Introduction:

As we race towards the first Amazon-produced James Bond film, the character has enjoyed a multi-media renaissance. First Light, Bond’s return to video games after a fifteen-year hiatus, was released to widespread acclaim in May and now we have the return of the literary Bond after a three-year gap: King Zero by Charlie Higson.

Higson is the author of five “Young Bond” spin-off novels and made his debut as the main continuation for 007 with 2023’s On His Majesty’s Secret Service. That novella has recently been making the rounds for ridicule online for on-the-nose prose passages filled with culture war buzzwords. Not exactly the most promising sign for fans of James Bond in print, but it’s important to note that His Majesty’s was written for charity and under a three month deadline, whereas King Zero represents a real chance for Higson to shepherd 007 into a new era.

How does this lifelong fan of Bond manage his first real outing as his scribe?

Not well.

1. The name’s Bond… James Bond?
   

Since the publication of 2002’s The Man With the Red Tattoo, Ian Fleming Publications has had a problem:

How do we monetize the literary James Bond without offending anyone?

The answer they’ve come up with seems to be alternating between period pieces from highly respected literary figures like Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and now Dan Jones and more commercial contemporary pieces from Jeffery Deaver and now Charlie Higson.

In the period setting IFP gives authors permission to let Bond be a cold, smoking, chauvinistic, blunt instrument of the mid-century British state because it’s framed as “historical context.” The period setting acts as a protective shield for his actual characterization.

King Zero shows that they don’t have the stomach for Bond in the 21st century, even with an obvious fan of the character behind the word processor.

The customary flirting with Moneypenny has been redacted, and she’s been turned into a kind of Archie Goodwin for M. Bond is consciously less of a ladies’ man, which is actually fine as it lines up with where society is now, but his byplay with the women he meets is desperately out of character for any spy, much less James Bond: he’s emotionally vulnerable to women he barely knows and overly emotional bordering on the sentimental.

Higson has transmuted a character who was never supposed to be an example of model behavior into one who cannot offend 21st century center-left sensibilities. His only real remaining vice is that most socially accepted one of alcoholism. He hasn’t been rebooted, but the actual timeline of his past is deliberately kept vague, sort of the way the films handle it.

I have no problem, in theory, with a left-wing Bond story; Quantum of Solace remains one of my favorite Bond films. My issue is the sanding down of James Bond the character to the point where he’s a generic action hero for the sake of mainstream acceptance that’s never going to come because the literary Bond is always going to be a niche figure outside of the UK.

II. “Oh, I travel. A sort of licensed troubleshooter.”

This sort of embarrassment with the character extends to the international locales chosen: Saudi Arabia, the Maldives, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Fleming was a voracious traveler and in each of his Bond stories, the setting is inexorably linked to the action of the story: You Only Live Twice only makes sense in the context of Japan’s cultural fascination with cruelty and death; the physical and diplomatic inaccessibility of Switzerland is what drives Blofeld’s plot in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the particular rhythms of life in the Caribbean provide the offbeat menace of stories like Live and Let Die and Doctor No.

You always got the sense that a Bond novel was the product of an incredible vacation taken by a former intelligence officer and journalist who found all the little details and beauty of the place before exposing the menace underneath.

Higson has chosen two locations– Saudi Arabia and the Maldives that are associated with absolute wealth and criminal hypocrisy and cannot find anything interesting to say about either one of them. Bond’s most interesting observation about Saudi Arabia is that the fusion restaurants favored by wealthy tourists aren’t very good and that he’d rather be some place he can drink. Most of the Saudi section of the book is set in a vast, anonymous desert. The Maldives fares even worse: one of the most fascinating locations in the world is reduced to a hot island. He could be in Bali, in Cabo Verde, in Haiti and it wouldn’t make a difference.

The Congo fares slightly better as it houses the climactic battle pitched in a literal shrine to colonialism: a replica of a quaint English village of the nineteen-fifties surrounding a brutal mining concern but it’s damning when the most evocative observation Bond can muster about his surroundings across an entire novel is a weary nod to their colonial scars.

Also, and this is a small thing but I think is significant to the thesis I’m building here: King Zero is the first Bond book I’ve ever read that does not assign him a sidearm. He uses a modified Sig Sauer P226 for the book’s best action sequence and he’s running around with an AK-47 in the climax but he’s never assigned a gun or mentions what gun the 00 Section is using. Normally, that wouldn’t be noteworthy but the Bond franchise is pretty legendary for realistic tradecraft with regards to firearms and I wonder if that kind of thing is seen as “too American” these days.

Enough about our favorite Double 00, though. What about heavies? What’s this book even about?

III. “Despite your efforts, my finely-wrought dream approaches its fulfillment.”

King Zero opens in Saudi Arabia with a tech firm demonstrating a new AI-guided neurosurgical robot on a patient with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. The firm is cheating its investors, the AI system isn’t ready and the surgery is really being performed by a doctor in Mumbai, but that crime quickly fades to the background when the robot is hacked and literally scrambles the man’s brain like an egg before murdering the attending nurses.

Bond is recalled to MI6 and dispatched to Saudi Arabia because the patient in the opening was a disgraced former Double 0 agent who may have stumbled onto something serious: a vast criminal syndicate called Nothing. His contacts in KSA: an old schoolmate named Gooch and an MI6 computer expert named Navy Riordan lead him to a techbro financier named Jackson St. Bride and his muscle, a body-modified cagefighter called “The Chimp.”

It’s not long until his investigation into St. Bride turns up a connection to Malika, a self-styled pirate queen and Aztec priestess who enjoys mutilating her lovers before sacrificing them to the Tiger Shark population of the Indian Ocean. 

It’s here that Bond finally makes the connection to the head of Nothing, a mining magnate named Martin Koenig who wants to burn out every electrical device in the world with a ring of AI controlled satellites because the world’s gotten a bit fussy for him in his old age.

All of that, in a synopsis, sounds fine. Perhaps a little more indebted to the films than the books, but on the whole that is recognizably a James Bond plot.

It is, as always, the details that matter.

Bond just never feels right and because he never feels right, the book never unfolds as it should: he’s constantly being bailed out of deathtraps, he resigns himself to death more than once, he cracks under the pain of being tortured. 

He’s also oddly psychologically introspective during one torture scene as if Higson doesn’t trust the audience to pick up on the subtext of what they’re reading. This happens a second time in the climax when Bond notes that Koenig’s conservatism is just an exaggerated form of his own distaste for modern technology, and I don’t know if Higson is too used to writing for young adults that he doesn’t trust his audience or he just doesn’t understand how much he’s undercutting his own work by having the lead do all the thinking for the reader.

As the villains are techbros and senile industrial tycoons, it’s only during the middle portion of the book with Malika that it feels genuinely like the battle of wills you find in Fleming. Higson has so much contempt for his villains that he never bothers to play the grand game of wills that the best Bond stories contain.

Credit where it’s due: the opening sequence is incredibly suspenseful and violent. It feels like it’s from a different, meaner, James Bond novel. Also the middle portion set on Malinka’s yacht where Bond goes from being nearly castrated to absolutely destroying the villain in one fell swoop was marvelous.

The classic Bond villains were human grotesques beyond any redemption who had constructed secret empires. This book climaxes with Bond face to face with a man who cannot articulate why he’s doing what he’s doing because he’s so senile. It’s an obvious symbolic dig at modern neo-conservatism– longing for a past that they don’t even remember because it never existed– but it doesn’t make for an engaging thriller.

IV. Conclusion

There are sparks of what makes James Bond great here, whispers of it. The trouble is after three years of waiting at some point IFP has to deliver the full Bond experience, or license the character out to someone who’s willing to. If First Light earlier this year showed how Bond could be readily cast into a 21st century techno-thriller, King Zero is a cautionary tale about which parts of him cannot be set aside in the transition.