In the interest of full disclosure, I will begin by saying that I am a long-time fan of James Bond. I am not a slavering, unthinking fan; while I enjoyed the action sequences in the Pierce Brosnan incarnation and many of the suave absurdities of most of the post-Diamonds are Forever efforts, for me the definitive Bond will always be the callous brutality of Sean Connery, with Daniel Craig’s vaguely sociopathic return to the character’s roots in Casino Royale coming a close, very close, second. It was in fact the latest Bond film that drew my attention to the recent Penguin re-issues of Fleming’s classic thrillers, complete with lurid covers painted in a vintage 1950s style. I have been reading them in order over the last several months, and so Dr. No marks my sixth literary adventure with the character.
Let’s get comparisons with the film Bond out of the way first, shall we? The James Bond of these novels is not the enchanting, devil-may care adventurer of the films. He is cold, calculating, unfathomably professional, and deeply self-hating. What translates into the films as a kind of twinkly-eyed joie de vivre and cheerful misogyny is, in the novels, a barely-contained alcoholism and a profoundly self-destructive emotional defense mechanism. Bond does care about the women he beds, although he never takes such pleasures in the course of an assignment (Daniel Craig’s recent film appearance is far more accurate in that regard; with Bond the job always comes first), and he is deeply scarred by his encounters with them, his inability to be both the man he wants to be for them, and the man they deserve. It is not that Bond is inhuman, but rather that he is all too human, that he cannot stop himself from loving, and so must break his back with violence and alcohol in order punish himself for his deficiencies. He is pitiable, but he is still the man that all men wish to be; his only truly superhuman trait is his near complete selflessness with regard to Queen and Country.
Dr. No is slightly different from the first five. The prose is still the same: controlled, professional, and very tight. It’s tempting to call Fleming’s style spartan, but despite its economy the feeling it evokes is actually rather decadent; we hear Bond’s thoughts, but this world is very much a world of the body. Where this novel truly differs in its plausibility. The major element that separates the films from the novels is their sense of scale; in the films Bond saves the world, and in the novels he is merely one of many keeping his tiny corner of the world from falling into chaos. The back story of Dr. No, the quest of a private citizen, a former Chinese/Austrian gang-member who has worked up from the streets to control a small colony on a private island, is more than plausible. His only real goal is to have complete control over his personal sphere, and to extend his control only a little, selling missile guidance jamming technology to the Russians or the Chinese. Given the modest scope of his aims and the long time-frame in which he has worked to achieve them, it’s not difficult to believe in Julius No as someone who could have existed in the world. Where this story falls apart is in his behaviour once he has captured Bond and Honeychile Ryder (the only truly sexualized Bond Girl name to have so-far appeared in the novels). He gives Bond and Ryder a speech about his Villainous Plan, and then sets out to kill them both in elaborately improbable ways (although less elaborate and improbable than in the various films). This is the first time that such a trope has appeared in the Bond novels, and it seems out of place, in fact a little ridiculous after the much more serious, discrete, and lethal-seeming villains of the first five books. The traps he sets out are overcome, although not easily (Bond spends much time in hospital throughout these books), and it is essentially a lack of foresight on the part of Julius No that causes them to fail—and given the enormous organizational powers he demonstrated earlier in the novel, it is somewhat harder to buy his mistakes than it was with the earlier antagonists.
My only other difficulty with this book was the casual racism that Fleming obviously not only did not think of as racism, but imagined his audience would not think of it as such either. It was not so pronounced in Dr. No as it was in Live and Let Die (the worst of the six, but only because of the extremity of its racism), but it is likely to make the modern reader a little uncomfortable. It’s helpful, if difficult, to read the book as a kind of period piece, and it is a thrilling read, although it does have things to offer the more-than-casual reader. I can’t wait for the next one, but as there are so few (oh how I long for the days of having the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels ahead of me), I am rationing them. Expect to hear about Goldfinger in four or five books’ time.
Stay tuned! My next read is Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words.
