The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [24]
In those most successful of all twentieth-century thrillers, Ian Fleming's James Bond stories, the imagery again and again quite explicitly builds up the `monster' with echoes of myth and fairy tales. Le Chiffre, the villain of Casino Royale, is a black-fleeced Minotaur'; Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker has `a hulking body with ogre's teeth'; Mr Big in Live and Let Die has `a great football of a head, twice the normal size and nearly round'; the villain of Dr No, bald and crippled, with steel pincers insteas of arms, `looked like a giant venomous worm, wrapped in grey tin-foil'.
Indeed one of the key reasons for the initial success of the Bond stories, even before they were translated to the cinema screen (increasingly modifying Fleming's original versions), was precisely the way they tapped so unerringly into those springs of the human imagination which had given rise to similar stories for thousands of years. So accurately did the typical Bond novel follow the age-old archetypal pattern that it might almost serve as a model for any Overcoming the Monster story.
As conceived by Fleming, the basic Bond story (one or two vary the pattern slightly) unfolds through five stages rather like this:
1. The `Call' (or Anticipation Stage): The hero, a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is summoned by `M, head of the service, and told of suspicious goings-on somewhere in the world which appear to pose a deadly threat to Britain, the West or mankind as a whole. Bond has been chosen to track down and confront the source of this evil, and the general mood of this opening phase is one of anticipation of the immense task to come. To prepare him for his ordeal, Bond may visit the armourer, `Q, to be equipped with special weapons, such as a new gun, a sports car fitted with a smokescreen device or a rocket pack which will enable him to fly. These are exact modern equivalents to the `magic weapons' of ancient myth, such as the sword, the `helmet of invisibility' and the wingedsandals enabling him to fly with which Perseus was equipped by the gods before his journey to confront Medusa.
2. Initial success (Dream Stage): Bond has first brushes with the `monster's' agents or even the `monster' himself, in which he is victorious (he catches Goldfinger or Drax cheating at cards or golf). There may be attacks on his life, but he survives these, and the general mood of this stage is a dream-like sense of immunity to danger, with the full horror of the monster's power and ambitions not yet in full view.
3. Confrontation (Frustration Stage): Bond eventually penetrates the monster's lair to get closer to his enemy and then suffers his first serious setback, when he falls into the monster's clutches. But this enables him to get a full view of his sinister and repulsive opponent for the first time.2 Because the villain thinks he has Bond in his power, he reveals the full scale of his intentions, e.g., to rob Fort Knox or to drop a nuclear bomb on London. Bond's frustration at not being able to communicate this vital information back to the outside world is redoubled by knowing that the monster also has in his grip some beautiful girl or captive `Princess'.
4. Final ordeal (Nightmare Stage): Bond is now forced by the monster to face the `terrible ordeal, which seems fiendishly designed to lead to his painful, longdrawn out death: e.g. having to endure a deadly obstacle race, crawling through a subterranean tunnel, where he has to run the gauntlet of poisonous spiders, roasting heat and finally a battle with a giant squid.
5. The Miraculous Escape (and Death of the Monster): Bond survives the ordeal and then, by a miraculous feat of ingenuity and strength, manages in the nick of time to turn the tables, outwitting and killing the villain. He thus saves not