Dame Margaret Drabble: Kill Bond(!)

An astonishingly short bit in the Standard caught my eye tonight. Maybe it was the last line quoted that caught my attention, ire or whatever. Friends, countrymen...

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So, Margaret Drabble is not a Bond fan - well, we never

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Dame Margaret Drabble is on a mission to kill James Bond sequels. The next Bond novel, Solo, is due out in September penned by William Boyd. “I’ve never read an Ian Fleming novel,” she told me at last night’s Royal Society of Literature's £10,000 Ondaatje prize at the Travellers’ Club won by Philip Hensher, “so I wouldn’t want to read a sequel. Enough is enough.”



Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson said he couldn’t see the appeal of mimicking another writer’s style.

“I can understand why William would think it was a lovely gig but I don’t get it. As a writer you have a voice and you work through that voice. That’s the point. And of course to write a Bond book you would have to really care about Ian Fleming.

“That’s the real mystery to me — why anyone gives a damn about him.”

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/so-margaret-drabble-is-not-a-bond-fan--well-we-never-8615619.html

Dame Margaret who?

Exactly. Dame-doms handed out like cookies.

When did Mark Hamill become a Dame?

So what did she write???

So she hasn't read anything by Fleming, and this somehow makes her uniquely qualified to pass judgement on the merit of any potential sequels to the novels she hasn't read in the first place.

So I Googled "Dame Margaret Drabble", and found a Wikipedia article on her. Her only novel notable enough to have its own article - and even then, it's just a plot summary - is for The Millstone, which was published in 1965. This is the article lead:

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It is about an unmarried, young academic who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and, against all odds, decides to give birth to her child and raise it herself.

I gather she is one of those feminist literary academics who has no grasp of popular fiction because she lives in a world as isolated as those of her novels, and shows no desire to join in with the rest of the world for fear that her work will lose its esoteric value (which has never been established by anyone but her and her like-minded fraternity). Furthermore, she has no desire to have the rest of the world give up their tastes in popular fiction and join her in her closed-off niche of self-proclaimed literary elitism, once again for fear that this will strip her work of its so-called value.

I would refer to her as "Dame Margaret Dribble", but that would likely be interpreted as being too bourgeois, and treated as an excuse to disregard any criticism of her.