“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–becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it.
James Bond suddenly knew he was tired.”
With that opening line author Ian Fleming introduces the world to James Bond of His Majesty’s Secret Service. There is no opening dramatic action scene, or explanation. The story and character begin at 3am in the Casino Royale. For being the first book of the series it’s odd that this isn’t the reason that the world knows James Bond. That credit goes largely to Sean Connery and the movie series that is so popular a girl I know asked me the other day, “Wait, they were books before they were movies?”
The book centers around the confrontation between the movers of the Western world (U.S. and Britain) and their gambit against a man named Le Chiffre who is working for the USSR in France. It seems that Le Chiffre lost a lot of the KGB’s money investing in brothels right before France outlawed prostitution. THe money was supposed to be used to bankroll worker’s revolts, strikes, and Socialist organizations in France but now Le Chiffre is in danger. The US/UK know this, they know that SMERSH (the sickle arm of the KGB) is going to kill Le Chiffre so their only play is to bankrupt him before he can win back the money thus needing their protection.
Most of the action in this book takes place in a casino or in the town near the casino. So much of the book is centerred around the match between Bond and Le Chiffre that you might be tempted to call it not a spy book but a gambling book. The game here is Baccarat, an older game that I assume Blackjack is based on, and the climax of the book comes in the form of a hand between Bond and Le Chiffre.
The book explains that Bond liked gambling because, “everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt.” Bond takes a philosophical approach to gambling, he feels the sting when he loses but he understands that it’s a loss, and no matter how much he goes in to the hole it isn’t his money anyway.
I enjoyed the book for the simple urgency and panic that Fleming instills in something as normally inane as a card game. Placing the emotional state and effort of Bond to constrain his emotions while his second card is flipped over is something rarely seen in books or movies. Even in the recent adaptation of this novel, the illustration of Bond is more relatable here. Bond has recently killed two people to achieve his “00″ status but he begins to doubt the whole profession itself.
Not what he does for a living, no the killing doesn’t bother him, it is that the definition of good and evil is becoming blurry. Which is strange, considerring that this book was written during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was a pretty good example of who the bad guy was. He says that history is moving too fast and everyone is changing their parts from hero to villain, this confuses him and he worries of the day when he suddenly finds himself on the wrong side.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the book is what is missing from the movies: the Cold War atmosphere. The days when “the great game” was afoot, and the world needed heroes and villains of the Walsingham Spymaster sort. The two recent movies were good but the shadowy “Quantum” organization doesn’t hold a candle to the KGB and SMERSH for me. A recommendation certainly, though I should warn that this book ends about as abruptly as the movie did.
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