CASINO ROYALE

Ian Fleming’s first novel about the world’s most famous spy.

What one has to remember is that, despite Bond’s association with the 1960s, most of the novels were actually penned in the ‘50s. Fleming himself died before the first Bond movie ever saw light of day.

As a first novel, truth be told, Casino Royale is a pretty poor introduction to someone who is supposed to be one of the best spies in the world. The premise is that, simply, Bond has to beat his adversary, Le Chiffre, at a game of Baccarat at the eponymous establishment. Not really world-shaking spy stuff as is the case with Moonraker or Goldfinger. Not only that, Bond comes across as a weak character. He faces three challenges during the novel and survives each one of them, not through his own skill, but by the actions of others. Firstly, the botched assassination attempt, then the Baccarat game itself where he has to be bailed out by Felix Leiter and the CIA and then, finally, his capture by Le Chiffre. In every case Bond’s escape is unsatisfactory, particularly as Fleming has to rely on the maguffin of a SMERSH agent to rescue Bond from the Le Chiffre’s clutches (an obvious and clunky raison d’etre for Bond to be pitted against SMERSH in the later novels).

Nor is that all, we find out that Bond got his 00 designation for the assassination of a mere two people – a Japanese spy in New York and a Norwegian, both during the Second World War. Not really the sort of CV one would expect of an agent with a licence to kill.

Indeed, the book effectively finishes two thirds of the way through, leaving the final third of the book to be filled with Bond’s irrational self-doubt of his suitability as a spy and then the even more unsatisfactory denouement between him and Vesper.

On top of that, it isn’t even a well written book. Fleming has to use the female interest, Vesper Lund as a blank page so that he can explain, via Bond, to the reader the ins and outs of Casino etiquette and the rules of Baccarat. It comes across as little more than an inelegant case of info dumping. What Fleming does do however, is reveal is inherent sexism, racism and xenophobia together with what appears as an unsavoury interest in sado-masocism, as evinced by his detailed description of Bond’s genital torture at the hands – or rather crop – of Le Chiffre.

It will be very interesting to see how the film the book translates to film because, as a novel, it fails.