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A review by lee_foust
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
3.0
In my defense I'm in the middle of my winter vacation and tackling a long, engrossing, mostly meditative and thoughtful book about Naples in the postwar era in Italian. It's just too intense and fatiguing to stick with all day. The weather's cold and rainy and my wife is away for the week working so I'm taking breaks from the good stuff to reread the Bond novels I guess I read before joining goodreads as there aren't any reviews of them here.
So, OK, Casino Royale, the very first Bond novel. This second time through I found it a study in contradiction. The first two acts are really pretty good--just what you'd expect for a spy thriller of the 1950s. I mean, grain of salt, yes it's going to be sexist and super anti-Soviet, to be expected, but it's written OK for the most part, pithy and sharp, and the character of Bond is actually kind of fascinating, as if even Fleming were judging him endlessly, struggling with his good and bad points, unable to reduce him to either a cliche or consign him finally to those age-old good and bad categories.
At about the 2/3 mark, however, with Le Chiffre's particular method of torture, Bond's reaction, period of healing, sexual anxiety, and the romance with Vesper Lynd that finish the novel, the narrative veers into some odd psycho-sexual territory that is bound to make the modern reader both cringe as well as marvel. I will declare here I think there's no better novelistic representation of fragile masculinity than this. It reminds me of two things: Bram Stoker's later novels, probably written while his brain turned to syphilitic mush and produced a bunch of weirdness, and the films of Ed Wood, where poverty and fringiness allowed for a kind of total freedom that we can only read today as sublime works semi-proving the Surrealists' theory that great art springs wholly from the subconscious. Anyway, we'll never know how in control of his work Fleming was, but he does always seem to give things away that most of us (men I suppose) wouldn't speak out loud. I guess fiction freed him from the superego enough to tap into his very fragile psycho sexual fantasy world.
I do remember being horrified on my first reading that Bond is ready to give up the service and marry Lynd yet (SPOILER ALERT) a mere two chapters later is able to declare "The bitch was dead." The tender falling in love scenes peppered with the canine diminutive in reference to a female human and love object, kind of sums up the male view of the era I suppose (and maybe even generally today although I wish/hope it were not so) in which a masochistic sexual desire was the male norm only occasionally softened by real feelings of affection--which could be brushed aside at a moment's notice if any of those other male bugaboos such honor or service etc. need be invoked to reinforce the misogyny that somehow proves one's masculinity. (You know, when Millhouse/Tucker Carlson yells, "Bart's kissing a girl--how gay!)
It's a cesspool, yet also confusing enough I feel Fleming is giving away his own male fragility and anxiety even as he attempts to give Bond this ultra macho face. It's weird enough to be interesting even if deeply troubling. The whole final third is also written in a very close stylistic approximation of Ernest Hemingway's romantic masterpiece A Farewell to Arms. Whereas Hem manages, at least at times (as not all readers will find it convincing even in him), to depict simple profound human emotions in simple and (he hopes, by being so simple) equally profound English, poor Fleming sounds more like a naif child who's yet to actually be in an adult relationship with a woman. I guess he tapped into his inner adolescent.
PS
I returned to the film, of course, as it re-invigorated my teenage enjoyment of the Bond films, which I'd pretty much abandoned through the later Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan years. It's a great screenplay, imho, finding even small details in the novel to exploit--like the throw away of Bond recounting his first two kills, which makes this entry's violent and pithy opening pre-credit sequence one of the best of the whole series!--and the modernization of certain elements are quite clever--i.e. Le Chiffre handling Anti-Occidental terrorist money rather than corrupt Soviet-run trade unions. I also liked the themes the screenwriters (there were three of them!) added--Bond as perhaps clumsy and a little too deadly, the theme of trust which touches on all of the characters good and bad and is of course perfect for the spy world, people who pretend and hide for a living, as well as the muddled I love her/I hate her of the novel, which, in the film, becomes a tad more believable as it's not so obviously peppered with run-of-the-mill misogyny but more a part of the who can you actually trust, how, and why theme.
So, OK, Casino Royale, the very first Bond novel. This second time through I found it a study in contradiction. The first two acts are really pretty good--just what you'd expect for a spy thriller of the 1950s. I mean, grain of salt, yes it's going to be sexist and super anti-Soviet, to be expected, but it's written OK for the most part, pithy and sharp, and the character of Bond is actually kind of fascinating, as if even Fleming were judging him endlessly, struggling with his good and bad points, unable to reduce him to either a cliche or consign him finally to those age-old good and bad categories.
At about the 2/3 mark, however, with Le Chiffre's particular method of torture, Bond's reaction, period of healing, sexual anxiety, and the romance with Vesper Lynd that finish the novel, the narrative veers into some odd psycho-sexual territory that is bound to make the modern reader both cringe as well as marvel. I will declare here I think there's no better novelistic representation of fragile masculinity than this. It reminds me of two things: Bram Stoker's later novels, probably written while his brain turned to syphilitic mush and produced a bunch of weirdness, and the films of Ed Wood, where poverty and fringiness allowed for a kind of total freedom that we can only read today as sublime works semi-proving the Surrealists' theory that great art springs wholly from the subconscious. Anyway, we'll never know how in control of his work Fleming was, but he does always seem to give things away that most of us (men I suppose) wouldn't speak out loud. I guess fiction freed him from the superego enough to tap into his very fragile psycho sexual fantasy world.
I do remember being horrified on my first reading that Bond is ready to give up the service and marry Lynd yet (SPOILER ALERT) a mere two chapters later is able to declare "The bitch was dead." The tender falling in love scenes peppered with the canine diminutive in reference to a female human and love object, kind of sums up the male view of the era I suppose (and maybe even generally today although I wish/hope it were not so) in which a masochistic sexual desire was the male norm only occasionally softened by real feelings of affection--which could be brushed aside at a moment's notice if any of those other male bugaboos such honor or service etc. need be invoked to reinforce the misogyny that somehow proves one's masculinity. (You know, when Millhouse/Tucker Carlson yells, "Bart's kissing a girl--how gay!)
It's a cesspool, yet also confusing enough I feel Fleming is giving away his own male fragility and anxiety even as he attempts to give Bond this ultra macho face. It's weird enough to be interesting even if deeply troubling. The whole final third is also written in a very close stylistic approximation of Ernest Hemingway's romantic masterpiece A Farewell to Arms. Whereas Hem manages, at least at times (as not all readers will find it convincing even in him), to depict simple profound human emotions in simple and (he hopes, by being so simple) equally profound English, poor Fleming sounds more like a naif child who's yet to actually be in an adult relationship with a woman. I guess he tapped into his inner adolescent.
PS
I returned to the film, of course, as it re-invigorated my teenage enjoyment of the Bond films, which I'd pretty much abandoned through the later Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan years. It's a great screenplay, imho, finding even small details in the novel to exploit--like the throw away of Bond recounting his first two kills, which makes this entry's violent and pithy opening pre-credit sequence one of the best of the whole series!--and the modernization of certain elements are quite clever--i.e. Le Chiffre handling Anti-Occidental terrorist money rather than corrupt Soviet-run trade unions. I also liked the themes the screenwriters (there were three of them!) added--Bond as perhaps clumsy and a little too deadly, the theme of trust which touches on all of the characters good and bad and is of course perfect for the spy world, people who pretend and hide for a living, as well as the muddled I love her/I hate her of the novel, which, in the film, becomes a tad more believable as it's not so obviously peppered with run-of-the-mill misogyny but more a part of the who can you actually trust, how, and why theme.