The distinction has to be made, before we go any further, between the Bond of Fleming’s novels and the Bond of the movies. For that matter, distinctions have to be made among the various movie Bonds. You can’t really play him, because there’s nothing to play; you have to be him. Sean Connery had the darkness and the hairy chest. George Lazenby was a misfire. Roger Moore was a brilliant anti-actor, sleek with the absurd good fortune of landing such a plum gig. Timothy Dalton, the late-’80s Bond, trailed terrible whiffs of the ’70s: almost everything he did felt anachronistic. Pierce Brosnan had such a likable face, too likable, surely, for 007. But Daniel Craig, our current Bond, has a soured, turned-off quality that is very satisfying. He seems almost to be playing the role under duress, his features thickened and smeared as if goons from the Fleming estate have been working him over between takes.

The latest film, Skyfall, took us deeper into Bond than any of the previous ones, to the very brink of identifiable psychology. The death of the mother figure in the remote chapel, the plunge through the ice, the resurrection motifs: we seemed at moments to be entering the phantasmagoria of the Bond title sequences themselves, those underworld (undersea, sometimes) montages of flames and bullets and writhing women, occasionally churned by shock waves of Shirley Bassey.

Fleming’s novels, too, skirt the droning vacuum of Bond’s inner life. Is he human at all? From time to time he slumps, depressively—as, for example, in the opening pages of Thunderball: “Again Bond dabbed with the bloodstained styptic pencil at the cut on his chin and despised the face that stared sullenly back at him from the mirror above the washbasin. Stupid, ignorant bastard!” But this discontent is due to the fact that he has a hangover, he is between missions (traditionally a dangerous moment for Bond), and he has cut himself shaving. An immediate and physical ennui, in other words. He’ll be all right in a minute.

The theologian Cardinal Newman wrote that as we come to understand “the nothingness of this world … we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it.” So it is with the Bond books, the difference being that in Bond’s universe the two great solitaries of existence are Bond himself and his controller, M: the vinegary omnipotence, the “shrewd grey eyes.” M sends him out; M calls him back; Bond will die for M. The books contain other characters, of course. The villains glow fantastically, fanatically, cranking their evil plots; the CIA’s Felix Leiter and assorted sidekicks come and go; and there are always the women, the beautiful women who cannot resist him. (Bond has to be irresistible—his irresistibility, his crude magnetic pull, is what he has in the place of charm.) But this is a ghost parade. It all comes down to Bond, and M, and the mission.