What We Can Learn from James Bond about Western Civ

This year, for me, has been the year of trips, and the one most on my mind is the journey I took to Scotland (source of the back-country ethos that rules Cadiz, Ohio, my adopted hometown), where I spent ten days walking the West Highland Way with my sons — a project that afforded all kinds of adventures, the most “press ready” of which was being mistaken for the actor who played Hellboy in the eponymous 2004 and 2008 film versions of the Dark Horse comic-book series. A great honor! But the main adventures were learning terrain, and history keyed by that same terrain.

At Balmaha Harbor, after walking along the shore of Loch Lomond and glimpsing a chain of islands the placement of which indicates (exactly) the whereabouts of the geological fault line dividing Highlands from Lowlands, we learned that Scot was the Latin word for pirate and referred to folks who settled near the harbor in the fifth and sixth centuries after arriving from Ireland, thereby bringing Gaelic culture to the Scottish Highlands and eventually converting indigenous Picts. At Crianlarich, a crossroads where we left the River Falloch to follow a tributary that drains waters flowing southeast from mountains near Ben Nevis, we passed the ruins of an Augustinian monastery restored by Robert the Bruce in the 14th century. All that, before even getting to Kingshouse, an inn where British troops were garrisoned in 1742 after traveling on Cromwellian military roads to put down Jacobites who were trying to restore a Catholic monarch (James II’s grandson) to England’s throne.

“What is Scotland?” my younger son wanted to know early in the trip, after marveling at the medieval “sense” of the town/country interface visible along the West Highland Way, given the absence of suburbia. Me being me, I immediately told him that the way “in” was to read literature, specifically Thirty-Nine Steps author John Buchan’s little-known novel John Macnab (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) — Buchan because of his high-resolution descriptions of trout fishing and cob-booted mountaineering, and Stevenson because of his sympathy for Jacobites and, of course, his de-facto map of the very same Highland route we ourselves were taking.

Kidnapped is set in 1751, just nine years after the Jacobites were defeated at Culloden, and you can learn a lot from Stevenson about their rebellion and the Enclosure Acts that precipitated it. Sure, Kidnapped is a boy’s adventure tale, but there is something deeper going on. It can, at times, be hard to see through the fog, if you will, of romanticized Gaelic culture that sits thick in Kidnapped and, indeed, almost all books by writers who came of age in the late 19th century, when Catholicism in the Highlands had been eradicated. But owing to his plot line, Stevenson ultimately enables the reader to grasp that the Jacobites weren’t just fighting to restore a Stuart monarch to the throne. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, they were fighting to reclaim the medieval commons, and the life sustained by access to that commons, so as to avoid what they intuited was coming — namely, the transformation of Scot farmers into tenant farmers (“crofters”) who lived behind a fence and paid rent to a landlord via secondary income derived from employment as laborers in a quarry (or on a seashore harvesting kelp). These crofters were then, not too many years later (after owners realized that profit could be better maximized if crofter houses themselves were bulldozed), expelled to America. Which, of course, is what happened between 1750 and 1815 during Highland Clearances, so called.

As the walk with my sons progressed, however, and we found ourselves alongside Scoti hikers — all of whom were talking about Britain’s upcoming election — I began to doubt whether I had steered my boys in the right direction by recommending they read Buchan and Stevenson. After all, those two writers were, at the very least, comfortable as Unionists, whereas our fellow hikers were most assuredly not. It wasn’t just that they were for Scottish independence, which, of course, they were — and to a degree that called to mind the nationalism of William Wallace. Rather, it was that they believed it was “too late” for Scottish independence and were committed to overthrowing Brexit. What was going on?

As you may or may not know, the July 8 election our fellow hikers were talking about turned out to be a landslide victory for the Labour (center left) party in Britain after 17 years of Conservative (center right) rule, in part because true conservatives in Britain were appalled by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s default on his obligations to trim government spending and show respect for D-Day veterans, and mostly because Britain’s problematic separation from the European Union had happened under Conservative rule. In Scotland, though, things turned out to be more complicated, for the dominant party is, and has been for the past 17 years, the Scottish National Party. And there’s the rub. Scotland, unlike England, is not subject to the usual liberal/conservative binary. Instead, it’s a place where far-left and far-right folks stand shoulder to shoulder while looking across what appears to be an unbridgeable gulf to more centrist parties on whom they are, confoundedly, dependent.

So my thinking went.

But it wasn’t until we drew close to Glencoe, where the River Ba rises and Skyfall was filmed, that a lightbulb flicked on in my head and I finally saw the best literary key for deciphering Scotland’s uneasy alliance with England.

“Boys,” I said. “Forget Buchan and Stevenson. The books you should be reading are Ian Fleming’s spy thrillers starring James Bond.”

I first got interested in Fleming’s novels when a friend claimed that Fleming explicitly referenced Steubenville, Ohio, as the training ground, worldwide, for card sharks and dealers with dice-cheat skills in both Casino Royale, his first book (1953), and Diamonds Are Forever, his fourth (1956). Like a lot of people my age, I had mistakenly imagined that the immensely successful Broccoli/Saltzman movie productions starring Sean Connery contained everything I needed to know about James Bond. Indeed, it had never even occurred to me to read the novels on which the movies are based. Hence, when I finally read the novels, I was doubly rewarded — first because my friend’s claim proved correct, and second because the books are of very high caliber and, in general, far more complex and enjoyable than the movies based on them. If you read the novels straight through, one after the other, it can feel as if you’ve hitched a ride on the train in From Russia With Love (1957) relentlessly boring its way toward a confrontation of importance. By the time you hear the “howl of the windhorn,” along with regularly appearing “grade-crossing bells,” you’re glad to be on that train.

Moreover, my interest increased when I discovered that Fleming wrote one Bond book per year, all of them homeruns, over a course of ten years — an extraordinary, possibly unparalleled performance — and that when Fleming did, with his 11th and final effort, write a bad Bond book (a really bad one, published posthumously in 1965, called The Man With the Golden Gun), Robert Ludlum from New York kindly stepped in not only to rescue Fleming and the Bond series from disgrace and oblivion but to strengthen that series by writing a more proper sequel to Fleming’s tenth book, You Only Live Twice (1964). Ludlum called his sequel, published in 1980, The Bourne Identity.

Those who have read You Only Live Twice will remember the ending, but for those who have not, let’s just say that it ends with a literally over-the-top but believable and quite exhilarating sequence in which Bond escapes the villain’s castle keep by severing a weather balloon’s rope, holding on as helium within the balloon propels the freed device skyward, and then, after being shot by pursuers, falling into the sea, there to be rescued by fishermen. Which is exactly where Ludlum in The Bourne Identity picks up the plot.

In You Only Live Twice the hero is rescued by pearl diver Missy, who swims Bond, as a lifeguard might, to her fishing village on the other side of a strait. In The Bourne Identity the hero is rescued by seamen working on a trawler who drop Bourne off in Marseilles. In each instance, it is discovered that the secret agent, upon being shot, has developed amnesia and does not know who he is. Indeed, the handoff (if you will) is perfect.

Ludlum was not as good at crafting memorable prose as Fleming was, and at first it seems the ball will be fumbled because Ludlum provides little in the way of rest spots that ensure a reader’s trust. Eventually, though, Ludlum wins you over by carefully detailing how Dr. Marie decides to trust in Bourne’s instinctive decision to risk his life to save hers in the face of consistently reliable news that convinces Bourne as well as Marie that he is a trained assassin. The book’s best line? “I really know what I’m doing. I think I’ve always known that.” Of course, The Bourne Identity became a breakaway success, thereby enabling the production of the Doug Liman-directed movie (and its two sequels) starring Matt Damon, and, on the heels of that success, the rebooting of the entire Bond series via the casting of the sufficiently dangerous and entirely winning Daniel Craig in a thoroughly refreshed version of Casino Royale, a competent if not perfect film adaptation of Fleming’s short story “Quantum of Solace” (1959), and a deliciously perfect, all-stops-removed movie that ratified the Bourne trilogy as a continuation of Bond called — you guessed it — Skyfall.

But I digress. My point is that the Bond series is a powerful myth. Indeed, I am convinced that for the past 50 years it has functioned as the 20th-century edition, as it were, of the Latinized (Virgilian) Homeric myth that has long served, for those of us in the West, as our founding story.

That the Bond series is Homeric is clear for many reasons, foremost among them being its reliance on what we would now call comic-book elements, such as villains marked by physical deformities; the regular appearance of exceptionally beautiful, often scantily clad women; and plot devices featuring tricks and disguises that can fail should heretofore fooled observers suddenly recognize a scar. Just as The Odyssey features giants (the one-eyed Cyclops), so too the Bond books feature giants (Mr. Big and the exceptionally tall Dr. No with pincer-like metal hands). As for beautiful women, Vesper (Casino Royale), Solitaire (Live and Let Die), and Honeychile (Dr. No) certainly hold their own with Calypso (the “nymph with lovely braids”), Circe (the enchantress who wears a “filmy” robe drawn close), and Nausicaa (the Phaeacian princess who wears nothing at all).

Yet the main reason the Bond series has a Homeric dimension is the figure who makes recognition moments necessary — namely, Bond himself. It’s not just that Bond, like Odysseus, is always out in front when it comes time to lead crew members or soldiers into mortal danger (as he does in the underwater sequence in Thunderball); rather, it’s that he is every bit as deceitful as Odysseus and, therefore, every bit as prone (when the time is ripe) to throw deceit to the wind and, in trademark fashion, announce (for all the world to hear) his real identity: “The name is Bond. James Bond.” When that happens in movie versions of the novels, the audience invariably cheers. The reason is that those of us in its midst delight in this recognition moment exactly as we do when Odysseus finally throws caution to the wind after the Cyclops he’s just blinded heaves a boulder into the sea perilously close to Odysseus’s escaping ship. “Cyclops!” our hero yells. “If any man on the face of the earth should ask who blinded you,…say Odysseus, raider of cities. He gouged out your eye. Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca.”

Yet Bond is also Aeneas, a commander who is mannered in his relationships with women, quick to protect them should they suffer unwanted advances, and completely, even definitively devoted to serving the Queen of England and her commonwealth.

The Bond book in which Homeric and Latinized elements are most strongly in view is probably Dr. No, due to a prolonged sequence in which Bond actually sails a small wooden craft to Crab Key from Jamaica’s northern shore at night under a bowl of stars, much as Odysseus might have done. Moreover, after landing on a beach and crawling under a nearby bush to sleep in safety, Bond wakes to see Honeychile harvesting shells, much as Odysseus wakes to see Nausicaa bathing after he had crawled under an olive bush to sleep in safety after washing up on a beach. But every Bond book written by Fleming features Homeric and Latinized elements. Indeed, the linkage to Homer and Virgil is so strong that, after finishing the series, this reader started to question why people even countenance the idea that James Joyce’s Ulysses still reigns as the Latinized Homeric epic of our time.

Don’t get me wrong. I have great respect for Joyce and Ulysses (1922), which takes place over the course of 19 hours in the quite ordinary lives of Stephen Daedalus (who stands in for Telemachus), Leopold Bloom (who stands in for Odysseus), and Molly Bloom (who stands in for Penelope) as they wander through a morning, an afternoon, and an evening at a hospital, a brothel, a cabman’s shelter, a bedroom, a tavern, and a kitchen in Dublin in 1904. It is, without question, a great novel, owing to Joyce’s extraordinary skills as a wordsmith and his pioneering stream-of-consciousness narration technique. Additionally, the way he transposes key episodes in The Odyssey involving Cyclops and Circe and Odysseus’s actual homecoming are ingeniously imagined. But Ulysses is an epic solely in an ironic sense, and irony, as a default position, turned out, in the 1960s, to be a dead end. Therefore, it makes sense that, starting in the early part of that decade, as the civilizational ground under our feet began to break along previously undetectable fault lines, the Joycean version of the Latinized Homeric epic might give way to a new version with vast popular appeal that became even more vast as it began to be conveyed through movies with soundtracks, as well as through the printed word.

The breakthrough year, clearly, was 1962, for that is when the film version of Dr. No was released, starring Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, and — let’s face it — John Barry, who wrote the swanky, brass-based score in addition to the trademark surf-guitar riff that accompanies the opening credits of every Bond film. After 1962 the audience for Bond films grew exponentially, and by the time Thunderball appeared in 1965, the jury otherwise known as the public had decided that the Bond series was the Latinized Homeric epic of our time. Thankfully, the series retained that crown despite bad odds made even worse when producers cast Roger Moore in the starring role starting in 1973.

Looking back, though, you can see that the real miracle was the abiding presence of an underlying, definitely not planned but highly revealing, structural innovation present in Fleming’s edition of our founding story that highlighted differences between Homeric and Virgilian visions of how a peace based on the rule of law can be achieved while at the same time not resolving those differences: decentralized (federated) polities secured by Scoti-like pirates, on one hand, and empire projects secured by centurions and navies, on the other; the Pleiades and “Orion in all his power” above “broad rich plowland” worked by 12 evenly sized cities, on one hand (as in The Iliad), and Roman, British, and American empires extending “far and wide as the earth,” on the other (as in The Aeneid). Rather than assuming these viewpoints to be compatible and then simply stirring them together, Fleming’s version of the Latinized Homeric epic depends for its efficacy on shaking up essentially contradictory aspects to the Homeric and Virgilian viewpoints, much as a bartender might when asked to make an iced martini with vodka and a slice of lemon. The result? An adventure starring James Bond, the ever resourceful, highly dangerous, expertly deceitful Scoti pirate from Glencoe whose “secret” Jacobite-like “agent” status enables him to serve Queen and empire while at the same time — thanks to Bond’s marriage to Tracy di Vicenzo — maintaining links to organized crime.

It’s a strange drink, that, but it packs a wallop, and one of the reasons is that it perfectly describes Scotland’s strange alliance with Westminster.

What, though, do we make of ex-Prime Minister Sunak’s failure to recognize the importance of the memorial marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day? How could he possibly have decided that a television interview was more important than paying his respects to infantrymen who died so England and its allies might succeed in their effort to vanquish the threat posed by Hitler? At the inn where my boys and I stayed in Tyndrum between Crianlarich and the Bridge of Orchy, our host was appalled by Sunak’s absence on a stage where other world leaders had gathered in Normandy. And well our host should have been, given that British, Canadian, and Scottish soldiers, along with First Division American infantrymen leading the D-Day assault at heavily defended Omaha Beach, unquestionably did save Western Europe and, to that extent, the world at large from civilizational collapse in 1944.

Yet it might be more correct to say that these soldiers forestalled collapse, owing to the fact that both world wars (themselves phases of a storm generated 700 years ago when William of Ockham removed the Word as an integrative center) occurred while steadily eroding medieval capital still existed and allowed us to maintain the illusion that the West was a Christian culture, even though, as Europe’s and now America’s rising anti-Catholic sentiment shows, it wasn’t.

If that hypothesis is correct, might it not also be correct that the ruling power of the technocracy Sunak fronted might have grown to the point where the Roman, British, and American empire projects, along with the Latinized Homeric epic undergirding them, are now obsolete? Surely not. After all, Virgil has oriented us for almost two millennia, from the reign of Caesar Augustus up through Dante’s and Pope’s and Tennyson’s and Joyce’s times. And even through Fleming’s time, when The Aeneid oriented and provided purpose for American soldiers maintaining control of straits in the South China Sea, let alone battling their way north through Alpine terrain into Germany from Italy. But, then again, maybe so, given the accelerating speed with which safety is now displacing liberty as a civilizational principle.

It’s a daunting prospect, and cause for worry.

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