Disabled villians: the trope that won't die

For centuries, fictional narratives have used outer difference to telegraph inner monstrosity. And, as Jan Grue has learned, editing out a few slurs or bad words cannot fix this ugly characterisation

- Jan Grue

DECIDED, SOME YEARS AGO, TO READ ALL OF IAN FLEMING'S James Bond novels. It may have been a fit of nostalgia for the Roger Moore films I grew up watching, or perhaps I was bored with writing short stories for a minuscule readership and wanted to know what mass-market success read like. It was quite an experience - and one I found myself recalling when I found out that Fleming's books were being revised, chiefly in order to remove some, though not all, of the casual racism. Also some of the misogyny, though probably not all of that either.

My first question, on reading the news, was what kind of reader exactly was Ian Fleming Publications Ltd envisioning. Presumably someone who would, were it not for the most explicit slurs, really enjoy the ethnic stereotypes. Or someone who would, were it not for the full-on rapes, really enjoy the pervasive sexism.

The other question that struck me was this: what on earth are they going to do about disability? As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original Bond books had, shall we say, an interesting relationship to embodied difference. It was a feature of Fleming's writing that would be all but impossible to alter through the interventions of a sensitivity reader.

Fleming's attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and phrases, but in characterisation and plot. It is not a novel observation that Bond villains tend to be, to use a less sensitive register, disfigured and deformed. Dr No with his steel pincers instead of hands, Blofeld with his scars, Hugo Drax, the villain from Moonraker, with his facial disfigurement and his pathetic attempt to conceal it with a "bushy reddish beard". Were they not successfully self-employed, most of Bond's enemies would probably qualify for disability benefits.