg game and the caning--and generally thought things worked best here when Benson was in his more cinematic mode.) However, it does have some more original elements. The most obvious is the extent to which the plot is tied to a contemporary event--the real-life handover of Hong Kong back to China (something Gardner only tried once, in quite a different way, in The Man From Barbarossa).2 While this seems rather obviously an attempt to make the old series' new book appear topical it is connected with something more substantial, namely the book's treatment of the politics of Empire. It was the Opium Wars that established British dominion over Hong Kong--a fact given some attention here. The return of the Crown Colony to China is, in fact, treated as the righting of a wrong, in spite of Bond's distaste for the current form of the mainland government, while the villain is a British colonial furious over the event--the bad guy, a man angry over the end of Empire--and Bond's task to stop him. Subsequently in Australia Bond has occasion to remember the mistreatment of the Aborigines, who end up saving his life. It is a remarkable inversion of the attitude to the Empire with which Fleming began, when anger and bitterness over the Empire's decline, unashamed exploitation of the rest of what remained (as with African diamonds in Diamonds Are Forever), and defensiveness about Britain still having "what it takes" in spite of these losses, are the prevailing notes.

I did not get the impression that this was meant to be subversive of the franchise--certainly it did not have Bond reconsidering the interests he has been defending all his adult life--but even so it had me thinking again about how much the series belongs to another time.

As it happened, while the plots of Benson's Bond novels were to raise the resentments over the imperial past time and again in his work--in Bond's adventure on Cyprus in The Facts of Death, in the reference to the longstanding disagreement between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar in DoubleShot--Benson never raised such matters so squarely again.

1. The calculation is based on Bond having been specifically identified as eight years from the double-O section's mandatory retirement age of forty-five in Moonraker, which was published in 1955 (and gave us no reason to think it was set earlier or later than the date of publication), implying that Bond was born in 1918.
2. Of course, Gardner, too, referenced that return--in his own Bond thriller, No Deals, Mr. Bond.

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

Review: Cold Fall, by John Gardner

After SeaFire there was another year without an original Bond novel (John Gardner published the novelization of the year's Bond film, GoldenEye instead), following which the next, and final, Gardner Bond novel appeared in 1996, Cold Fall (also published under the alternative title of COLD). In it those who may, in light of the prior book's close, have expected to see the book pick right up where the last novel left off got something different, Gardner going for a previously untried two-part structure, with "Book One" detailing a previously unmentioned episode of Bond's life from many years earlier before, and then in "Book Two," rejoining the "present" to pick up the thread of the narrative from SeaFire's conclusion.

The opening of Book One, and the novel, has a whiff of terrorism and techno-thriller about it, with the destruction of an airliner on the runway at Dulles International by an unknown bomber and Bond, following an uncharacteristic display of forensic acumen, sent off to join the investigative team, whose efforts quickly link back to the events of an even earlier book than SeaFire or Never Send Flowers, Nobody Lives Forever, with Sukie Tempesta reemerging--and, as Bond finds when walking right into an FBI investigation of the Tempesta family driven by the fact that Sukie and her family are not who he thought they were. In contrast with the picture of respectability Sukie painted for him in the prior book the Tempestas turn out to have actually been an aristocratic Roman answer to the Sicilian Mafia who have graduated from ordinary criminality to supervillainy through involvement with an American compound of militia and (yet another) millennial cult. (The Cold--or COLD--of the title derives from the acronym shortening the cult's full name, the "Children of the Last Days.") And Bond winds up being asked to help the investigators out by trading on his connection with Sukie to infiltrate the family.

After detailing that adventure Cold Fall cuts back to where Gardner's last book left Bond. While I took it as a given that Flicka was dead at the end of the last book she was, in fact, still fighting for her life when Cold Fall returned to that point in the timeline (even if the prognosis is very grim, with the doctor telling Bond her chances of making it at all are less than even, and survival likely to mean being a cripple for the rest of her life). Indeed, Bond is struggling with the situation just as he finds himself involved again with COLD and the Tempesta family, on the verge of making their big play for power (while M is on the verge of ceding his, the decision already made to retire the longtime chief of the organization).

As all this suggests the book is yet another mass of comparative oddities from the standpoint of the series, both structurally and in the elements of which it is composed. In cases this appears to be compensation for the prior books' light servings of action, not least in the jet ski chase and helicopter battle in Book One. In others it appears a matter of trying to present something different (not least, in having the Bond girl of a prior book revealed as actually having been a world-threatening supervillainness all along).

Some of the resulting twists have their interest. If Bond's coming to America's rescue had been a theme of the series from the first, his saving it not from Communists and other foreign menaces, or even "internal foreigners" like ethnic gangsters, but a purportedly "all-American" type like the lunatic General Brutus Clay is a noteworthy variation. When it comes to "big action" the novel serves up a good deal more of that than anything the Gardner Bond novels had offered since at least Win, Lose or Die. And as is so often the case, Gardner is not just well aware of the incongruity, but does not hesitate to make a joke of it, which for those willing to go along with the humorous approach helps. (Thus we see Bond in a restaurant in Idaho full of cowboy hat and cowboy boot-wearing servers and patrons craving a vodka martini, but "common sense" telling him "that just might be considered a girl's drink around here," and settling for a bottle of Red Dog beer instead--while still raising eyebrows by accepting the offer of a glass to go with the bottle. And that was, of course, nothing next to how wrong he proved to be about Sukie!) Moreover, there is the place of the book in the series--the way in which it seems to, with the end of Bond's involvement with Flicka, and in a way the loss of the father figure to him that M had been, round off the transition so clearly underway in Never Send Flowers.

Still, the result has definite limitations. Again, if the new theme has its interest (the threat posed by the Clays of the world) a Bond novel is a less than ideal place to explore it, and unsurprisingly their form of villainy remains thinly sketched to the end. (COLD and company are obsessed with "toughness" on drugs and crime, with isolationism, with "strong leadership," but its concerns fall short of quite cohering, with the same going for its particular ambitions for a takeover of the U.S..) Indeed, their plans for taking the country over are as sketchy as their ideology. (They plan a wave of bombings that will be blamed on "terrorists" and presumably have "the country demanding leadership," but it is far from clear just why anyone should turn to this obscure group of fanatics for that "leadership.") The action scenes, while technically well written, seemed to me less energetic than they ought to have been--an impression I had not just the first time I picked up the book (at the time of its release), but many years later when revisiting it for my research. And altogether the novelty, the twists--the unsubtle cramming of two stories into one to produce a book-length narrative--can seem more indicative of strain than of vibrancy. Indeed, considering Gardner's last novels, and this one most of all, I find myself thinking of the pure and simple fact that (by his own admission) he had spent a decade and a half working on a series he had never much liked, and had probably stuck with for longer than he should have.

After all, if Gardner's work on the Bond series never compared with his very good best on his own projects--his Boysie Oakes novels, his Moriarty novels--he was still a skilled storyteller with a knack for action, a sense of humor, and a readiness to try something different (in itself a virtue, even though this was a place where it often did not work out), which even in this series let him wring some interest out of the shaky premises available to him (maybe more than we had any right to expect). Still, it is a reminder that novel-writing is not a thing done well for very long when taken up unenthusiastically, even by a genuinely talented and experienced author. It is a reminder, too, that by the '80s, let alone the '90s, updating the adventures of a '50s-era hero who was himself an update of adventures that in the '50s were already as old and tired as Bond was to be at century's end was an increasingly difficult task, one reason why Gardner's successors so often took different paths.

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

Review: Scorpius, by John Gardner

From For Special Services to No Deals, Mr. Bond, the John Gardner James Bond novels had 007 continuing his old battle with SPECTRE and SMERSH's successors in the KGB. Afterward he seems to have taken the same path of least resistance, the same one that the Bond films for nearly two decades had been following by this point--seizing on whatever happened to be fashionable in pop culture at the moment.

This time around the novel (like the Bond film then in production, Licence to Kill) has a whiff of '80s Hollywood action-adventure about it. We have Bond, who had increasingly acted like a local policeman than globetrotting secret agent in these adventures, now more like such a policeman than ever--the tale beginning back in London where a body turns up, and not that of an agent but a rich young girl from the sort of Establishment family whose problems could plausibly become a matter of concern for the Service. We have the much-publicized drug problem of the day, and a cult of religious fanatics, and again a connection with international terrorism. (Bond's enemy this time is "The Meek Ones," who, run by a man who may well be a fabulously wealthy arms dealer behind his new persona as "Father Valentine," uses its rehabilitation services for drug addicts to recruit bodies for yet another rent-a-terrorist service, in this case specializing in suicide bombings.) We have Bond pounding a good deal of London pavement, looking into dodgy credit cards, while in an adventure that sees him in London for the first two-thirds, closely tied to the office and to an unusually present M, who could seem like the perpetually harassed and angry police captain of so much cop show cliché, until Bond goes rogue with a special forces veteran determined to save his daughter from the villains. And amidst it all we have Bond dealing with young girls, and coming across as father figure rather than ladies' man (the way he has increasingly seemed to be since his time with Lavender Peacock).

Of course, Gardner endeavors to make more of it than the police story-gone-over-the-top-in-Don-Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer fashion it looks like, in this case through the well-known method of making up for the enemy's smallness by enlarging the bureaucratic hassles at the heroes' backs, such that as all this is happening M is coping with a triennial audit of the Service that will determine its operating budget, and the Service's frictions with the American intelligence operation in-country. Meanwhile, there is a General Election in the background. All of these factor into the adventure in various ways, not least in elevating the stakes (with the Service's future, the relations with "the Cousins," the determination of the country's next government bound up with the fight with the Meek Ones). Still, given the ways in which they factor in--the only ways in which they could factor in given the needs of the Bond franchise--they can make only so much difference. (We are, for example, given to understand that someone wants to swing the General Election and is using the Meek Ones' services to do it, but we are never told who or why--in contrast with the course a non-Bond thriller would have more easily followed of envisioning an authoritarian party looking to grab power by creating a sense of crisis over public safety.)

In the end all this leaves Scorpius an essentially domestic, grounded, low-stakes Bond adventure, the third in a row and more so than its predecessors. However, if Scorpius does in important respects continue in an established path it would in itself be repeated in later Gardner books, while it seems worth remarking that Gardner did some tweaking of the series' two principal characters from book to book, namely Bond and M. Discussing the beliefs of the Meek Ones Bond displays a very slight, general knowledge of comparative religion, induces M to look (gawk?) "with patent disbelief" at 007, something he apparently did "when his agent revealed interests or information outside the normal business of their trade," apart from the well-known ones of "food, wine, women and fast cars."

Both the display of knowledge and the surprise at it strike me as less characteristic of Fleming's vision of Bond than the films' transformation of the character into an omnicompetent superman who speaks every language and handles any machine with ease. (The "first in Oriental languages at Cambridge" Bond casually mentions in the film You Only Live Twice would have been news to Fleming, who pointedly wrote of Bond as absolutely ignorant of Japanese language and culture in the book from which that movie took its title--and so little else.) It strikes me, too, that where this area of human life is concerned it is not wholly accidental that it came into the series while being written by a former priest--just as that former priest's later taking up theater criticism as a career seems the reason why Bond (in spite of Gardner himself later describing Bond as "never . . . much of a theater or moviegoer") became someone who could detect an impostor based on his memory of minor details of long-ago stage performances, or recognize a line from a classic musical and complete it--and, where they had never been much of a presence in Fleming, the visual arts, from the paintings in M's office to plot points in the story like Bond's infiltration of Markus Bismaquer's compound became a noteworthy element of the tales.

It is not the only break from the characters' past tendencies we see here, M himself surprising us--by, at the close of the novel, involving himself in Bond's love life. If the stodgy old Victorian had not been quite perfect in keeping his thoughts to himself before here he suggests Trilby Shrivenham, a recently recovered drug addict and member (and in her having given them her considerable resources, financier!) of the cult Bond battled in the book as a "Good girl for you, James," without it being a joke. Fleming's M may well have preferred to see Bond married rather than womanizing, but he would have not opened his mouth to actually suggest Bond's doing so--and objected to many a possible partner on far slighter grounds than that. Both Bond's propensity for the theater, and M's nudging Bond toward marriage, were to make significant appearances in Gardner's later Bond novels, especially Never Send Flowers, but we would see something of the change much sooner than that, with a softer M revealed as a doting grandfather who, during Christmas at Quarterdeck, "turn[s] into the reformed Scrooge," and wonders to himself if his thinking of Bond so much is not, after all, because he is "the son the old man had always wanted"; while 007 displays quite the memory for the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance when combating high-tech pirates in the next book, Win, Lose or Die.

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