‘It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people.’ (p.64)
The casino in question is in the fictional French town of Royale-les-Eaux, just north of Dieppe, near the mouth of the river Somme (p.34), based on the holiday resorts of Deaville and Trouville – ie not the sunny south of France
James Bond is an agent for the British Secret Service. Their offices are in a gloomy building overlooking Regents Park. Its head is ‘M’ (p.14) whose personal secretary is Miss Moneypenny (p.23) who ‘would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical’. Bond has a Double O number because he has killed in the line of duty: to be precise, a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm (p.64 and p. 142).
Bond Biography
Bond lives in a flat in Chelsea. His only personal hobby is ‘one of the last of the 4.5 litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers’, a battleship convertible coupé which he bought in 1933 (p.36). He is given penetrating awareness of everything around him, especially other people’s appearances, particularly women (eg the page-long description of Vesper Lynd pp.38-39).
Vesper thinks Bond looks like a cold, ruthless version of the popular singer and pianist Hoagy Carmichael (p.40), though when Bond himself looks in the mirror he sees cold grey-blue eyes, and a vertical scar down his right cheek, not much like Carmichael (p.57). Asleep, when the warmth and humour have left his eyes, Bond’s features relapse ‘into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.’ (p.13) He is a ‘harsh, cold’ man (p.151).
Le Chiffre
Bond has been sent to Royale-les-Eaux on a mission. The man known as ‘Le Chiffre’ has risen from being a Displaced Person after the War, to become one of the KGB’s top agents in France and undercover paymaster to the 50,000-strong communist-controlled Trade Union of Workers of Alsace, on the border with Germany and therefore an important fifth column if war with Russia breaks out. He is controlled by KGB ‘Leningrad Section III’.
Le Chiffre is a clever man, a cunning strategist, a cool gambler. But he has made a bad mistake. He embezzled a big sum of funds from the Union – funds ultimately belonging to the Russians. With them he bought a chain of a dozen or so brothels and porn shops. Unfortunately, soon afterwards, the French government passed a law banning both brothels and porn. He lost the lot. In fear of what will happen when his Soviet paymasters find out, le Chiffre travels to Royale-les-Eaux (which has become a notorious high-stakes gambling centre) and, in the time-honoured fashion of embezzlers who need to pay back their funds, is hoping to get lucky in the casino and win back the money.
The mission
Bond’s mission is to beat le Chiffre at the gambling tables. To humiliate a major Soviet agent and the large communist union he manages, probably leading to le Chiffre being eliminated by his own side, an organisational and propaganda victory for our side. The execution would be done by SMERSH, the Soviet execution agency – a word formed by joining two Russian words smyert shpionam Death to spies! (history & overview given on pages 21 and 147).
Bond has been handed a large amount to gamble with and the ‘cover’ of being a playboy millionaire inheritor of a large fortune in Jamaica. He is helped by Mathis, an agent from the French Deuxième Bureau, and Felix Leiter, from the American CIA (full description page 53).
A connoisseur spy
‘I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink.’ (p.61)
Bond is a connoisseur of good food and drink, of guns, cars and women. Rereading Casino Royale it struck me that:
- In previous literature, this level of connoisseurship was restricted to aristocratic characters, and not a usual characteristic of the special agent genre, as embodied by John Buchan, Bulldog Drummond or the ordinary bloke heroes of Eric Ambler. One element of Bond’s success is combining the visceral excitement of the spy thriller – traditionally thought of as a pulpy or low genre – with a level of upper-class connoisseurship previously restricted to more high-brow literature.
- Bond really enjoys the things he likes, and Fleming manages to convey this enjoyment very powerfully. There are not that many stereotypical thriller scenes (one bomb goes off, there’s a very long card game, a car chase and an extended torture scene). What dominates the text is Bond’s supremely sensual enjoyment of what he likes: food, cigarettes, fast cars, fancy drinks, looking at a beautiful woman in expensive clothes.
Bond’s likes
In fact, the word ‘like’ crops up frequently. ‘Bond liked to make a good breakfast’ (p.28): in this instance, half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon, and a double portion of coffee without sugar, followed by the first cigarette of the day, ‘a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street’.
The pleasure of good food
When he orders paté de foie gras he makes sure it comes with a porcelain pot of very hot water to dip the knife in so it will cut through the paté more easily (p.45). He gives the barman at the casino very precise instructions to make him a cocktail from – three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shaken very well until it’s ice-cold, then garnished with a large thin slice of lemon-peel. ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made.’ (p.51)
He has one large dinner with the woman assigned to assist him on the mission, Vesper Lynd, which is described in loving detail: Vesper orders caviar (Bond ensures it comes with plenty of toast, always the issue with caviar) then plain grilled rognon de veau with pommes soufflés, and for dessert fraises de bois with a lot of cream; while Bond shares the caviar starter before moving on to a very small tournedos, underdone, with sauce Béarnaise and a coeur d’artichaut, and then (surprisingly) half an avocado with a little vinaigrette for dessert. And champagne to drink, Bond thinks the Taittinger 45, though the sommelier tactfully suggests the Blanc de Blanc Brut 1943 might be more appropriate. Wow.
The pleasure of gambling
During the long scene in the casino where Bond battles Le Chiffre at baccarat, Fleming explains the rules with crystal clarity so that even a non-gambler like myself gets drawn into the exciting battle of wills. Not only explains what’s at stake, but conveys the enjoyment.
‘Bond had always been a gambler. He loved the dry riffle of the cards and the constant unemphatic drama of the quiet figures round the green tables. He liked the solid, studied comfort of card-rooms and casinos, the well-padded arms of chairs, the glass of champagne or whisky at the elbow, the quiet unhurried attention of good servants… He liked being an actor and spectator… Above all he liked it that everything was one’s own fault…’ (p.47)
The pleasure of BDSM sex
When, after pages of the very long card sequence, Le Chiffre finally loses all his money (and thus Bond’s mission is complete) Bond is fantastically relieved. He cashes his checks and tokens in at the casino bank, then takes Vesper for a drink. Coming down off the tense high of the card game, he imagines having sex with Vesper, but not vanilla sex; rather, sex which involves domination and pain, tears and ecstasy.
He wanted her cold and arrogant body. He wanted to see tears and desire in her remote blue eyes and to take the ropes of her black hair in his hands and bend her long body back under his. (p.98)
Later, he repeats the same feeling only that, knowing Vesper better, and having become more intrigued by her mystery, he imagines the sexual act with deeper intimacy and fervour.
And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape. Loving her physically would each time be a thrilling voyage without the anticlimax of arrival. She would surrender herself avidly, he thought, and greedily enjoy all the intimacies of the bed without ever allowing herself to be possessed. (p.167)
Where it is clear from the context, and from the descriptions of his deepening feelings for Vesper, that the word ‘rape’ is used in a BDSM context, meaning the agreed, permissive role-playing of violent or aggressive domination and submission, which is designed to take its participants to higher levels of sensuality and intimacy. Emphatically not the backstreet violence, the ugly violation of actual real-world rape.
The pleasure of driving a fast car
But before this can happen, Vesper is kidnapped by Le Chiffre’s people and Bond gives chase in the Bentley. Although there are technical descriptions of rear-wheel drives and superchargers and so on, what comes over most in this car chase is the sheer physical pleasure Bond gets from driving a superbly engineered car with supreme skill.
The baddies wait on a bend and lace the road with anti-tyre nails so that Bond’s lovely Bentley crashes at high speed and he is pulled unconscious from the wreckage, taken in the baddy’s car, along with the unconscious Lynd, to an isolated farmhouse and there tortured by Le Chiffre.
The masochistic pleasure of being tortured
Le Chiffre cuts away the seat of a cane chair and has Bond tied naked to it so his genitals are hanging down through the gap. Le Chiffre then proceeds to beat his genitals very hard with a domestic carpet beater until Bond is unconscious with pain, covered in sweat and there is a pool of blood under the chair from his damaged body. As he does so Le Chiffre’s eyes look at him ‘almost caressingly’ (p.120).
Linked to the S&M vision of sex with Vesper, this gross torture scene is part of the sensual world the book inhabits, a world of physical pleasures and terrifying pains. The horrifying torture is the mirror image of the cold showers, the slick grooming, the smooth shaves and bow ties which precede the fine dinners.
It reaches its climax when Le Chiffre, mock sorrowful that Bond has not revealed to him the location of the vast cheque of his winnings (which, understandably, he wants to steal) takes out a big kitchen knife and advances on Bond to emasculate him. ‘Say goodbye to it, Mr Bond’ (p.127). Presumably this means Le Chiffre is going to cut Bond’s penis off.
Le Chiffre had earlier assured Bond that this wasn’t the kind of ‘romantic adventure’ in which the hero is rescued by magic. But in fact it is. As Le Chiffre advances to castrate Bond, a mysterious voice sounds in the gloom. It is an agent of SMERSH sent to terminate him for his stealing of the KGB funds, which Russia has, after all, found out about. ‘Phut’ goes the silenced gun and Le Chiffre falls dead. The SMERSH agent whispers in Bond’s ear that, unfortunately, he has no orders to kill him, but he sadistically carves the Russian character for the first letter of Spionam into his right hand, and departs.
The pleasure of recovery
Out of a fog of anaesthetics Bond surfaces in a French hospital. The police had found his crashed car, searched nearby houses and discovered him and Vesper with the corpses of Le Chiffre and his henchmen. The doctors are (of course) amazed at Bond’s superhuman powers of endurance and, indeed, recovery. Miraculously ‘he’ will heal – ie his testicles, which you would have thought would have been mashed to pieces, will be restored to good working order. What is more restful and pleasurable than lying in a hospital bed, doped with local anaesthetic, being ordered to do nothing, think of nothing, and just be fed and watered day and night?
Vesper’s betrayal
The novel could have ended about here, when Bond – surprisingly – tells Mathis, who’s come to visit him in hospital, that he’s going to quit his job. In a couple of pages of schoolboy philosophising he says it’s getting harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Well, don’t fight for principles, Mathis advises him; fight for the people you love and against the people who are threatening them.
Bond is worried he won’t have healed enough to have sex with Vesper (or anyone) so is sensitive when she visits him in hospital. After visiting every day for a week or more, Vesper says she has found a quiet little boarding house down the coast and arranged for them to stay. They drive there with basic belongings and begin what should be an idyllic beach holiday. There is a sensuous build-up with swimming from the deserted beach, an immaculate home-made French dinner, and then passionate love-making.
But almost immediately Vesper becomes tense and nervous. Next morning Bond catches her making a secretive phone call which she unconvincingly lies about. She is convinced someone has followed them to the boarding house, and when a passing commercial traveller stops for lunch, she tenses with fear.
They continue the days of sunbathing and nights of good food and sex, but Vesper cries half the time and is irreparably sad. There is one last night of love before which Vesper insists on getting tipsy, and then the terrified patron wakes Bond early the next morning (it is the respectable 1950s, so Bond and Vesper had been given separate rooms). Bond rushes down to the hall to find Vesper dead in her bed. She has committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
Next to her is a farewell letter in which she reveals that she has been a double agent working for the Soviet MWD for years, ever since the Russians got hold of her Polish RAF pilot lover. The Russians promised he’d be safe if she spied for them. And so for years – years, Bond reflects bitterly, during which he has been gallivanting round the globe like a schoolboy adventurer bumping off cartoon baddies – the real traitor has been working in the heart of his organisation, quietly copying top secret files and sending their contents to Moscow.
Vesper admits that she betrayed every detail of the Le Chiffre mission to Moscow, including Bond’s cover story and aims. In the casino, she distracted Leiter so Le Chiffre’s would-be assassin could come close to killing Bond, with a silenced concealed gun. And, she reveals, her kidnap by Le Chiffre was all a put-up job to entrap him. Vesper goes on to say she genuinely fell in love with Bond but didn’t want to betray her Polish lover, and when she stopped regularly messaging her Paris contact, she knew they would send someone for her, someone from SMERSH. Which explains her irrational fear of the ‘commercial traveller’. So now she’s taken the only way out of her hopelessly tangled, compromised plight.
The bitch is dead
Bond crumples up the letter, all sentiment for her evaporated. All this time she was a spy doing her country inestimable damage. And he had grand-standed in front of Mathis, saying he was ready to marry Vesper and quit the service because he was all confused about the morality of spying. Not any more.
The novel ends with his determination to combat the fear which stands behind all the Soviet agents, the whip hand of SMERSH itself, the instrument of terror which keeps the whole system running. He phones the hot line to London to leave a coded message, that agent 3030 was a double all along. Yes, he said ‘was’ – because ‘the bitch is dead now.’
If Bond was cold and heartless before, he is even colder and more heartless now. If he was wavering about his job and his role, this mission crystallises his determination to shake himself out of it, and take the fight to the enemy.
Thoughts
This is an excellent kick-start to what turned out to be a never-ending series of fictions about the cold, pitiless, sensual, cruel connoisseur spy. All the key ingredients are here, including the final determination to fight the foe forever. And Bond may indeed go on forever…
This first book establishes the narrative pattern: Bond combats one big, central baddy, preferably in exotic foreign locations, where he displays his connoisseur-like enjoyment of the finer things in life and survives numerous physical attacks, before the plot intensifies, he falls into the baddy’s clutches and endures sadistic levels of punishment, before just about defeating the enemy, all accompanied by a sexy lover whose initial coldness he triumphantly overcomes.
Credit
Casino Royale published in 1953 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 1978 Triad Grafton paperback.
Related links
- Casino Royale (novel) on Amazon
- Casino Royale (movie) on Amazon
- Ian Fleming website
- Where is Royale-les-Eaux?
- Hoagy Carmichael website
- Google images of a 4.5 litre Bentley convertible coupé
Other thrillers of 1953
The Bond novels
1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.
Books & Boots 