Last week on X (formerly known as Twitter), Ed West, journalist and eternal Eeyore of the British right, shared a few pages from the latest James Bond novel. He included no prompts to indicate how we should feel about it, or indeed why he had thought it worth bringing to our attention. But the derision it drew was immediate. The consensus was overwhelming: it was tripe.
The book is called On His Majesty’s Secret Service. If your first reaction to that title was, like mine, ‘Hang on, isn’t there one called that already?’, then you need to look again. This is a new Bond for the new king (he / him). It is, in a very real sense, all about the pronouns now.
Indeed, this iteration of the erstwhile queen’s thug came out back in May. It was commissioned for the coronation – very much like the Charles- and Camilla-approved broad-bean quiche of that name. But until recently, it had escaped most people’s attention.
The new book presents Bond as a weary 21st-century beneficiary of corporate frequent-flyer schemes. A Bond whose worldview seems more in line with someone whose formative years were spent in the BBC’s HR department rather than in MI6 HQ.
[Sounds riveting. Shame I’ll miss reading it. ~ Beege]
Join the conversation as a VIP Member