Ian Fleming (1) (1908–1964)

(Note:- I'll be discussing some spoilers of the book in this review, but it is an old and very popular book that has inspired a new and very popular film, so you probably know what happens anyway.)

Casino Royale is a novel of two halves – one bad, one good. The first half epitomises everything I disliked about James Bond (more specifically, the literary Bond), who comes across as dour, charmless and snobby. There's a lot of pretentiousness, as Bond (read: Fleming) seems more concerned with show more cocktail recipes, fine cuisine and fashionable clothes than with the espionage mission. "The trouble always is, he explained to Vesper, "not how to get enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it."" (pg. 62). A problem that will be familiar to secret agents and men of action the world over, no doubt. It seems at times like every fifth word in this half of the book is in italics, denoting something rather pretentious. Tournedos. Sauce Béarnaise. Coeur d'artichaut. Those are just in the first paragraph after that caviar quote above; the same page also has Bond debating champagne with a waiter (the Taittinger 45 or the Blanc de Blanc Brut 1943? Has any spy ever faced such a desperate choice?). I acknowledge that this high-life is part of Bond's appeal, but the attention given to it in the book is grossly excessive; I quickly grew tired of indulging Fleming's boorishness. Vast swathes of it could have been edited out easily; even when Fleming explains in great detail the rules of baccarat (important to the plot, I guess), I skipped over most of it and still adequately understood the subsequent high-stakes gambling scenes.

These gambling scenes are when Casino Royale starts to redeem itself; tension, violence, torture, action all follow in the second half of the book as we move away from Fleming salivating over what vintage to have with his evening meal to the reader salivating over high-stake thrills. Whilst many of the tropes we associate with Bond as a franchise are not yet present in this first book, it is still the 007 we have enjoyed in his many on-screen incarnations. In a way, the book is Bond moving away from the posh-boys-on-a-jolly idea of gentlemanly espionage still persuasive in the early 1950s towards an ever-changing and increasingly ruthless geopolitical landscape where nothing is black-and-white. As Le Chiffre's taunts express, Bond has been playing a "game of Red Indians" and has "stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups." (pg. 133). The old patriotic compass doesn't apply ("this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date", Bond muses on page 159) and the good guys, struggling in a brutal new world where the purported villains often win, are trying to adapt. Whilst the bad guys are trying to kill them.

Casino Royale is in essence Bond's attempt to adapt. He is, as the French agent Mathis notes, a machine – a tool, a Double-O – and machines can become obsolete. But he is also a man, and it is to this side of Bond that Mathis is appealing when he encourages him to "surround yourself with human beings… They are easier to fight for than principles." (pg. 164). But in necessarily drawing on his humanity to help him realign his machine-like functionality, Bond leaves himself open to emotion. Taking the form of Vesper Lynd.

Vesper is interesting because it is she who both allows Bond to successfully adapt to the new world and also fundamentally damages him. The taciturn Bond is clearly deeply affected by her betrayal and death; never has a woman been called a 'bitch' with such repressed anguish and heartbreak. But in acknowledging how she was exploited by SMERSH – the Russian villains of the piece – Bond allows himself to fall back on his old black-and-white morality, morphing it into a sort of mutant that can survive in this new morally-grey world. Bastardising Mathis' advice, human beings become his principles; he turns his anguished hatred at those who would exploit people like Vesper: "He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy." (pg. 212). He has identified his villains and, though he recognises the world is no longer black-and-white, he decides to see it as such anyway because it enables him to cope. He rises above and yet at the same time sinks below the morality of the ordinary spy. Vesper has broken him and yet at the same time allowed him to function. And they say the Bond books lack the conflict and the gravity of the likes of le Carré...

In this respect, even Bond's chauvinism serves a purpose. Whilst I can't fully get behind a character who thinks women should stay in the kitchen (pg. 116) and says with apparent sincerity that it's better to seduce enigmatic and reticent women because then every "conquest of her body… would each time have the sweet tang of rape" (pg. 186), his attitude to women is illustrative of his growing and begrudging acceptance of the realities of his new world and the death of the old one. When he ends the book with a seemingly callous "The bitch is dead now" (pg. 213), it is not just Vesper Lynd he is referring to. It is the heroic ideals of the old Empire of Queen Victoria, still clung to by many at the time the book was written. It is the goddess Britannia on her throne, just a few years before the Suez Crisis really drove that lesson home. It is this which gives the book its gravity and illustrates its literary importance; Casino Royale was one of the first books to really acknowledge the frightening reality that, in the decade after the largest conflict in history, the world had fundamentally changed." show less

I had decided to read this first of the James Bond novels many years ago, and it took me a good long while to get around to it. In the interim, I ended up reading some other Cold War espionage classics that I consider to be much better books, such as Deighton's Ipcress File and Greene's Our Man in Havana. Still, Casino Royale has its charms, tending toward the violence and sex that characterize the enormously popular Bond franchise. It largely lacks the epistemological anxiety that I find to show more be one of the chief attractions of the spy genre.

The book reads very quickly, but has an unusual pacing, with two major climaxes and plot resolutions accomplished fairly early, and settles into what appears at first to be a long denouement for the final third of the book, focusing on Bond's physical recovery from his earlier ordeals and the consummation of his love interest. Fleming is supposed to have drafted the novel just prior to his wedding, which seems a bit alarming in light of the grim eventuation of the romantic plot elements. Also, considering his reported ambivalence about the book prior to publication, it seems odd that its finish clearly intends to provide a point of departure for more stories about Bond.

One of my motives for reading the book was to assess the common claim that its villain Le Chiffre was based by Fleming on his acquaintance Aleister Crowley. Crowley may have contributed a few minor details and physical mannerisms, along with an aura of the sinister, but the resemblance is less vivid than those afforded by other Crowley-based characters in fiction, such as the Oscar Clinton and Apuleius Charlton of H.R. Wakefield.

Bond is no superman in this story, but he is harsh, calculating, particular, and not altogether sympathetic. The French agent Mathis with whom he is teamed comes off as both more fallible and more likable. Fleming's prose throughout is efficient, and shows the fascination with hardware (especially cars and weapons), the predatory attitude regarding sex, and the attention to glamorous settings that would become hallmarks of the Bond works as a whole. show less

It's okay if a James Bond adventure starts with a low-key escapade where Bond discovers the villain cheats at cards-- even if Fleming already pulled this one in Moonraker, he's good at it. It's also okay if a James Bond adventure starts with a low-key escapade where Bond discovers the villain cheats at golf-- though even Fleming struggles to make golf exciting. What's not okay is having 143 pages of your 354-page novel taken up by Bond rooting out cheaters. It's decidedly low stakes stuff, show more like the old Superman story where he stops someone from fixing up Ivy League football matches. I guess it oughtn't surprise me, though, because this James Bond novel is more about Bond versus people who violate English social norms than most: in addition to people who cheat at gentlemanly pursuits, this book is Fleming's most racist yet, with some really awful stuff about Koreans, plus Bond "cures" a lesbian, and Bond blames the death of one woman (in this book, two "Bond girls" die which seems a pretty poor showing; actually are they the first women to die in the series since Vesper?) on the fact that she wouldn't listen to him, and the fact that she wouldn't listen to him on the women's suffrage, which masculinized women and feminized men.

I found this to be a less satisfying Bond novel on the whole; in addition to the languid opening, Bond feels like a bystander for too much of the story, even if we do learn that behind the scenes, something he did caused contingencies to be put into motion that saved the day. The best part of the novel is the long car chase where Bond tales Goldfinger from England to Switzerland; as he usually does, Fleming makes something that could be dull in other hands quite tense through his explication of minute details. If the rest of the book had been this good, it would have been great. As it is, alas. I am still looking forward to the film.

(I was surprised that the story's most famous image, death by gold paint, doesn't actually appear on the page; Bond is just told it has happened by the victim's sister. It's on the cover and of course in the movie regardless.) show less

Forget every James Bond film you have ever seen before you read Ian Fleming's first (1953) novel about the British state operative. There is perhaps a link between Sean Connery's couture in 'Dr No' and his holiday wear and Bond is tough but that is about it. Otherwise this Bond is quite different.

Let us be clear about one thing. Bond is not a spy. He is a warrior, closer to Navy Seal or Special Boat Service, and, although he has killed twice before the novel opens, they were necessary acts show more of war. He is now in a very different sort of war in the early 1950s. He is not a 'hit man' - yet.

Bond kills no one in this book . We get the impression that he is someone trained to be a psychopath by his background and role rather than one born that way. He shows doubt about right and wrong (albeit briefly and at a low point) and he is capable of love although it does not last.

In fact, Bond is more victim than perpetrator in 'Casino Royale'. There is a brutal torture scene that has been interpreted by literary types as an example of Fleming and his audience's sadism but it is nothing of the kind.

Fleming was in naval intelligence during the war. He moved in circles that would be fully aware of the use of torture by all sides in an existential struggle for survival. He refers specifically to German and Japanese torture though historians have since confirmed that we tortured as well.

He was describing and not revelling in the horror only a few years after the war had ended, much as he carefully and in this case lovingly describes the intricacies of the game of baccarat in a way that pulls us into a story of desperation on both sides.

The background is that of attempted Communist infiltration of European civil society in the late 1940s and early 1950s, another existential struggle from the point of view of both sides. It is also striking how it is not a British story alone but one of partnership between three Western allies.

There is some friendly competition between the allies at the highest level but Bond works easily and in a comradely way with both French (Mathis) and American (Leiter) counterparts. It tells us that the Western alliance was deeply embedded by then in the psyche of men like Fleming.

British Imperial pretensions are never present. The old gung-ho Dornford Yates or early Neville Shute attitudes of Britain against the Reds are gone. The Western Alliance against communism is unquestioned. All that is questioned is whether a man is fit for the struggle.

However, respect is shown for the equally hard, perhaps harder, Stalinist hit men of SMERSH and even for the villain Le Chiffre who gambles and loses (though no spoilers are permitted here about how that comes about). The first are professionals, the second a victim of self-made circumstance.

There is a sense by the end of two security apparats who operate with a brutal integrity not only in a competition of national interests but under conditions where national interest is aligned with ideological interest. These struggles are between men who must believe in what they are doing.

Le Chiffre is simply a displaced person of undoubted high intelligence who gambles and finds himself ground between these two competing machines. He is too brutal for us to sympathise with but he is the type of the chancer individual who cannot beat the system in the long run.

Le Chiffre's motivations are actually never sadistic - he is playing for very high stakes, his own survival. Bond too is not in the least sadistic but operates almost like a machine which is what he is supposed to be when he is on top form.

As to the security professionals, we have, on the one side, an unquestioningly loyal 'bourgeois' hit man operating in a world of political gangsters on the one hand and an unquestioningly loyal 'proletarian' hit man for people using gangsters on the other side .

You find yourself asking to what degree is Bond's remit and that of Smersh that much different from that of Bugsy Siegel's 'Murder Incorporated' which had its own professional integrity and sense of loyalty. Bond himself at one point appears to think along similar lines.

This is, of course, a man's world. A woman is as unwelcome in it as she would have been in an air squadron in 1940, in a bomber crew or in a submarine. However, Fleming introduces some love interest (though of course things are more complicated than that with the cool and young Vesper).

He gets away with it and with great skill. The story seems to come to a close four fifths of the way through but Fleming keeps our attention to work through the Vesper-Bond relationship. That is no mean narrative achievement. As with Le Chiffre, that story cannot be told because of spoilers.

The sexual content is remarkably frank for 1953 and not at all gratuitous. It is there where it is supposed to be even if Fleming's approach to gender relations is conventional and not very imaginative. It is at least honest from a 1950s male perspective at least. Bond has feelings of a sort.

Even the infamous quasi-rape fantasy of Bond should not be taken too seriously. He is not a rapist. Fleming simply finds this to be a way of expressing private imaginative passion in a man who is not sexually repressed but emotionally repressed. Critical readers simply lack imagination here.

All in all, within the thriller genre, 'Casino Royale' is rightly highly regarded. It is an early bridge between the war adventure and what will become the spy thriller. Fleming himself at one point draws that vital distinction between what people like Bond do and what goes on amongst the spies.

Spies gather and then evaluate information or plant disinformation. Bond arrives at his destination with nearly all the information he requires and he only needs more for local tactical purposes. His job is one of action. He has to lay aside any more complex pointy-headed moral considerations.

And do not look for fantastic locations either. Yes, it is set around a casino but all the action takes place within a few miles of a tourist trap for big money only 150 miles or so from the English coast. The beach looks out on the English Channel, not the Caribbean or South China Sea.

The simple political conditions of a struggle for hegemony over the trades unionist movement would be very recognisable to contemporary readers. The office hierarchy back home and the locale would have been different to the lives of readers but not exotic, just interesting and new.

Although one could never say that the book was 'high literature', Fleming writes well for the average intelligence reader, the characterisation is sufficient to the cause, the narrative is fast-paced and the local colour and detail are easily enough to give a sense of 'being there'.

Where it triumphs is as an insight into an era where Fleming (perhaps not as successfully as he might have liked) could play a little with the grey area between loyalty and betrayal and what people will and will not do to survive without holding up the story with pretension.

It is not up to the 'intellectual' standard of Greene or Le Carre but it is not supposed to be. It does not matter that it is not. It is still justifiably the much appreciated basis for the later franchise. I regret we never saw a film of it played straight. That could have given us a more interesting Bond. show less