Casino Royale - James Bond Novel

source : Amazon.com
author : Ian Fleming

The allure of James Bond was best described by Raymond Chandler, who insisted that 007 is "what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Who can argue with that? This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film release of Dr. No, which was the first Bond adventure to make the big screen, and two big coffee-table books are being published to honor the occasion (LJ
10/1/02, p. 96). Shockingly, Fleming's original novels have gone out of print, but Penguin here reproduces a trio of the British secret agent's early outings, released in 1952, 1958, and 1959, respectively, sporting stylish cover art. These stories were racy for the nifty Fifties but are quite tame by today's standards. Still, they can be fun. -- Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reader's review:
"M," head of the British Secret Service, hands Commander Bond what appears on the surface to be a posh assignment: thwarting an enemy Russian spy, Le Chiffre, in his attempt to win an exorbitant 50 million francs - KGB funds which he had lost through an ill-advised investment in a chain of brothels. Agent 007 lives an intensely hard lifestyle, and he's known to be the best gambler in the Service. He's therefore assigned to break Le Chiffre's bank at the baccarat tables of the Casino Royale, in the French Riviera.

SMERSH, the Russian Secret Service in charge of all diplomatic killings for the Fatherland, is right on to Le Chiffre. Though he's very desperate, Le Chiffre happens to be a first rate baccarat player. He plans on winning that 50 million francs at any cost, employing a couple of potent assassins enforced to help see it through.

Though James Bond must face Le Chiffre as a force of one at the baccarat table, he has his own team of assistants: Rene' Mathis of the French branch, American CIA agent Felix Leiter, and the beautiful Vesper Lynd of the S branch of British Intelligence. Vesper is officially the very first Bond girl - and she utterly mesmerizes our master spy: he sees her as an entity of wonder.
Truly, this story does not own any of the qualities that could easily be made into a movie. There's plenty of tension, plenty of action, and quite a lot of romance to boot. However the tension is mainly in the climatic card game, which, minus the author's excellent descriptive prose, would appear tedious on the screen; the action is definitely intense, but includes a harrowing torture scene which should not be witnessed by the squeamish; and, well, without the advantage of being able to follow the thoughts of our hero, a film version of this story might easily cause the romance to appear as carelessly thrown in.

Vesper's an intriguing Bond Girl, though. Her fateful role exacts a twisted surprise ending, which inevitably sets the tone and atmosphere of Bond's future relationships with women. This is perhaps the only book of the series wherein Bond takes a good, hard look at the moral portents of his own place in his profession - sort of a teasing glimpse into the window of his heart - but only that peek - as it seems thereafter shut fast and hard. Keen, sharp, dark and moody: James Bond remains ever the quintessential Man of Mystery. -- A. Casalino

The first part of the novel thus details Bond fighting against Communist agents, but Fleming builds the climax early. Afterwards he builds another tale dealing with the ramifications of the first. During this he has Bond question his role, and by the end, with its shocker finish, Bond has renounced the role he has questioned and decided to from now on go after the force that makes spies spy. Having created an all-purpose group of fairy-tale villains for Bond to fight in future novels, Fleming has no more need for any further moral exploration by Bond--the knight doesn't bother wondering whether he should slay the dragon.

That I think is why Fleming's friend Raymond Chandler always said that he had never bettered "Casino Royale" and to an extent I agree--the novel marks the point where Bond is in between the realistic world of betrayals and moral ambiguity and the thrilling world of surrealistically evil villains and larger-than-life exloits. Bond never returns to this point again, and we are deprived of the pleasure of seeing him walk that edge.-- IA

The plot is simple; most of the action takes place around a card table. The scene played around the game Baccarat, however, are surprisingly effective. Fleming explains the game, and the tension created by the circumstances of Bond's particular games is palpable. The actual "action" scenes, such as they are, are less intense--this includes the de rigueur car chase.

There are two elements of the novel that are particularly disturbing. One should be aware of these elements in reading this novel, and especially in permitting children to read it. One is that the strongest violence in the novel surrounds the torture that Bond undergoes. Though 1950s sensitivities prevent the writing from being very explicit, the scene is nonetheless intense and with deep, underlying sexual overtones.

Second is the novel's pervasive misogyny. I mention above that the reader is not presented in CASINO ROYALE with the promiscuous Bond. No, women do not rise even to the level of one-dimensional sex objects. Rather, women in the CASINO ROYALE world are what distract men from their work, and when things go wrong in that work are usually the cause. The one love affair that Bond has, though apparently genuine as far as he is concerned, is largely driven by his need to discover that torture has not made him impotent.

What I found particularly interesting is how Fleming explains, late in the novel, why his Bond novel is not a traditional espionage novel: it does not focus on actual spying, but on the threat that causes it. "The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. They could spy and catch the spies. He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy." Fleming's Bond is not Le Carre's Smiley: Bond, his apparent intellect notwithstanding, is out to eliminate the threat, not the spying.

CASINO ROYALE, with the caveats given above, is an enjoyable read: there are fine elements to the story, and it is a kind of time capsule for an earlier popular spy fiction, one that leads later to a more sophisticated, and more intellectual engaging, body of espionage literature. -- M. L. Asselin

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