James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan
stated that this is the case.
Bond is not without a tender side, something hinted at by his terror of being brought to his knees by love or by luck, a fate he considers inevitable. He is also, if not afflicted by moral doubts, then certainly not prone to brainless my-country-right-or-wrong standpoints. He notes of the shifting definitions of villainy in a developing Welfare State, ‘If I’d 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.’ Additionally, he opines that the people whose killings had garnered him the double-O number were ‘probably quite decent people’ who were ‘just caught up in the gale of the world …’ Nonetheless, his attitude towards his antagonist in this book is never sympathetic.
Said antagonist is Le Chiffre, one of the Opposition’s chief agents in France, in which role he acts as undercover paymaster for a fifth-column trade union. In one respect, this villain is what the world would come to consider quintessentially Bondian: ‘Le Chiffre’ is French for ‘figure’ or ‘numeral’ and has been adopted because this stateless, apparently amnesia-stricken ex-inmate of Dachau considers himself merely a number on a passport. That tinge of the outlandish aside, however, he is a fairly common-or-garden baddie. That he is a ‘flagellant’ and ‘does not laugh’ hardly distinguishes him from those touched with the banality of evil. Or indeed from the often grim, often spank-happy Bond himself.
Although he is a competent operative, Le Chiffre’s financial difficulties have caused him to misappropriate monies entrusted to him by the Soviet Union (‘Redland’, in Secret Service nomenclature). He is therefore in a perilous position. Unknown to him, but known to the Secret Service, an operative of SMERSH is already heading his way with deadly intent.
SMERSH is, to quote a memo sent to M, an ‘efficient organ of Soviet vengeance’. It would be Bond’s nemesis until the ninth 007 book, when Fleming decided to make his character’s main adversary SPECTRE. Although Fleming sets up an elaborate and ostensibly knowledgeable explanation for the title of the organisation – SMERSH is a conflation of Russian phrase ‘smert shpionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’ – it didn’t actually exist. A Russian World War II counterintelligence agency of that name had long since been broken up. The organisation to which Fleming was alluding was clearly the KGB.
Le Chiffre has decided to make good his losses by gambling in the casino at Royale everything in his trade union’s depleted coffers. For the purposes of inflicting a blow – financial and psychological – on the enemy, it is recommended to M that ‘the finest gambler available to the service should be given the necessary funds and endeavour to out-gamble this man’. Guess who.
A showdown over a baccarat table hardly sounds exciting – or even Bondian – stuff, but the drama actually picks up at this point. Although Casino Royale has an arresting first line (‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning’) and features in Chapter 6 a blood-splattered failed assassination attempt on Bond by means of a bomb, the book’s opening is leisurely. No explosive ‘pre-title sequence’ here – or, really, in any of Fleming’s books – but an opening six-dozen pages that merely pootle along.
Bond is assigned Vesper Lynd as his Number Two. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ he thunders. ‘Do they think this is a bloody picnic?’ He is, though, somewhat mollified when Vesper turns out as promised to be a black-haired, blue-eyed beauty with ‘splendid … protuberances … back and front’.
The book’s most exciting scene comes when Le Chiffre is facing potential ruination at the card table. One of the villain’s henchmen discreetly tries to make Bond withdraw his bet by pressing into his coccyx a silent gun disguised as an umbrella. Faced with the alternatives of his spine being shattered and of letting Le Chiffre win his desired loot, Bond ingeniously creates a diversion by toppling backwards in his chair.
In an attempt to retrieve his money, Le Chiffre abducts Vesper. After an exciting and well-written car chase, 007 ends up in the clutches of Le Chiffre, who takes him to his villa and begins torturing him by swatting with a carpet beater what the mores of the time dictated be delicately referred to as ‘the underpart of his body’. Bond determines not to talk and resigns himself to death, but he is saved from a grisly fate by the intervention of the SMERSH agent tasked with executing Le Chiffre. With no orders relating to Bond, the assassin simply carves a warning sign into his hand.
Bond is not just smitten enough by his new colleague to decide to name his proprietary Martini a ‘Vesper’ – he resolves to propose to her. However, her behaviour at the secluded inn at which they are staying becomes strange and disturbing. The next morning Bond is woken with the devastating news that Vesper has killed herself with a bottle of sleeping pills. Her suicide note piles on the devastation. She had been a double-agent for the Russians, blackmailed into the role by their torture of her Polish lover. She has been conspiring with Le Chiffre against Bond all along, if reluctantly. With SMERSH now on her trail, she had put herself and Bond beyond danger by her fatal action.
Bond weeps. The ‘harsh obscenity’ which he emits before he does is something to which we are not made privy. For all their reputation of raciness, Fleming’s books would usually only allude to profanity or represent it with underlining. Only in the last few books of the series would the likes of ‘arse’, ‘cock’ and ‘balls’ rear their heads, and never the short version of what Fleming rendered in You Only Live Twice as ‘Freddie Uncle Charlie Katie’.
Despite 007’s callous statement to his handler, ‘The bitch is dead now,’ there is a hint that this woman to whom Bond had so frequently patronisingly thought of as ‘the girl’ was in fact cleverer than he: Bond acknowledges that, in contrast to his ostentatious actions, she had been working at his elbow for the other side quietly and without heroics. Bond was no feminist, but women would often be portrayed in Fleming’s books in just such a proactive and positive light, something not at all common in the fifties and sixties, especially in thrillers.
Bond had been contemplating resigning from the Service, but the thought of helping to take on SMERSH – without whose terror methods people like Vesper would not engage in treachery for the Soviet Union – gives him a professional resolve. Although Fleming can’t have known at this point that the Bond character would play out over a series, it almost feels as if this new attitude is intended as a long-term raison d’être for the hero – what is commonly known today as an origin story.
The narrative of Casino Royale consists of generally businesslike third-person prose but with touches of lyricism (‘The moonlight shone through the half-closed shutters and lapped at the secret shadows in the snow of her body on the broad bed’). Most of it is from Bond’s point of view but we are also occasionally given glimpses into the minds of other characters, including Vesper. This would usually be the case in Fleming books and, as here, the non-Bond points of view, as well as the occasional passages of omniscience, really serve only to weaken and slacken the prose.
The salient details about espionage are dropped in casually enough to create verisimilitude, while the author is clearly on comfortable ground when describing the plush and upholstered terrains Bond traverses. However, Fleming – in one of the first of many examples across the series of his insufferably propounding on things he clearly knew little or nothing about – attributes psychopathic behaviour to ingestion of marijuana. (Even the way he spells it – ‘marihuana’ – seems gauche.)
As well as Mathis, the book features supporting characters who will be recurring in the series. We meet here Bill Tanner, M’s chief of staff and Bond’s best friend in the Service; Miss Moneypenny, Fleming’s secretary and gatekeeper; and Felix Leiter, a good-humoured Texan CIA operative.
Casino Royale is a peculiar way to kick off the James Bond series. It’s thin and sedate enough to carry the whiff of being a padded-out novella. Moreover, the hero of this volume of just 218 pages in its first edition is a man not with a mission to kill but a licence to bankrupt. However, it is only what succeeded Casino Royale that makes a slim book of dossiers, card games, travelogue, blundering and lovey-doveyness seem atypical Bond.
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