James Bond Goes to Hell

When Bond cradles his wife’s limp body at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and assures a concerned young patrolman that “She’s having a rest,” we’re eavesdropping on more than a touching moment of denial -Fleming is probably signaling his next move.  For his follow-up he would adapt a work in which a napping young lady can be whisked off to the next world on a sun-drenched afternoon even while very much alive.

If the author had turned to a Middle English anthology to brush up on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight before writing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he only needed to skip past a few pages to find one of his models for the sequel.  You Only Live Twice borrows its rough outline from a Middle English version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice known as Sir Orfeo, a poem written in the same era as Gawain.  

Pearl, another work by the Gawain poet and essentially an ode to grief, may also get a winking reference in You Only Live Twice.  Bond meets a geisha madam named Grey Pearl.  Tiger Tanaka is obsessed with the idea that bombing Pearl Harbor was a fatal misstep for his country.  Tiger later recruits Kissy Suzuki, an Ama diving girl who searches the sea-bottom for abalone shells and the occasional pearl oyster.  Blofeld promises to reward Irma Bundt with another strand of grey pearls.  By the end of the book Kissy will be growing a precious pearl of her own.  

You Only Live Twice is a novel about the stages of grief, as the frequent mention of pearls may be intended to remind us.  Or perhaps Fleming understood that Gawain, Pearl, and Orfeo belong together, and tossed in a few gems to satisfy the English Lit students among his readers.

The Dead-Giveaways: 

• When Sir Orfeo’s wife is carried off one day by the Fairy King, Orfeo disguises himself as a beggar-minstrel and embarks on a quest to bring her home.  Finally locating a hidden gateway to the Otherworld, he finds a magnificent castle populated with captive souls, some of them hideously mutilated by violence and disease.
  
  
• To avenge his wife’s murder and pay off a debt to Tiger, Bond plays the role of humble fisherman to infiltrate Blofeld’s “Disneyland of death.”  The forbidding castle’s deadly gardens attract Japanese youth who are contemplating suicide.  Bond comes upon victims in various unsettling stages of death and disfigurement.
  
  
• Admitted to the castle, Orfeo meet a fairy king and queen who rule in lavish splendor over the citizens of the Otherworld and its captured souls.
  
  
• Bond threads his way past deadly gardens and bubbling volcanic fumaroles to enter a castle where Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Irma Bunt have installed themselves as King and Queen of Hell.
  
  
• When Orfeo finally returns home with his wife, enough time has passed that he goes unrecognized.  He manages to convince even his own faithful steward that King Orfeo has been killed.
  
  
• Although Bond’s mission is successful, he stays with Kissy long enough that he is presumed dead back home.  His obituary is distributed to the press.

Fleming includes imagery from at least one other obvious source, one probably suggested by the casting of an up-and-coming actor who was a former bodybuilder and figure model, to play his hero.

Far from being disappointed with the choice of a strapping Scot in the role, Fleming made the most of his casting.  After seeing Connery’s performance in Dr. No, the author wrote a scene in which Bond, stripped down to a loincloth, grabs a wooden club and starts swinging away.  While many of the story-beats follow Sir Orfeo, for the climax of this 12th book Bond re-enacts the 12th Labor of Hercules, in which the mighty hero storms the domain of Hades.  Just as Hercules was forced to subdue the hellhound Cerberus without the use of weapons, Bond winds up defeating Blofeld with his bare hands.

Closing the valve on a thermal vent, thus ensuring a spectacular conclusion, Bond steals a ride on a buffeted weather balloon, ascends toward the heavens, plummets into the sea, drinks from the waters of forgetfulness, and is soon ready to be reborn - once Kissy fishes him out of the drink. 

You Only Live Twice not only completes the arc that was retrofitted to start with Thunderball, it closes the circle of classic tales beginning with From Russia With Love.  Like From Russia With Love’s Tatiana Romanova, Kissy is a Garbo doppelgänger.  She is also a former starlet who quickly became disenchanted with Hollywood, but left town with fond memories of David Niven.  Bond symbolically gets his wife back from the Otherworld, though the union with Kissy endures only about as long as we might imagine wedded bliss with Tracy would have lasted.  There is, however, the promise of a child with Kissy.

Bond's return to the world of the living in The Man With the Golden Gun* was hampered by the untimely death of his creator.  Unfinished, the manuscript was sent into the reading world scarce half made up.  We’ll never know what it might have been.  

You Only Live Twice remains Fleming’s last completed novel. 

(For more see “The Last Mashup” in the blog)

*(For later thoughts on Fleming’s final novel, see “Pistols at Sunset” in the blog) 

  

What About the Film? 

Some viewers consider You Only Live Twice to be one of Connery’s weaker outings as 007.  While this page is chiefly about the book, the film version of You Only Live Twice is an exceptional case, because the novel was written specifically with Connery in mind as Bond.  The literary Bond suddenly speaks with Connery’s cadences, tossing off quips that seem to have been written for the actor.  In the film Connery plays the part as found on the page, a weary man who, in the beginning at least, is only going through the motions.

It was a perfect marriage of actor and role.  Bond, drained and disillusioned since the events of Thunderball, now felt middle-age creeping up on him.  Connery, at the same stage of his life as 007, had done five Bond films in five years, with other projects hammered into the interstices wherever they could be made to fit.  

Each production had grown larger and more unwieldy. Each resulting film had been greeted with an escalating public relations frenzy.  The promotional machinery had long since sped off without brakes and was now screaming down a winding mountain road out of control.  The star's image seemed to grace every magazine on every newsstand in the world, and the press hounded him relentlessly, literally everywhere he went.  He was fed up with all of it - for now.

There is also an unfair sense that the book was discarded during the writing of the screenplay.  Reading the novel today is a reminder of how much of its flavor the film retained.  With the sequence of books being disrupted (OHMSS would now follow the adventure in Japan instead of preceding it) a grieving Bond no longer made any sense, and had to be dropped.  Given the job of adaptation, Fleming’s friend Roald Dahl was handed a book with two distinct halves: Bond uses a Japanese code-breaker to avert World War III, becoming indebted to Tiger in part one, and repays his debt to Tiger by invading the deadly garden and assassinating the gardener in part two.  Dahl compresses the storyline, having Bond avert World War III by invading Blofeld’s volcanic hideaway.

Bond marries an Ama pearl-diver, dresses up in a ninja costume, evades the thrusts of a sword, wields a wooden stave, enjoys his first "civilized bath”  - all bits from the movie which have counterparts in the book.  There are no manned space capsules being captured in orbit in Fleming’s version, but a number of ICBM’s are prepped for launch.  The pool of piranha, hand-to-hand combat with a giant, the drop through an oubliette (though the landing is gentler in the film) are all nods to the book as well.  Unfortunately the lesson taken to heart by filmmakers was that, so long as they doled out a sprinkling of genuine Fleming-approved seasonings, they would get away with twisting the plot into as many knots as they pleased.

It’s also unfortunate that filmmakers decided not to include a certain scene from the book, one probably intended to suggest what has been going on in the background this whole time.  In the parlance of our day, a visit to some stony icons at the seashore retcons the entire saga and makes this installment an important step in an extraordinary hero’s journey.

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