A Spectre Haunts Bad Novels

The problem with bad books is to find, as Friedrich Nietzsche counsels, worthy enemies. A bad book has to be interesting, or we wouldn't care. Strong schmaltz is an option, like The Little Prince (1943) or Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) (carry the light, anyone?), but pure genre work is a better bad. It can talk back, though no one is doing the talking. In fact, that's the appeal of genre work.

Ian Fleming's novels consist entirely of clichés, coordinating conjunctions, and appositives. No renaissance man, commander Bond is nobody, a super zero ("a neutral figure," Fleming calls him) who lives to advertise a watch—set, as they are in magazines, to ten past ten. He's a "secret agent" who tells anyone his name. Being an agent, he cannot act for himself, and going everywhere, he has no real home and lives in a no-man's land where every side has another side, a third side that can be the secondside of the first two sides, so that the opposing sides often find themselves on the same side.

For this reason, Fleming replaced the Soviet SMERSH with SPECTRE in several of the novels. "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion" is independent and itself hides behind FIRCO, an agency that locates French resistance fighters from the war. Because SPECTRE stands for the multiplication of sides, it can animate the iterability of Bond while producing his correlative individualism and invulnerability. The series could not continue if the enemy, once vanquished, were simply the other side. Bond is irreplaceable because he is double, one who "only lives twice," who "never says never," for whom "the world is not enough." Cheesy, laughable, and iterative: the writer who brought you a fudge recipe in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang (1964) introduces the bondsman of global capital.