Bond’s so called Jamaican holiday ends up being his most dangerous adventure yet thanks to a mechanical dragon, deadly maze, giant squid and a pincered supervillain. Thank God for all the guano!
After the injury he sustained at the end of From Russia with Love, James Bond is assigned a lighter assignment – a ‘holiday’ in Jamaica to find out what happened to two missing Secret Service personnel. After two attempts on his life, Bond quickly realises the mysterious Dr. No, who runs a guano mine on Crab Key Island, is to blame. In Dr. No’s lair, he encounters the alluring Honeychile Rider, a mechanical dragon, a maze that nearly kills him and more guano than any 00 agent should ever have to deal with. All that guano does come in useful at the end, though!
I really enjoyed Dr No. While it is more fantastical than the first five books in the series, it is closer to the James Bond stories made famous by Sean Connery in the films. It helps, of course, that it was the first novel to be filmed, but the fact it has a mysterious, megalomaniacal super villain hidden away on a secret island moves it into the territory of a more fun, escapist read. That said, the sequence with the centipede was terrifically tense, and Fleming wrote about Bond’s experiences in the maze very well indeed.
In terms of the characters, I enjoyed Quarrel, although I found Fleming’s insistence to write Quarrel’s dialogue completely in dialect somewhat tedious (I felt the same way about the main character in James Clavell’s Tai-Pan, a much longer novel!). I also liked Honeychile Rider, and thought she was one of Fleming’s more successful female characters. In all the books so far, Bond has surprised me by being much more romantic than I expected. He is not the womaniser that the films depict. In the novels, he genuinely cares for all of the Bond girls – and so far, there has only been one in each story, not the two or three of the films. Dr No was a fitting and scary villain, especially with his mechanical pincers instead of hands, if a touch too impressed by his own cleverness. His ending was, to say the least, fitting! Dr No’s minions were unconvincing, however, being very much anonymous hired goons.
All in all, of the six Bond books I’ve read so far, I think this is up with Moonraker as being among my two favourites, and possibly even pips it because of the exotic location. After all, we read and watch James Bond for escapism, don’t we?
Rating: 84%
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