You Only Live Twice

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda recounts delivering a talk at a Catholic girls’ school. ‘During the question period one young woman asked, “If you could be any character in literature, who would you choose?” Given that I write about books for a (hardscrabble) living, I could see that she expected me to name some obvious literary heavyweight, such as Odysseus, Prince Genji or Huckleberry Finn — all of whom flashed through my mind as good answers. Instead I paused for a moment, put on my most sardonic look, and huskily whispered into the microphone, “Bond, James Bond”. It brought down the house. Of course, people thought I was kidding. And, of course, I wasn’t.’

Dirda notes, ‘It is a truth universally, if seldom publically, acknowledged that every American male, from puberty onward, would love to be 007’. This ‘truth’ shouldn’t be limited to American males – practically every boy in my primary school in Cape Town dreamed of being James Bond, too. None of them had read the Bond books — they knew 007 only from the films, which were rotated in an endless, loop on South Africa’s only pay-television channel, to which my anti-TV mother refused to subscribe (and anyway couldn’t afford). This was the era before satellite television, high-end video game consoles and the Internet. Do today’s boys still want to be James Bond – or has Harry Potter and Halo taken care of this? And what about girls – who do they want to be?

The American male’s infatuation with Bond is indeed odd. In a memorable 2006 article for the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens (an essayist and journalist whose suaveness, bravado and dry-as-a-martini wit is not unlike Bond’s) argues that ‘the central paradox of the classic Bond stories is that, although superficially devoted to the Anglo-American war against communism, they are full of contempt and resentment for America and Americans. And not just political contempt, or the penis envy of a declining power for a burgeoning one, but cultural contempt as well. And not just with cultural contempt in general, but more specifically disgust about America’s plebeian interest in sex and consumerism, the two Bond staples’.

Apart from James Bond, which literary character would you choose to be? Email me your answers and I’ll publish the results in a column. Emailers won’t be quoted by name.