Casino Royale (James Bond 007)

This review assumes you have either read the book, or have seen the Daniel Craig film and will discuss the plot accordingly. If you wish to avoid spoilers then please skip.

Like many, I suspect, I have long been a fan of the Bond films but had never actually read any of Fleming's original books upon which the movies were based so when I came across a second-hand copy of Casino Royale in a local charity book sale I felt this was well worth 75p.

Having read the book now I think I can see why Cubby Broccoli did not start the film franchise with the first book. We are meeting Bond and his world for the first time, and there is surprisingly few locations and little action in the book, so all in all not much grist for the mill of visual media; even the more recent Daniel Craig film has had to add to the very sparse material presented here, there is no Madagascar, Uganda, Caribbean, Montenegro, or Venice in the narrative, apart from a very brief opening in London all the story plays out in a fictional town outside Dieppe in northern France.

The appearances of Le Chiffre and his henchmen are, perhaps surprisingly, similarly limited and the playing out of Bond's mission, to bankrupt the financially vulnerable Le Chiffre in a high-stakes game of Baccarat (and not Texas Hold 'em poker as in the film) is dispensed with almost indecent haste. What we are left with, then, is the fallout from the mission, on Le Chiffre's attempts to steal back his losses (and Bond's winnings), and the relationship between Bond and his MI6 partner Vesper Lynd.

This is where the novella gets… interesting. Bond gets captured by Le Chiffre and endures a slightly homoerotic hour of torture in which he is stripped naked, tied to a chair, and suffers the indignity of his genitals being assaulted with a carpetbeater. When Bond is later recovering from this ordeal it is clear that this was by far the worse thing he could have been subjected to; Le Chiffre was not just attacking Bond’s body but his very identity, purpose, and prime motivation as a virile and assuredly heterosexual hero. The experience triggers something of an existential crisis in Bond as he begins to recover from this torture. Then during his convalescence Bond decides he wants to, and does, sleep with Vesper to check that ‘normal’ service is fully restored – how charming.

Their affair, however, is not quite the happy and inconsequential fling Bond was looking for. He realises he has developed deeper feelings for Vesper, however she does not fully reciprocate and it is clear she is hiding secrets which prevent her from fully committing her mind and spirit to Bond as he wishes; this leads him to the frankly vile speculation that until she does so each physical union of theirs would bear the “sweet tang of rape”. Here, then, is the real Bond; famously dismissed by Judi Dench’s M as “A sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War” and in this book we see this writ large (although, being first published in 1953, I think the Cold War relic charge understandable). This outing is more than seeing a Bondtesaurus trample across some Jurassic landscape of espionage; what we witness in Casino Royale is Toxic-Masculinataurus Rex bellowing its awful roar.

The films are not without their problems in terms in these regards, but I feel this is one of those rare cases when the films are better than the books that inspired them.