Casino Royale – Ian Fleming, 1953 ★★★★½

Giving Birth to Bond

Did any cultural icon ever make an entrance as brilliant and yet as strange as Bond James Bond?

For a long time I had an odd relationship to Casino Royale. I was not alone. It took over a half-century for the movies to get it right, long after putting on screen nearly everything else Ian Fleming wrote, even the kiddie book about that car.

One thing Casino Royale has going for it: inspiration from a totally invested author striving to give birth to his creation.

What doesn’t it have? A Bond you can picture becoming a franchise.

Casino Royale features a ludicrous plot, a barely-there villain, and a hero by turns morose and inept. It’s hard imagining this Bond making it out of 1953, let alone surviving and thriving in the 21^st century.

Take this first meeting he has with the novel’s love interest, Vesper Lynd: “Her eyes were wide apart and deep blue, and they gazed candidly back at Bond with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter, roughly.”

But Casino Royale is not just a good novel. It is a great novel. When it comes to establishing a mood, a setting, a sense of psychological toll exacted by a life lived in the shadows of society, Fleming’s debut novel was not only lucrative but brilliant, perhaps the only time we ever got a book from him he actually cared about. And it shows:

He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears, and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical.

That’s Fleming writing about Bond, but also himself. There is a lot of Fleming in Casino Royale. We get his perspective on French and English culture, on the good life, on what constitutes a decent breakfast, and on the ennui he found everywhere pressing against his life.

The opening paragraph of Casino Royale is one people often point to in this respect:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – become unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it.

Third time's the charm. Daniel Craig as Bond at left faces off against Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre in the 2006 EON adaptation of Casino Royale. Though the game here is poker, not chemin-de-fer, this is the closest of the three Casino Royale movies to what happens in the book. Image from https://rembautimes.com/2018/04/09/die-die-china-wont-fold/.

There’s something of Fleming even in the novel’s villain, Le Chiffre, a nasty fellow who snorts Benzedrine, manages brothels, and gets into trouble with his Soviet handlers. Le Chiffre is termed a “flagellant,” something he had in common with Fleming and which he uses on Bond in the book’s climactic scene.

Something funny about that scene: It occurs two-thirds of the way in, leaving the rest of the book for Bond to sort out what just happened. Casino Royale is a very odd book if you’re expecting a simple spy yarn.

The novel spends a lot of time on Bond; much less on his adventure. We begin with the adventure already underway. Bond has settled into the French port city of Royale-les-Eaux (unlike later Bond novel locales, a fictional setting) to challenge Le Chiffre at chemin-de-fer, a rather rudimentary card game won almost entirely by luck and hence an unlikely source of income for a man on a mission like Le Chiffre, who needs 50 million francs to make up for earlier defalcations of his Soviet paymasters.

Right away, Bond is defanged. A French agent shows up at his hotel room to explain how his cover is already blown. This should send Bond packing, as should an attempt on his life by a pair of Bulgarians, blocked not by Bond but by a rather clever story twist that Fleming plays off so casually you hardly notice it. Bond’s refusal to go away might seem brave, but reveals stunning ineptitude that, like winning at chemin-de-fer, exposes his success as a matter of luck more than skill.

In fact, about the only things Bond does actively in his first book is to set up his hotel room to detect intrusion (of no consequence as his cover is blown anyway) and send messages to his handler in Jamaica (“You and your Jamaica,” Bond is told early on, another wink at self-identification from the author). The Bulgarian attempt on Bond’s life is stopped through no effort of Bond himself. The one time Bond does anything physical to hamper an adversary is by literally falling out of his chair.

Author Ian Fleming enjoys his first novel between puffs of his ever-present cigarette. Smoking is another link between creator and creation: We are told early on in Casino Royale that Bond has smoked seventy ciggies in a single day! Image from https://www.biography.com/news/ian-fleming-biography-facts.

How Fleming draws you in is not through Bond’s spycraft, but his personality. As said at the top, it is not a pleasant one. But he is, for all his coldness and brutal manner, a decent sort roughed up by his chosen profession. Asked about his work by the novel’s only other major character, Vesper Lynd, Bond is matter-of-fact:

“It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people. That’s all the meaning it has. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of. I’ve got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O. Probably quite decent people.”

The jaded tone only grows as the novel continues, another aspect of Casino Royale that gave me pause back in the day. If Bond can’t get up for his adventures, how the hell could I? Looking back, I see now how effective an approach this was. It really grounds the character. Bond showed flashes of this jaundiced attitude in later stories, but never again to this degree.

That jaundice is everything in Casino Royale, as personified by Vesper.

She’s a remarkable figure, this first-ever Bond girl. Bond’s dislike for her is instant, and sustained for a long time, long enough for us to resent it. What we first see in her is a young woman out to prove herself in a man’s world. Bond’s cool attitude toward her, and the insight Fleming gives us to even more unpleasant thoughts roiling up inside him, make her an emotional center in a book devoid of same.

Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynd in the 1967 version of Casino Royale, a silly spoof with many lame jokes but enjoyable despite itself. Andress has the rare distinction not only of playing two Bond girls, here and in Dr. No, but also of getting written into another Fleming-Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Image from https://screenmusings.org/movie/blu-ray/Casino-Royale-1967/pages/Casino-Royale-1967-0304.htm.

Yet Fleming keeps his focus on Bond, and this pays off in his confrontation with Le Chiffre. At the gambling table, Fleming builds up the suspense masterfully, card by card, all the time taking in the smoky atmosphere of a casino in the wee small hours of the morning. It isn’t quite the Fleming Sweep of later Bond novels – there is little physical action being described and woven through the detailed descriptions – but a gripping precursor:

In the background there thudded always the hidden metronome of the Casino, ticking up its little treasure of one-per-cents with each spin of a wheel and each turn of a card – a pulsing fat-cat with a zero for a heart.

I love Bond’s initial view of Le Chiffre, which as indicative of this novel’s lazy pacing, comes well into its middle third. Le Chiffre is seen from across a baize-topped gaming table, and his ugly stolidity is likened to “the thick bust of a black-fleeced Minotaur rising out of a green grass field.” Way to keep that classical education handy, Mr. F!

Most impressive are the neat little descriptive touches that limn the narrative, the off-handed way Fleming makes us feel like a fellow insider in Bond’s world. He notes archly a French decorative fixation for leather and mahogany; describes the waxing and waning of Royale-les-Eaux among the smart set; and has Bond explain to Vesper, in one of his more expansive moments, how the trick to ordering caviar is to make sure it comes with plenty of toast.

Even a moment of Bond looking out a window brings feelings of being at his shoulder:

He lit his first cigarette, a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Moreland’s of Grosvenor Street, and watched the small waves lick the long seashore and the fishing fleet from Dieppe string out toward the June heat-haze followed by a paper-chase of herring gulls.

What gives Casino Royale its punch is the trick of its tail, the revelation of what put Bond on the wrong foot at the start and unfolds after what we were led to believe was the business of the novel has been resolved long ago. It is another critical way Casino Royale differs from the Bond formula, where stories are usually wrapped up more neatly in a final chapter or two. Here we get a longer, more probing denouement.

Barry Nelson as the screen's first-ever Bond in a 1954 American television adaptation of Casino Royale. Nelson is perhaps better known as the manager of another famous cinematic hotel, the Overlook, in 1980's The Shining. Image from https://hilaritybydefault.com/2016/09/07/007-7th-casino-royale-1954/.

The big takeaway is how Fleming doubles down on the ennui, with a bruised and battered Bond taking stock of the strange life he leads. Stuck as he is in the heart of the Cold War, in the year that saw the deaths of Stalin, Beria, and the Rosenbergs; the detonation of the hydrogen bomb; and the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower; the political and moral relativism he feels at the end comes as a surprise:

“Today we are fighting communism. Okay. If I had been alive fifty years ago, the brand of conservatism we have today would have been damn near called communism, and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”

Ultimately, his attitude boils down to the haunting, aptly-named Vesper, a woman that stands as a Rosetta Stone for unlocking Fleming’s contrary feelings toward the female. In the parabola of her relationship with Bond lies a tale of warped passion and blame that less complex females would tease out in later Bond stories, only occasionally approaching the same level of success.

“I have all the time in the world…” Le Chiffre tells Bond as he commences a round of torture. It’s a phrase pregnant with meaning in the Bond mythos, and very apt in defining both the weight of the character and his lasting cultural appeal.