The New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat scorched the novel in a piece headlined “How America Made James Bond ‘Woke,’” warning that it juxtaposes a progressive version of the globetrotting spy against a caricature of conservatism, “007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a super villain,” Aethelstan of Wessex, who can be described as a “Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.”He goes on to note that Bond, known for womanizing in the past, is in a romantic “situationship” with an immigration lawyer he permits to sleep with other men, and that his mission is that he “must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation.”Douthat lamented it as yet another example of “American-style wokeness” asserting its power throughout the Anglosphere or countries culturally and linguistically connected to England.
