To go by the innumerable film versions, one would scarcely imagine that Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers is as much satire as swashbuckler. Dumas, a man of the nineteenth century (indeed, the son of a prominent general of the French Revolution), spent much of the novel having fun at the expense of those pillars of the Old Regime--monarchs and aristocrats, soldiers and churchmen, and all they represented, not least their moral squalor.1
The result is that, as the reader quickly finds, the musketeers popularly associated with not much more than high spirits, loyalty and camaradrie are basically a pack of thieving, deadbeat, colossally entitled hoodlums--and that on their better days.2 Charming as they are for all that in print, the movies tend to curtail this (especially after D'Artagnan's memorable first meetings with his future comrades, which they dare not drop and can scarcely modify), filmmakers finding this all a bit much for characters presented as "our heroes"--while in our relatively conservative times, they also hesitate to mock soldiers and priests. And of course, along with contemporary conservatism, there is contemporary feminism, which looks askance at such types as adulterous airheads, damsels in distress and villainnesses who fight with traditional "women's weapons" like lies, seduction and poison--so that in Paul W.S. Anderson's 2011 version Constance is a secret agent (and unmarried to a doddering old man); and Milla Jovovich's DeWinter is Resident Evil's Alice in period costume. Meanwhile, rather than all the derring-do being driven by the heroes' effort to stop a potentially war-starting exposure of the French Queen's astonishing indiscretion (a striking indictment of the stupidity of the politics of an era in which war was the sport of kings), what we get is their disrupting Cardinal Richelieu's scheming to create the appearance of adultery.
Alas, in the process the satire is reduced to nearly nothing, and a good deal of texture gone too, leaving us with just a sanitized early fragment of the adventure (few moviemakers bother with more than the first third of the story). This being the case one may wonder at the eternal eagerness to refilm it for the umpteenth time.3 (Just check out Dumas' IMDB page.) But those who have been paying attention know that faithfulness to a classic, or even an interest in what makes it a classic, has less often been part of adaptations than one might wish, for all the tediously pious protestations of the PR people. Those looking to film the story simply seem to think cloaks and rapiers are cool, and have a name everyone knows attached to them, which spares them the trouble of making stuff up like a writer should, or still worse, trying to sell something under--horror of horrors--an original title.
Even going by this standard Anderson's version is uneven, but it does at least reflect an all-too-rare recognition of the truisms that if you have to leave behind a big chunk of what makes a story worth telling in the first place, you ought to replace it with something else; and that the millionth version of the same story ought to have something setting it apart from the nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine versions preceding it. In this case, it is an abundance of clock-punk that performs the role, and at the least, it gives the production an interesting look. Still, filmmaking would be a whole lot better off if there was a little more readiness to say "Do it right or not it all," a bit more broad-mindedness toward classic stories' content, and moviemakers did not have to slavishly wrap up original ideas in the trappings of established names.
1. In this Dumas is a lot like Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, another, contemporaneous classic of French and world literature distorted out of all recognition in the popular memory by the film versions.
2. Living by sword and by gun and disdaining industry and those who do it; regarding it as unthinkable to be unattended by a servant, while usually being flat broke; quick to arm and quick to anger and thinking themselves quite entitled to take what they want and take advantage of anyone they need to do in order to do so; they comprise rather an unflattering portrait of aristocratic, "leisure class" mores.
3. Even Richard Lester's attempt to shoot the fuller story wound up split into two films--with the stuff after the first third generally going into the second film, The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1974).
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
James Bond, Mythic Hero
Robbie Collin penned one of the more interesting of the recent pieces about the Daniel Craig era in the Bond films' history, noting, among other things, if nothing else, for the issues he raises.
Collin is right when he points to the series' more political edge. Still, one ought not to push this too far--the series' ideas about the necessity of espionage orthodox, but the depictions of terrorism vague, while things were complicated by an abrupt, if short-lived, left turn in Quantum of Solace.
Collin is right, too, when he points to the series' greater readiness to embrace Bond's obsolescence. Still, there is no going back to a pre-Suez mind-set, regarding either Britain's place in the world, or gender attitudes--so that this does not mean very much here. And Collin claims rather than demonstrates that the changes have made Bond relevant in a way that, for example, he did not seem to be pre-reboot.
Quite the contrary, Collin is most persuasive when he discusses the turn to myth in recent films--in the evocation of the Odyssey, and in other ways. (In fact, I recently discussed the same theme at some length.) Mythology has its fascinations, but from a modern, rationalistic standpoint it has very serious limits. As Darko Suvin observed, myth is essentially a "ritual and religious approach" that, in a story taking place "above time," "claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena."1 As a practical matter this means that it "absolutizes and personifies apparently constant motifs from the sluggish periods with low social dynamics"--exactly what modern times have not been, with the result that myth explains much less satisfactorily. Indeed, it is apt to appear "an illusion . . . a fraud, in the best case only a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies."
As relevance goes, this is not terribly great, and the results show it. (Just what does Skyfall really tell us about life, the universe and everything?) Naturally the significance of a mythic Bond lies less in making him "relevant" to our times than in relieving the pressure on the creators to make him contemporary, and permitting the small-scale intrigues in which he is more apt to get caught up now to seem somehow larger than they are, as though we were watching not a civil servant chasing a Bad Guy to get a peek at his phone, but (however superficially) the doings of old-time gods and heroes whose every word, deed and gesture somehow seems worthy of an epic.
1. These remarks come from his classic article "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre."
Collin is right when he points to the series' more political edge. Still, one ought not to push this too far--the series' ideas about the necessity of espionage orthodox, but the depictions of terrorism vague, while things were complicated by an abrupt, if short-lived, left turn in Quantum of Solace.
Collin is right, too, when he points to the series' greater readiness to embrace Bond's obsolescence. Still, there is no going back to a pre-Suez mind-set, regarding either Britain's place in the world, or gender attitudes--so that this does not mean very much here. And Collin claims rather than demonstrates that the changes have made Bond relevant in a way that, for example, he did not seem to be pre-reboot.
Quite the contrary, Collin is most persuasive when he discusses the turn to myth in recent films--in the evocation of the Odyssey, and in other ways. (In fact, I recently discussed the same theme at some length.) Mythology has its fascinations, but from a modern, rationalistic standpoint it has very serious limits. As Darko Suvin observed, myth is essentially a "ritual and religious approach" that, in a story taking place "above time," "claims to explain once and for all the essence of phenomena."1 As a practical matter this means that it "absolutizes and personifies apparently constant motifs from the sluggish periods with low social dynamics"--exactly what modern times have not been, with the result that myth explains much less satisfactorily. Indeed, it is apt to appear "an illusion . . . a fraud, in the best case only a temporary realization of potentially limitless contingencies."
As relevance goes, this is not terribly great, and the results show it. (Just what does Skyfall really tell us about life, the universe and everything?) Naturally the significance of a mythic Bond lies less in making him "relevant" to our times than in relieving the pressure on the creators to make him contemporary, and permitting the small-scale intrigues in which he is more apt to get caught up now to seem somehow larger than they are, as though we were watching not a civil servant chasing a Bad Guy to get a peek at his phone, but (however superficially) the doings of old-time gods and heroes whose every word, deed and gesture somehow seems worthy of an epic.
1. These remarks come from his classic article "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre."
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Review: Dark Force Rising, by Timothy Zahn
New York: Bantam, 1992, pp. 376.
Heir to the Empire concluded with the heroes repulsing Thrawn's attempt to grab a sizable portion of their fleet at the Sluis Van shipyard, but only at the price of damaging the ships Thrawn tried to steal, rendering them inoperable for some time to come. This makes it less than a triumph--and indeed, Bothan politician Borsk Fey'la seizes on the results to contrive treason charges against Admiral Ackbar, accusing him of having set the fleet up for attack by the Empire.
Naturally, our heroes set out to clear his name. Meanwhile, for his part Grand Admiral Thrawn pursues his effort to sharply expand his fleet, a game into which the titular "Dark Force"--a fleet of two hundred highly automated warships thought to have been lost in space a half century earlier--quickly looms large.
The result is that in this second book of the trilogy, the good guys and bad seem to be headed in different directions--and while their paths eventually converge, this takes rather a while. In the meantime a great deal of time is spent on matters that seem comparatively tangential--the mystery of Fey'la's connection with New Cov, Han's meeting with Senator Bel Iblis (an Old Republic politician who early on broke with the Rebellion to fight his own, separate war against the Empire), Leia's dealings with the Noghri. (Where the last in particular is concerned, the significance of the matter for the big picture is still not yet clear by book's end.) Luke's meeting with C'boath initially appears more consequential, but this time around, at least, does not amount to very much.
The book is the more diffuse because Thrawn, whose machinations helped tie the events of the last tale together, is less of a presence in this installment. And the looseness--and uneventfulness--seem the less forgivable for coming just when the tale should have been getting tighter and tenser on the way toward the climax. Unsurprisingly the conclusion in which it all culminates leaves something to be desired. In the main it is a replay of the preceding book's, with Luke and his friends up against Thrawn as he makes his play for a bigger force, while the power struggle between Thrawn and C'boath escalates abruptly (perhaps too abruptly, given that a proper build-up could have been the most engaging thing in the book). Still, the finale, which has Thrawn get the upper hand over the heroes, while C'boath just may be getting the upper hand over Thrawn, promises a more exciting tale in the next and final installment, The Last Command.
Heir to the Empire concluded with the heroes repulsing Thrawn's attempt to grab a sizable portion of their fleet at the Sluis Van shipyard, but only at the price of damaging the ships Thrawn tried to steal, rendering them inoperable for some time to come. This makes it less than a triumph--and indeed, Bothan politician Borsk Fey'la seizes on the results to contrive treason charges against Admiral Ackbar, accusing him of having set the fleet up for attack by the Empire.
Naturally, our heroes set out to clear his name. Meanwhile, for his part Grand Admiral Thrawn pursues his effort to sharply expand his fleet, a game into which the titular "Dark Force"--a fleet of two hundred highly automated warships thought to have been lost in space a half century earlier--quickly looms large.
The result is that in this second book of the trilogy, the good guys and bad seem to be headed in different directions--and while their paths eventually converge, this takes rather a while. In the meantime a great deal of time is spent on matters that seem comparatively tangential--the mystery of Fey'la's connection with New Cov, Han's meeting with Senator Bel Iblis (an Old Republic politician who early on broke with the Rebellion to fight his own, separate war against the Empire), Leia's dealings with the Noghri. (Where the last in particular is concerned, the significance of the matter for the big picture is still not yet clear by book's end.) Luke's meeting with C'boath initially appears more consequential, but this time around, at least, does not amount to very much.
The book is the more diffuse because Thrawn, whose machinations helped tie the events of the last tale together, is less of a presence in this installment. And the looseness--and uneventfulness--seem the less forgivable for coming just when the tale should have been getting tighter and tenser on the way toward the climax. Unsurprisingly the conclusion in which it all culminates leaves something to be desired. In the main it is a replay of the preceding book's, with Luke and his friends up against Thrawn as he makes his play for a bigger force, while the power struggle between Thrawn and C'boath escalates abruptly (perhaps too abruptly, given that a proper build-up could have been the most engaging thing in the book). Still, the finale, which has Thrawn get the upper hand over the heroes, while C'boath just may be getting the upper hand over Thrawn, promises a more exciting tale in the next and final installment, The Last Command.
A Note on Golgo 13
I first encountered Golgo 13 as the protagonist of the old NES video game, Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode. The game does not seem to be discussed very much compared with others from its era, but it was something of a hit, enough so to get the sequel released in North America, and even today seems noteworthy for a number of features.
Among them was its relatively "adult" content. In this game, when people got shot, they bled. Characters were seen smoking. And in James Bondian fashion, Golgo had intimate moments with two different women. However, there was also the context for all this—a relatively well-developed storyline presented through cut scenes that were still a novelty in themselves. And of course, the game was novel, too, for helping pioneer the first-person shooter in two of its stages.
At the time I took Golgo for a James Bond-type created just for that game. I had no idea that he was the center of a massive franchise in his own right—the star of one of the biggest-selling mangas of all time, which had already resulted in a number of animated and live-action films (one of which, Assignment: Kowloon, starred Sonny Chiba in the title role). Since then the series has remained in print, making it the longest-running manga of all time, while leading to several more adaptations, most notably a 50-episode anime series in 2008-2009.
But as it turns out, Golgo has a Bondian connection. His creator, Takao Saito, actually produced authorized manga adaptations of four James Bond novels (Thunderball, The Man with the Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die) for the Japanese market during the 1960s before Golgo made his debut in 1969 in Big Comic—and as it happens, his version of Bond looks an awful lot like Golgo later would.
Still, it would be a mistake to think of Golgo as simply a derivative of Bond. Unlike Bond he is a freelancer, without any boss to answer to, who chooses and refuses jobs as he sees fit—and while often involved with spies or gangsters, takes a good many purely private jobs, often making him simply the agent of someone else's personal revenge, the question of good guys and big guys irrelevant. Additionally, while he has a good many skills he is a gunman above all—a sniper, specifically. And where Bond is an open book to the reader, more or less (and the Bond of the films much the same, even if there is less to read in it), Golgo is presented as opaque—and the versions of the story I have encountered (mainly episodes of the recent anime) make this the source of much of his interest.
At times the series abandons the action-adventure structure altogether. Many a time we see not a job but its aftermath, as a hapless cop questioning Golgo, certain of his responsibility for an assassination, and yet completely unable to prove a thing—Golgo having covered his tracks all too well, and anyway, no one able to believe that a human being could actually make a shot like that. In many another case Golgo is not even the center of the story. Instead what we see is someone else's drama, in which Golgo is a supporting player, perhaps just pulling a trigger near the end—someone else the viewpoint character, perhaps narrating the tale, their impressions of Golgo the only ones we get.
Besides helping distinguish Golgo from Bond, this variety of story themes, structures and viewpoints has helped sustain the interest of the adventures for nearly a half century, all as Golgo manages to out-Bond Bond.
More superhumanly competent, combining grandeur of plots and lavishness of resources with independence, he has made fewer concessions to the changing times in even his sex life—realizing the old fantasy even more fully than the original ever dared.
Among them was its relatively "adult" content. In this game, when people got shot, they bled. Characters were seen smoking. And in James Bondian fashion, Golgo had intimate moments with two different women. However, there was also the context for all this—a relatively well-developed storyline presented through cut scenes that were still a novelty in themselves. And of course, the game was novel, too, for helping pioneer the first-person shooter in two of its stages.
At the time I took Golgo for a James Bond-type created just for that game. I had no idea that he was the center of a massive franchise in his own right—the star of one of the biggest-selling mangas of all time, which had already resulted in a number of animated and live-action films (one of which, Assignment: Kowloon, starred Sonny Chiba in the title role). Since then the series has remained in print, making it the longest-running manga of all time, while leading to several more adaptations, most notably a 50-episode anime series in 2008-2009.
But as it turns out, Golgo has a Bondian connection. His creator, Takao Saito, actually produced authorized manga adaptations of four James Bond novels (Thunderball, The Man with the Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die) for the Japanese market during the 1960s before Golgo made his debut in 1969 in Big Comic—and as it happens, his version of Bond looks an awful lot like Golgo later would.
Still, it would be a mistake to think of Golgo as simply a derivative of Bond. Unlike Bond he is a freelancer, without any boss to answer to, who chooses and refuses jobs as he sees fit—and while often involved with spies or gangsters, takes a good many purely private jobs, often making him simply the agent of someone else's personal revenge, the question of good guys and big guys irrelevant. Additionally, while he has a good many skills he is a gunman above all—a sniper, specifically. And where Bond is an open book to the reader, more or less (and the Bond of the films much the same, even if there is less to read in it), Golgo is presented as opaque—and the versions of the story I have encountered (mainly episodes of the recent anime) make this the source of much of his interest.
At times the series abandons the action-adventure structure altogether. Many a time we see not a job but its aftermath, as a hapless cop questioning Golgo, certain of his responsibility for an assassination, and yet completely unable to prove a thing—Golgo having covered his tracks all too well, and anyway, no one able to believe that a human being could actually make a shot like that. In many another case Golgo is not even the center of the story. Instead what we see is someone else's drama, in which Golgo is a supporting player, perhaps just pulling a trigger near the end—someone else the viewpoint character, perhaps narrating the tale, their impressions of Golgo the only ones we get.
Besides helping distinguish Golgo from Bond, this variety of story themes, structures and viewpoints has helped sustain the interest of the adventures for nearly a half century, all as Golgo manages to out-Bond Bond.
More superhumanly competent, combining grandeur of plots and lavishness of resources with independence, he has made fewer concessions to the changing times in even his sex life—realizing the old fantasy even more fully than the original ever dared.
Daniel Craig's Comments: A Second Thought
Daniel Craig's criticisms of his own character and movie are, predictably, still much in the news. Indeed, the Toronto Star's Vinay Menon wrote that such comments are "generating more pre-release publicity than any other actor who played Bond" ever did "in the past." That may or may not be true, given the series' long history (and the weak memory entertainment journalism displays). Still, Mr. Menon is quite right when he remarks that Bond is "making so many headlines for this apparent 007 self-loathing, previous Bonds are protectively jumping into the fray." Which in turn amounts to still more pre-release publicity, and, when Roger Moore comments on the prospect of a gay or female Bond (intentionally or unintentionally pushing that easiest, laziest of buttons, identity), publicity about the publicity about the publicity.
At times like these it seems worth remembering that, long before George Lucas or Steven Spielberg even went to film school, the makers of the Bond films not only invented the action movie, but the cinematic blockbuster. It was Goldfinger, in fact, which initiated the style of their release: a combo of massive publicity and wide release (a then unprecedented 1,100 reels) aimed at scoring big in the first weekends, front-loading the income; while supplementing the revenue from ticket sales with a colossal merchandising push, that escalated in subsequent films. When Thunderball hit theaters in America, so did sixty million dollars worth of James Bond merchandise, including such unlikely items as James Bond cough syrup, and James Bond toast, an excess that elicited some critical remarks from then-James Bond Sean Connery, who called the movie's opening "a Frankenstein monster. The merchandising, the promotion . . . they're thoroughly distasteful."
Indeed, Connery was given to grumpy interviews and criticism of his franchise before Craig was even born. They didn't seem to be part of the routine of publicity then, but one may wonder if, in this age when the sheer torrent of conventional puff pieces has desensitized us to their style of kiss-assery, this may not be a new strategy for grabbing attention--the Bond films once again pioneers in the publicity realm that others will follow, other actors, other directors, calculatedly displaying such unpleasant "spontaneity."
I can't say for sure that this is what will happen in the coming years. How well this works out, how repeatable it proves to be, remain to be seen. Still, I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
At times like these it seems worth remembering that, long before George Lucas or Steven Spielberg even went to film school, the makers of the Bond films not only invented the action movie, but the cinematic blockbuster. It was Goldfinger, in fact, which initiated the style of their release: a combo of massive publicity and wide release (a then unprecedented 1,100 reels) aimed at scoring big in the first weekends, front-loading the income; while supplementing the revenue from ticket sales with a colossal merchandising push, that escalated in subsequent films. When Thunderball hit theaters in America, so did sixty million dollars worth of James Bond merchandise, including such unlikely items as James Bond cough syrup, and James Bond toast, an excess that elicited some critical remarks from then-James Bond Sean Connery, who called the movie's opening "a Frankenstein monster. The merchandising, the promotion . . . they're thoroughly distasteful."
Indeed, Connery was given to grumpy interviews and criticism of his franchise before Craig was even born. They didn't seem to be part of the routine of publicity then, but one may wonder if, in this age when the sheer torrent of conventional puff pieces has desensitized us to their style of kiss-assery, this may not be a new strategy for grabbing attention--the Bond films once again pioneers in the publicity realm that others will follow, other actors, other directors, calculatedly displaying such unpleasant "spontaneity."
I can't say for sure that this is what will happen in the coming years. How well this works out, how repeatable it proves to be, remain to be seen. Still, I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
John Gardner's Final Three: Never Send Flowers, SeaFire, Cold Fall
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's novels (the Soviet revenge for prior battles in From Russia with Love, the aftermath of those events in Dr. No, etc.), Fleming got more ambitious in his later books. His last five novels--Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun--can be read as a single saga of a run-down 007 struggling against accumulated damage and repeated personal disaster through and after his battle with Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Likewise, John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. Bond's decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond become an administrator entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, he again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. In the first of the three books, Never, Bond ends up cooperating with a Swiss government agent, Flicka von Grusse, and while it is predictable enough that the two become romantically involved. What is less predictable is that she gets booted from her old job, and taking a new one with SIS, while cohabiting with Bond in a relationship that continues with them partners on and off the job into the next book, SeaFire. The result is that Bond is seen not just getting involved with a woman, but having a "normal" relationship (or at any rate, as normal as relationships between wisecracking, crime-fighting duos get)--before, again, she is taken from him.
Just as is the case with those last Fleming novels, the Gardner books represent the most radical break with the familiar "Bond formula." Bond and Flicka trading one-liners; Bond chasing a theater-obsessed serial killer through Disneyland; Bond coping with bureaucratic headaches galore; Bond playing bit roles in an FBI battle with militia-type loons spanning years; did not feel much like the stuff of Bond novels at all. Had the results been satisfying I might have taken the break with precedent in stride--as indeed, I was able to enjoy Role of Honor. However, the tales were on the whole derivative, Never Send Flowers a clear response to the popularity of serial killer stories after the success of Silence of the Lambs; SeaFire rehashes earlier Gardner novels (the half-baked pseudo-environmentalism of Licence Renewed, the neo-Nazism of Icebreaker, etc.); and Cold Fall brought back the Tempestas of Nobody Lives Forever and Beatrice Maria da Ricci from Win, Lose or Die. They also tended toward the very small-scale (Never Send Flowers and Cold Fall in particular). And the narrative knack that carried such an awkwardly structured and action-deprived tale as Brokenclaw was not in evidence.
The result is that while those last Fleming novels put me off with their particularly strong divergence from my expectations, on revisiting them I appreciated their quirks, and their ambition. Even where they were not altogether successful, I had a sense of an artist at work. Considering Gardner's last novels, however, I find myself thinking of the pure and simple fact that (by his own admission) he'd spent sixteen years working on a series he'd never much liked, and had probably stuck with for longer than he should have.
It is not the note on which I would have liked to conclude. For all his reservations about the character, at his best Gardner could be very good (as in the deft blend of Bond book and Bond film that was Licence Renewed)--and even when not so good, at least interesting (as in Win, Lose or Die). Still, it is a reminder that novel-writing is not a thing done well for very long when taken up unenthusiastically; and a reminder, too, that by the '80s, let alone the '90s, updating the adventures of the '50s-era hero was an increasingly difficult task, one reason why Gardner's successors so often took different paths.
While there was always an important element of continuity between James Bond's adventures in Ian Fleming's novels (the Soviet revenge for prior battles in From Russia with Love, the aftermath of those events in Dr. No, etc.), Fleming got more ambitious in his later books. His last five novels--Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun--can be read as a single saga of a run-down 007 struggling against accumulated damage and repeated personal disaster through and after his battle with Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Likewise, John Gardner's last books--specifically his final three novels, Never Send Flowers, SeaFire and Cold Fall--form a more thoroughly interconnected story. Bond's decay is not an issue, and the novels do not have him fighting a single great villain. Instead it is M's aging that is more prominent, the Old Man on his way out, amid a larger reorganization of the Service for the post-Cold War--changes which see Bond become an administrator entangled with government committees in SeaFire, and Cold Fall closing with Bond on his way to meet Sir Miles Messervy's replacement for the first time.
However, he again copes with love and loss, albeit in a different fashion. In the first of the three books, Never, Bond ends up cooperating with a Swiss government agent, Flicka von Grusse, and while it is predictable enough that the two become romantically involved. What is less predictable is that she gets booted from her old job, and taking a new one with SIS, while cohabiting with Bond in a relationship that continues with them partners on and off the job into the next book, SeaFire. The result is that Bond is seen not just getting involved with a woman, but having a "normal" relationship (or at any rate, as normal as relationships between wisecracking, crime-fighting duos get)--before, again, she is taken from him.
Just as is the case with those last Fleming novels, the Gardner books represent the most radical break with the familiar "Bond formula." Bond and Flicka trading one-liners; Bond chasing a theater-obsessed serial killer through Disneyland; Bond coping with bureaucratic headaches galore; Bond playing bit roles in an FBI battle with militia-type loons spanning years; did not feel much like the stuff of Bond novels at all. Had the results been satisfying I might have taken the break with precedent in stride--as indeed, I was able to enjoy Role of Honor. However, the tales were on the whole derivative, Never Send Flowers a clear response to the popularity of serial killer stories after the success of Silence of the Lambs; SeaFire rehashes earlier Gardner novels (the half-baked pseudo-environmentalism of Licence Renewed, the neo-Nazism of Icebreaker, etc.); and Cold Fall brought back the Tempestas of Nobody Lives Forever and Beatrice Maria da Ricci from Win, Lose or Die. They also tended toward the very small-scale (Never Send Flowers and Cold Fall in particular). And the narrative knack that carried such an awkwardly structured and action-deprived tale as Brokenclaw was not in evidence.
The result is that while those last Fleming novels put me off with their particularly strong divergence from my expectations, on revisiting them I appreciated their quirks, and their ambition. Even where they were not altogether successful, I had a sense of an artist at work. Considering Gardner's last novels, however, I find myself thinking of the pure and simple fact that (by his own admission) he'd spent sixteen years working on a series he'd never much liked, and had probably stuck with for longer than he should have.
It is not the note on which I would have liked to conclude. For all his reservations about the character, at his best Gardner could be very good (as in the deft blend of Bond book and Bond film that was Licence Renewed)--and even when not so good, at least interesting (as in Win, Lose or Die). Still, it is a reminder that novel-writing is not a thing done well for very long when taken up unenthusiastically; and a reminder, too, that by the '80s, let alone the '90s, updating the adventures of the '50s-era hero was an increasingly difficult task, one reason why Gardner's successors so often took different paths.
James Bond, Aristocratic Action Hero
Kingsley Amis wrote of James Bond as a "semi-aristocrat," with even that aspect of the character smuggled in by the backdoor rather than ostentatiously declared--at any rate, in comparison with his "clubland" predecessors like Bulldog Drummond. However, if he is just a backdoor semi-aristocrat, the fundamentals are very much there--not least that essentially aristocratic trait, individuality. We do not always remember the names of characters in films, but we remember this one, who manages to loom larger than the actor playing him. No one thinks of Goldfinger as a Sean Connery movie as such the way they would, for example, The Hill or The Molly Maguires or Entrapment; rather it is a James Bond movie with Connery in the lead role. (Still less does anyone refer to On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a "George Lazenby movie," unless they mean by that the one Bond movie that had Lazenby in it.)
One may protest that Bond is not the deepest of characters. There is a sufficiently strong sense of who he is, apart from any one character, that fans can get into fairly involved debates over who would be suited to the role, rather than this just being a simple popularity contest regarding which actor they like better; while the promise of a glimpse of his past was plausibly part of the sales pitch made for Skyfall. His traits and tastes are instantly recognizable--not least his affinities for particular leisure activities and consumption goods like beverages, food, clothing and cars.
And all this is very much evident in the way that Bond operates. Despite his Royal Navy background, it is difficult to picture him as ever really a member of a team, or an organization. When Bond receives his briefing, he usually gets it not as a member of a bigger group, from the top man in the Firm himself, after which he is packed off by himself to his destination where he may work with others (local stringers for British intelligence, friendly foreign organizations) but not as part of their units or structures. Even the quips in tense situations, and the gadgets (much more part of the cinematic Bond than the print version), fit in with this, their very idiosyncrasy adding to the character's distinctiveness, while the quips in particular do not just testify to his cool head under pressure, but his having a particular personality--his being an urbane man with a sense of irony and dark humor.
Moreover, Bond's individuality is time and again acknowledged not just by friends, but by foes. In Moonraker Hugo Drax on meeting Bond says "Your reputation precedes you," without any doubt at all about which reputation Drax has in mind. Of course, this is exactly what a secret agent, let alone one whose competence we are supposed to admire, should never hear from the villain in question. However, the line seems perfectly natural within the context of Bond's universe, which has virtually nothing to do with the doings of real-life spies, and everything to do with highly personalized contests between aristocratic men of prowess, Bond's enemies being equally individual. Even where they happen to be vulnerable to the charge of being crude ethnic stereotypes, they are still men in possession of vast resources, and accustomed to command, larger-than-life in their own person, and with sufficient aristocratic flair of their own to act as foils to the hero. Something of this even extends to their principal henchmen. Bond may knock off huge numbers of anonymous enemies--but his memorable confrontations are with characters whose names and appearances and methods we remember, an Oddjob, a Tee Hee, a Jaws. His ability to get the better of such figures at the gaming table, at the dinner table, or in a death grapple, rather than his shooting down the masses of "boiler suit" guys the villain uses as cannon fodder, is the real measure of Bond as a man of war.
In short, James Bond is most recognizable when he is an individual fighting as an individual against other individuals.
This appears all the more clearly when one contrasts Bond with characters developed in the extreme opposite fashion--the American action films of the '80s. The isolated, spartan existences led by figures like John Rambo, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's John Matrix in Commando (1985) or Dutch in Predator (1987) afforded little room for self-expression or personal distinctness of any kind. In fact, take away Rambo's trauma (more plot point than theme), and his bitterness about the treatment of America's Vietnam veterans (in Part II, at any rate), and one is left with very little indeed--Rambo virtually impossible to separate from the actor playing him. Likewise Matrix is virtually indistinguishable from Dutch in Predator. Matrix or Dutch, it's really just Schwarzenegger that we remember in either role.
Their manner of fighting the enemy reflects this aspect of them. The plot may have them fighting alone, but that lack of distinctness makes it much easier to see them as part of a team (albeit special ones, like the one Dutch leads in Central America in the early portion of Predator). These heroes may make the occasional crack, but speech of any kind is an uncharacteristic rarity, Dutch's "Stick around!" feeling to me a bit forced. Equally, while some of their enemies are more conspicuous because they are in charge, or because of some visual feature, there is just as little to them as there is to the protagonist, the slightness of one as a character doing nothing to sharpen the image of the other. (Steven Berkoff's career is especially handy in this regard; comparing his turn as General Orlov in 1983's Octopussy with his characterization of Colonel Podovsky in First Blood, Part II is enough to illustrate the point.)
Naturally, they may show an exceptional measure of cunning as they take on larger numbers of opponents, and at times even appear flamboyant in action, as when Rambo and Colonel Trautman momentarily stand alone on the Afghan-Pakistani border against a massive Soviet detachment, and then Rambo crashes his tank into an oncoming helicopter. Still, they seem most themselves when pointing a machine gun at a wave of oncoming enemies (who do not even have boiler suits) who dutifully fall down--the parody of such sequences in Hot Shots: Part Deux (1993) only a slight exaggeration of the finale of Commando.
In short, one winds up with very little individuality on the part of the characters in these films, which seem to me to reflect a different sensibility. Perhaps it is a matter of the form the whole leisure class-warrior idea takes in a more populist age (or perhaps, simply a pre-aristocratic one?): the combat prowess is there, but the aristocratic qualities that went with it in the old conception of things is discarded, such expressions of individuality included.
One may protest that Bond is not the deepest of characters. There is a sufficiently strong sense of who he is, apart from any one character, that fans can get into fairly involved debates over who would be suited to the role, rather than this just being a simple popularity contest regarding which actor they like better; while the promise of a glimpse of his past was plausibly part of the sales pitch made for Skyfall. His traits and tastes are instantly recognizable--not least his affinities for particular leisure activities and consumption goods like beverages, food, clothing and cars.
And all this is very much evident in the way that Bond operates. Despite his Royal Navy background, it is difficult to picture him as ever really a member of a team, or an organization. When Bond receives his briefing, he usually gets it not as a member of a bigger group, from the top man in the Firm himself, after which he is packed off by himself to his destination where he may work with others (local stringers for British intelligence, friendly foreign organizations) but not as part of their units or structures. Even the quips in tense situations, and the gadgets (much more part of the cinematic Bond than the print version), fit in with this, their very idiosyncrasy adding to the character's distinctiveness, while the quips in particular do not just testify to his cool head under pressure, but his having a particular personality--his being an urbane man with a sense of irony and dark humor.
Moreover, Bond's individuality is time and again acknowledged not just by friends, but by foes. In Moonraker Hugo Drax on meeting Bond says "Your reputation precedes you," without any doubt at all about which reputation Drax has in mind. Of course, this is exactly what a secret agent, let alone one whose competence we are supposed to admire, should never hear from the villain in question. However, the line seems perfectly natural within the context of Bond's universe, which has virtually nothing to do with the doings of real-life spies, and everything to do with highly personalized contests between aristocratic men of prowess, Bond's enemies being equally individual. Even where they happen to be vulnerable to the charge of being crude ethnic stereotypes, they are still men in possession of vast resources, and accustomed to command, larger-than-life in their own person, and with sufficient aristocratic flair of their own to act as foils to the hero. Something of this even extends to their principal henchmen. Bond may knock off huge numbers of anonymous enemies--but his memorable confrontations are with characters whose names and appearances and methods we remember, an Oddjob, a Tee Hee, a Jaws. His ability to get the better of such figures at the gaming table, at the dinner table, or in a death grapple, rather than his shooting down the masses of "boiler suit" guys the villain uses as cannon fodder, is the real measure of Bond as a man of war.
In short, James Bond is most recognizable when he is an individual fighting as an individual against other individuals.
This appears all the more clearly when one contrasts Bond with characters developed in the extreme opposite fashion--the American action films of the '80s. The isolated, spartan existences led by figures like John Rambo, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's John Matrix in Commando (1985) or Dutch in Predator (1987) afforded little room for self-expression or personal distinctness of any kind. In fact, take away Rambo's trauma (more plot point than theme), and his bitterness about the treatment of America's Vietnam veterans (in Part II, at any rate), and one is left with very little indeed--Rambo virtually impossible to separate from the actor playing him. Likewise Matrix is virtually indistinguishable from Dutch in Predator. Matrix or Dutch, it's really just Schwarzenegger that we remember in either role.
Their manner of fighting the enemy reflects this aspect of them. The plot may have them fighting alone, but that lack of distinctness makes it much easier to see them as part of a team (albeit special ones, like the one Dutch leads in Central America in the early portion of Predator). These heroes may make the occasional crack, but speech of any kind is an uncharacteristic rarity, Dutch's "Stick around!" feeling to me a bit forced. Equally, while some of their enemies are more conspicuous because they are in charge, or because of some visual feature, there is just as little to them as there is to the protagonist, the slightness of one as a character doing nothing to sharpen the image of the other. (Steven Berkoff's career is especially handy in this regard; comparing his turn as General Orlov in 1983's Octopussy with his characterization of Colonel Podovsky in First Blood, Part II is enough to illustrate the point.)
Naturally, they may show an exceptional measure of cunning as they take on larger numbers of opponents, and at times even appear flamboyant in action, as when Rambo and Colonel Trautman momentarily stand alone on the Afghan-Pakistani border against a massive Soviet detachment, and then Rambo crashes his tank into an oncoming helicopter. Still, they seem most themselves when pointing a machine gun at a wave of oncoming enemies (who do not even have boiler suits) who dutifully fall down--the parody of such sequences in Hot Shots: Part Deux (1993) only a slight exaggeration of the finale of Commando.
In short, one winds up with very little individuality on the part of the characters in these films, which seem to me to reflect a different sensibility. Perhaps it is a matter of the form the whole leisure class-warrior idea takes in a more populist age (or perhaps, simply a pre-aristocratic one?): the combat prowess is there, but the aristocratic qualities that went with it in the old conception of things is discarded, such expressions of individuality included.
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