Tremendously likable villain in the newest James Bond novel steals the spotlight

As David Kurten said, this “baddie” sounds like a “top bloke.”

From an entertainment magazine article this spring:

Ian Fleming Publications has commissioned … Charlie Higson to write a new James Bond adventure to celebrate the coronation of King Charles.

The new 007 story, ‘On His Majesty’s Secret Service,’ brings Bond into the present day. It is May 4, two days before the coronation of King Charles III. Bond is sent at the last minute to thwart an attempt to disrupt the coronation by the wealthy, eccentric and self-styled Athelstan of Wessex, who is on a deadly mission of his own to teach the United Kingdom a lesson.

One particular excerpt from the book is marvelously amusing; not because it’s a thrilling spy story, but because two characters, no doubt intended to be the villains, sound like swell statesmen, and sort of give off an American “Founding Father” vibe. A little context for “Birkett” and “Æthelstan” can be found below:

As Joel Abbott for Not the Bee said, “This new villain sounds BASED.”

Birkett is obviously very informed, abhors the Great Replacement, loves his country and hates globalism, refuses to bend to climate communism, and is… anti-pedophile? Sounds like a stud.

As for Æthelstan… an “unapologetically old-school” statesman who prioritizes political efficiency over creating a woke smörgåsbord of “diversity” hirees? A girl can only dream!

James Bond, a superhuman assassin, is now uncomfortable in a room if the crowd lacks women and the disabled? See Abbott’s response here:

GASP!

Where are the gay flags? Where are the transgender activists of color? Where are the twerking drag queens? Is there anybody at all in this English gathering named Mohammed? HOW WILL BOND SURVIVE THIS??

Let me remind you, this is not a Babylon Bee headline; it’s completely real.

Charlie Higson, the author commissioned to pen this bastardization is behind the official “young” Bond stories, and he’s got a special knack for destroying Fleming’s original vision. From The Sunday Times interview piece this past April:

Most controversially, this new Bond eats kimchi. Higson shrugs. His book is set in 2023. This is not a man of the 1950s, smoking umpteen cigarettes a day. He is a superfit international hero who reads the New Scientist and drinks the daddy gut concoction kombucha.

‘It doesn’t bother me if someone says he’s a bit woke,’ Higson says. ‘Younger people tend to be. There is nothing wrong with being woke.’ He is realistic about who 007 would be these days and avoided phrases that he thought were ‘too Fleming in the Fifties.’ For instance, one passage mentions a spy fooling about with a ‘pretty girl’. That is where Fleming would leave it, but Higson, in the novel, adds, ‘or a handsome young man’....

Is he vegan too? Maybe he fights for reproductive “rights” on the side? Does he find his male lovers in the Burning Man Orgy Dome? Higson only said he has “dark hair” — does he sport facial hair and full-glam make-up? Perhaps this Bond is a “they/them” and will eventually become the first non-binary intelligence agent to receive a womb transplant on his quest to become a “mother.”

Ian Fleming’s imagination and literary skill produced a type of villainy that was so fiendish and unparalleled,  the colloquial term we use to describe a real-life diabolical megalomaniac is “Bond villain” — think George Soros, Klaus Schwab etc. Now, for the woke left, villainy no longer equates to plots to rule the world, enslave humanity, and murder innocent people; it means patriotism, reason, and truth.

I expect the people to swoon, not for Bond, but for Birkett and Æthelstan.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.

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