The Damaged Goddess
After attending services for my father-in-law at Arlington National Cemetery many years ago, we spent a few days at the house where my wife grew up in Falls Church. Her father had collected jazz recordings at a feverish pace for most of his adult life, and had also assembled a modest library of favorite books. My eye was drawn to two matching sets of books sitting side-by-side, what I took to be book-club editions of Fleming’s thrillers, and a two-volume paperback edition of novelist and poet Robert Graves’s encyclopedic The Greek Myths. I didn’t imagine that one of these works might have something to do with the other until I finally got around to reading Dr. No last year.
The first thing to notice is all the Greek mythology.
The centerpiece of the story is a fairly straightforward retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth, combined with an amusing variation on Perseus and Andromeda. There’s also a generous helping of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions working hand-in-hand with an ecological subplot which was probably Fleming’s thank-you to an eminent ornithologist for the use of the name "James Bond.” The fact that the villain is a nod to Sax Rohmer’s fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu seems a given. But there’s also a chance that most of this is camouflage for the book’s real origin.
King Minos of Crete was known to keep a monster on his palace grounds - his queen’s son, a grafting of man and bull who fed on human flesh and developed an especial fondness for the youths and maidens of Athens. Victims were introduced into the maze where the monster lurked, inevitably stumbling across the ravenous beast while desperately searching for an escape route.
Dr. No, absolute ruler of the fictional Caribbean island of Crab Key, puts nosy intruders through a booby-trapped metal shaft which he calls "the gauntlet.” For any victim who manages to survive the hidden dangers, the only way out alive is a sheer drop into a deep sea inlet where a hungry surprise is waiting.
There is no Minotaur per se in Fleming’s version, but the doctor himself seems to be some sort of hideous mixture of man and crustacean. His severed hands have been replaced with steel pincers and he glides across the floor of his palace with such unearthly grace that Bond shoots a glance at the hem of his host’s floor-length kimono, half-expecting to catch sight of a tail.
Since Bond received an education equal to his creator's, when 007 first spies Honey Rider on the beach he’s reminded of a classic painting, imagining her as the flip-side of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” However what readers learn of Honey’s character is surely meant to remind us of Diana, goddess of the hunt and protector of the natural world. That centipede, a nasty nocturnal intruder which Bond hammers to a pulp just before losing his dinner, would have been a welcome house-guest at Honey’s place, part of the menagerie of creeping things she tenderly nurtures after the seasonal cutting of the cane fields destroys their habitat.
If Fleming hadn’t drawn inspiration from Graves’s The Greek Myths, perhaps he meant to suggest that Dr. No had. Why else would he decide to use Honey to act out the legendary sacrifice of Andromeda, pegging her out naked on the beach as a feast for something hideous that will rise up from the depths? Fortunately, both Bond and the villain have underestimated Honey.
The horde of Jamaican black crabs that are expected to nibble her to death, seem to recognize the island’s protector-goddess and end up playfully tickling her before moving on. Having already essayed the role of Theseus, Bond is not needed to stand in for Andromeda’s rescuer, the hero Perseus, except in joining Honey on a thrilling getaway ride aboard a mythical beast with wings.
There’s a lot to unpack in Dr. No, but it all seems to be lying there on the surface, about as much of a challenge as finding seashells on a beach, as if the mythology is meant to distract, mislead, disguise what Fleming is really up to. I’m surely not the first to suggest that Dr. No, which may have been adapted from a teleplay Fleming had worked on a year earlier, deliberately mines the structure of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - not the Verne novel, but the Disney film from 1954.
In both works, investigators are captured by a mad scientist who has a grudge against the world, a crew of devoted minions, and a vehicle sometimes mistaken for a legendary monster.
The captives are sadistically tested, wined and dined, shown an amazing view of the ocean depths, and then locked away. One escapes his confines and battles a giant squid with a knife and a spear. The madman is killed and his secret base is destroyed.
There’s another common denominator so oddly specific that it might be one of Fleming’s calling cards, deliberately dropped at the scene of the crime. Before being captured, Disney’s man of action, Ned Land, sings a salty sea shanty about island girls he’s loved and lost. When he first spies Honey, James Bond sings a phrase from a risqué calypso about an island girl who’s loved by all the local boys.
Just as From Russia, With Love adds sex to a Disney fairy tale, Dr. No performs the same service for a Disney adventure film. It’s what Jules Verne stories always needed, and are usually provided these days when they’re adapted into films.
Making Honey Rider the island’s somewhat spooky wildlife protector may have been a tip of the hat to Rima the bird-girl from W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, another work which was about to be turned into a film, with Audrey Hepburn cast as the mysterious jungle maiden. The ambitious but rather misguided production would join Sleeping Beauty at the box office in 1959, one year after the publication of Dr. No.
Fleming was not nearly finished mining Greek mythology for source material, though for his next thriller he would return to the theme of familiar fairy tales - picking the one which makes the least sense of any of them.
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Click this Youtube link for a video tour of Dr. No.