I'm a bit perplexed about all the fuss regarding the Bond figure in 'LXG: Black Dossier'. The angry reactions to this entry into the series IMO are perhaps mostly due to the fact that some readers may not have understood what LXG, what basically all of Moore's work is about.
Or, rather, people understand damn well what it's about and are angry precisely over that. "Deconstruction" is sometimes just a cover-word for a snide put-down job based on sloppy assumptions, and that's exactly what Moore has done with the literary Bond.
Moore claims to have captured the literary Bond and in my view he has done so.
Then I very much question the validity of a view that can conflate two versions of a character so drastically different in personality, morals, and temperament.
Although he of course can't withstand the temptation to caricature the film myth of 007 with the gimmicks
In other words, he either fudged the integrity of his own project, just so he could further rubbish a character he had little affection for, or he couldn't get the two versions of the character straight anyway. There's little to suggest that Moore's understanding of Bond is based on anything more than a few fuzzy memories of the most intentionally outrageous passages of
Casino Royale and memories of the films.
What people don't seem to get is: this is Bond in an alternate history!
Which apparently means that Bond is the only character to get an entirely new personality to go with it, as if he was just a puppet of history, unlike the other heroes of Moore's books, whose personalities remain recognizable from their literary sources.
This Bond has (after WWII; a different WWII with the Germans occupying GB, if memory serves) worked over ten years for the fascist 'Big Brother' government of Orwell's 1984! For some reason nobody seems too angry about this particular plotline, which to me is the farthest digression from Fleming I can imagine (I'd have put him into some kind of 'resistance'-movement).
Of course you would, because you have some understanding of Bond's very Germanophobic character, unlike Moore, whose feet of clay you seem reluctant to acknowledge, despite just having tripped over them.
But this also serves to show and deconstruct another facette of the Bond character. A popular criticism of Bond during the 60's/70's used to be that the SS would have been proud of a member like Bond and he'd have fitted perfectly into the Nazi apparat.
Which as your own resistance comment shows, is
bunk in the first place. What Moore has done is a shallow deconstruction based more on a discredited and spurious 60s take on Bond than on any understanding of the actual character as found in the books. But he then very smugly claims to have captured Fleming's Bond, and this is eyewash.
The howling about all of this is really a bit exaggerated, considering the fate Moore has chosen for all his characters. You think he's tough on Bond?
It should be pretty bloody obvious. Unlike Quartermain, this Bond is utter
scum, too pathetic to even be an imposing villain. This is not merely a matter of having a character changing their personality or shedding inhibitions--it is matter of intentionally denigrating a character by giving him attributes that have no basis in the character Moore's supposedly trying to capture. Fleming's Bond was a thoughtful patriot whose dealing with women were rooted in a paradoxical core of gentleness and reflection. Moore's Bond is the sort of pond-scum who's put date-rape drugs in a woman's drink. In other words, it's the version of Bond peddled through the years by critics determined to see him as an arch-misogynistic who, as LeCarre once spouted, would just as well have worked for the Russians if they'd had better caviar.
You see, Moore really stops at nothing if he sees a chance to pit his characters against their own limits, critics or clichés.
Better to say that Moore stops at nothing to pit other people's characters against his own limitations and cliches about their supposedly inner essences.
His premise is they are real people with all the sides and facettes real people have, pleasant and unpleasant ones.
Funny, but that was the premise of Pearson's Bond biography as well. And in the case of Bond he trumped Moore by spades.
You say there is no reality, especially not an ugly one, as there are no superheroes? Exactly, there is no reality in fiction, for that's what it is: fiction...What there is in LXG, in all of Moore's work as far as I can judge is: truth. For without truth no fiction has any meaning. And Moore has plenty of it.
So there's truth in Moore's work but no reality. By this bizarro logic truth is thus unreal. What next, truth is beauty? I think Keats might have beaten you to that one. Let me know when you're done pulling and I can have my leg back, because I can't help much of this as specious nonsense--even in bad fiction there can be truths about human nature or how the world works.
The supposed "truth" about Moore's conception of Bond, which he has uttered several times before, is that Bond is really an unpleasant misognynist and a nasty piece of work. This
isn't a truth, but rather an extremely gross simplification of the character, and
it is from this simplification that Moore has proceeded.
Even a genius can sometimes be stupid. Alan Moore is almost6 certainly the greatest writer in comics, and his books are distinguished by their conceptual daring, depth of understanding of human character, and postmodern erudition. None of this means that he can't occasionally go awry, for even Homer nodded at times. His LoG books usually work, and when they don't, it's because he's based his version of a character on a limited and faulty understanding of that personage. That is exactly what has happened with Bond, a character he plainly has little sympathy for and cares very little about. And when authors do not want to get to really know the characters they're using, those characters often come across as lifeless, unpleasant caricatures. Such is the case with Alan Moore's James Bond. More's the pity.
Edited by Revelator, 28 February 2009 - 06:55 AM.