This is the original James Bond, the cold, calculating, gentleman playboy of the 1950s. He's not rich but his tastes are expensive. He's not a super spy, but he's determined to complete his mission. Ian Fleming debuts his famous Double-O agent with perfect, pulpy unpredictability and it's nothing like you remember from the movies. This is not Sean Connery. This is not Roger Moore. This is not Pierce Brosnan. Okay, maybe it's a little bit Daniel Craig, but that's on purpose. Join me as I begin a year-long tour of the original Bond series, beginning with Casino Royale. For Christmas this year I got the entire set of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, about 14 volumes. My goal is to read them throughout 2018 but I already had the first one finished by New Year's Day. Thanks Mom and Dad! If the plot sounds familiar, it's no surprise. The 2006 Daniel Craig reboot Casino Royale was the most source inspired film of the entire franchise. Le Chiffre is an agent of the villainous Russian spy agency SMERSH who's gotten himself into money trouble and his only hope of survival is to win it all back gambling at the high stakes games of Royale-les-Eaux casino in northern France. He's likely to succeed unless the Brits and Americans can bankrupt him instead. The embarrassment would... I'm not really sure, but it would definitely get Le Chiffre killed by his own agency so he doesn't need to be assassinated. And it would really damage their super-spy street cred. Which is a big deal. I guess. So out of all their special agents, they send their best card player. Wouldn't ya know it, the best player in the force just happens to be a guy named James Bond. We're used to this idea that James Bond can do anything by now, but this being his first adventure, it's surprisingly more realistic that he could be the best card player because why else would they pick him? Whoever the best card player is, that's who this story would be about. And it's not such a far-fetched story as we're used to in the movies. All he's gotta do is win at baccarat (what, no Texas Hold'em in the fifties?). He's got high class tastes and some thoughts on the perfect mixed drink he's been concocting ("in a deep champagne goblet, three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel"), but other than that, he's just an ordinary agent. One of many. He's only killed twice. This is his biggest gig. Flemming knows how to write. I think. It's hard to say what constituted good writing in the 50's. British critics largely loved it, getting into the groove straightaway, while American critics panned it (and American readers avoided it altogether). Fleming makes some interesting narrative choices as an author and I think he's vindicated himself over time. In the entire first chapter, Bond hardly does anything except tour the casino wondering how someone might steal millions of francs, and then rules out each theory. The only way to leave the casino with millions of francs is to win them. He wires for more money. We're treated to lots of seemingly arbitrary stage setting, but Fleming is piecing it all together. Bond needs all the money he can get, and he's going to get it, yes, but there's no more where that came from. If he can't outplay Le Chiffre with this, he's done. The chapter ends, “His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the the warmth and humor of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold." It's the kind of writing you either roll your eyes at or you just get it. There's something delightfully ridiculous and hyperbolic about it. Like his drinks, his outfits, the women who can't help falling in love with him and his unlikely luck, the entire thing is wish fulfillment for wannabe gentlemen. Playboys really. It's status porn for the proletariat middle-classes. One conversation runs something like this, “It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill. That’s all the meaning of it. It’s a confusing business but if it’s one’s profession, one does what one’s told. How do you like the grated egg with your caviar?” Then in chapter two, Fleming backsteps even further from the characters and plot we're not yet familiar with to a letter two weeks prior between otherwise un-introduced department heads in London. An editor would never let me get away with this. The higher ups are all abbreviated to familiar titles like "M." or "Head of S." or "Q." The department letter outlines the opportunity (Le Chiffre's money problems) and the mission (bankrupt him at his own game) but it's risky (subject to chance) and expensive (millions of francs to gamble with). At the risk of the Americans taking the glory, M agrees to the scheme. They call in their best player, James Bond, an agent out of Jamaica, to see if he's up for it. He's realistic about the odds and very mathematical about the game in general, but nonetheless confident he can do it. There's a subtext of blindness to his confidence. Or maybe it's not blindness so much as presumption. Bond chooses to be optimistic and confident in spite of the odds (evens at best). There's an element of fakery here. Or fake it till you make it. Bond is perhaps just a tad over-confident. And it's not just his department heads he's trying to reassure, but himself as well. This is the crux of James Bond, I suspect. If it is wish fulfillment for the masses, then this is the foundational relatable quality that connects Bond to his middle-class wannabe audience. Both desperately want to be cool, smooth power players, efficient and precise and the best at what they do. He is no more a high-powered socialite than the readers. But he must pretend to be for his mission. There's a lot of French in Casino Royale. Like, a lot. I don't speak French, but I feel like I'm half way there after finishing this. It adds a degree of realism that's difficult to replicate any other way. So, too, do the references to brand names. Bond's Bentley, for example, or the names of top-shelf liquors. Of course, I won't surprise you in saying Bond wins the baccarat game after almost losing everything, and he embarrasses Le Chriffre to the tune of 70+ million francs. The surprise is that as I read it, I still held half the novel's pages in my right hand. The page count alone implied suspense. With all that money, surely someone would try coming for it. And just as he's beginning to make his moves on Vesper... They kidnap her and lure him into a trap. I can't not mention the sexism. It was a bit of a disappointment, perhaps the sole detraction to an otherwise exciting read. So much of the writing holds up today with an inferred layer of ironic subtext (which admittedly I project onto it from a modern lens). Like watching Mad Men, the cultural prejudices almost have an undercurrent of self-awareness: these despicable, dated, behaviors are a demonstration of how not cool they were. I can convince myself of that some of the time reading Casino Royale, but not enough to believe it was honestly Fleming's intent. As a product of his era, and as a direct outgrowth of the wish-fulfillment he brought with him, the women are... how shall we put it... just another fancy object that gentlemen playboy's get to play with. If the girl has a name, well, so does the brandy. Vesper is introduced by her appearance, "She has black hair, blue eyes, and splendid...er...protuberances. Back and front." Bond is immediately attracted to her sexually. She's an obstacle of the plot, if you think about it, a possible distraction. And that's when her unprofessional emotions don't interfere with the mission (Bond's first thought when being assigned a woman). "And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them. Bitch." This and other egregious lines shattered my illusion of Fleming's sub-textual social commentary. Even as a prototypical Femme-Fatale, she's a whimpering liability who serves the enemy to protect another man she loves, rather than a double-crossing spy who betrays Bond of her own volition. Nonetheless, I liked the ending. American critics of the time lamented the unnecessary chapters tacked on the back of this "short-story" to pad the word count. I on the other hand felt Fleming was taking his time to flesh out the thematic climax of the story distinct from the plot climax. It's not common to distinguish these two types of climaxes. The hero usually learns his thematic lesson at the same time that he defeats his practical adversaries (think of Han Solo choosing to save the day at the same time as Luke Skywalker choosing to use the Force at the same time as the Death Star getting blown up. Nice and tidy.). So if the plot climax is Le Chiffre's defeat at baccarat (actually it's his assassination by his own spy organization after attempting to torture Bond for the money, that ultimately concludes the plot, but same difference), then what is the novel really about if it doesn't end there? It's about James Bond, dummy! It's about him coming face to face with his own delusion of grandeur. Bond's character arc is that he starts out pretending to be -- wanting to be -- this perfect gentleman secret agent. His cover is blown by the time he arrives at the casino. He survives assassination only by inept assassins. He basically loses at baccarat until the Americans bail him out and he gets lucky. Even after he wins, he's easily captured after failing to rescue the damsel and he's about to die of torture when his enemies save him by bureaucratic oversight (Le Chiffre's assassin says he should've been given a kill order for Bond as well but his bosses essentially forgot. "So until next time Mr Bond..."). And lastly, Bond intends to conquer Vesper (sexually) and inevitably discard her as all his relationships go, but -- ah! -- he fails at this most of all. Her aloof inconsistencies get under his skin and he falls for her (we later learn her strange behaviors were the consequence of both being made to secretly betray him, and her original lover being captured by the enemy). She sits by him during his recovery (out of guilt) and they go away together on a sort of honeymoon where he decides to propose to her... until she starts acting funny. On the one hand she's become dreadfully paranoid of Russian spies following them. On the other hand, she's sorta acting like a spy, making secret phone calls to unlisted numbers and lying about it. When he confronts her and confesses his intention had been to propose, she promises to get her act together. They have one last truly passionate night together... and then she kills herself, confessing everything in a letter. I won't say it's entirely unpredictable, as some sort of twist involving betrayal and death is more than imminent by this point. But it doesn't play out with a shootout or major confrontation the way you expect in the movies. This is Bond's own personal thematic climax. The fulfillment, in my interpretation at least, of his arc. If Bond was only a wannabe at the beginning, his willingness to marry Vesper is ultimate proof of his fakery. He was gonna retire, after one mission! But in her suicide and betrayal, he finally becomes the cold spy he imagined himself to be, his sights set on SMERSH, and nothing else, his heart dead, just like the girl. The entire novel now functions as one long series of pretenses and failures to be the perfect gentleman super-spy, right up until the last savage, embittered line when he calls the home office to say, "3030 was a double [agent]. Yes, I said "was". The bitch is dead now." The end. James Bond has finally become James Bond on the last page. He has a purpose. He has no heart. And he has succeeded and survived at his first "impossible" mission. The premise for the entire subsequent series is established. Casino Royale was just an origin story. A prelude. The reason I like it is because it's so personal, and dark, and tragic. Not just because he lost the girl he thinks he loved, but because he lost his humanity in the process. It's far more intimate and jaded then a hero vowing revenge on the bad guys. The procedural technicalities of the casino mission made this the first sorta techno-thriller, decades ahead of Tom Clancy, but the story was never about that. The essence of James Bond is in this extended denouement wherein we see his heart crushed and a cold-blooded special agent born. All his adventures from here on out will carry this same subtext of personal loss and inner brokenness, no matter how violent and exciting they get. His attempts at bravado and brazen fearlessness will inevitably be a cover for his depression and self-loathing. This is not the James Bond of the movies. This is Ian Fleming. Conclusion: Five stars for awesome, minus one for blatant sexism. But if memory serves, the next couple novels are a marked improvement. We'll find out in a month...! Don't Forget to Like and Retweet!
Other Bond Novels Live and Let Die Moonraker Diamonds Are Forever Raymond Chandler Detective Novels The Big Sleep Farewell, My Lovely
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