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Bond's hotel room is on the first floor. I find it uniquely interesting that Fleming would assign that particular detail.
For this non-linear storytelling, it works very well that a lot of items are served up matter-of-fact. Then given detail and context in later sections like the dossier. SMERSH for one.
The dossier mentions the Combined Intelligence Agency. I can't tell if that was ever a name for the Central Intelligence Agency or other organizations.
Greek reference: Zographos (Ζωγράφος or painter). Zographos and his associates here are bankers with a monopoly on high-level French baccarat banks.
Greek reference: Stentor (Στέντωρ), known as a Greek herald with the voice of 50 men, urging soldiers to battle. Makes sense of Mathis' cover as "Director of Radio Stentor" to deliver the radio. A detail pointed out in other discussion by @Agent_99.
@RichardTheBruce To answer your question about the Combined Intelligence Agency, there is definitely not one. A quick Google with Combined Intelligence Agency in quotes turns up a ton of Bond stuff relating to Climax's version of CR, but nothing of substance in actuality.
@Birdleson, I think it's high time you remove that question mark. We are reborn.
I think the men in straw hats would've made for a great movie sequence too. I think if Le Chiffre was in the film as described in the book (toad-like face), not as many people would've seen the movie. Besides, Mads is a great villain.
What do we all think of Eva Green vs book Vesper? I'm always thinking of her.
Absolutely. I'm puzzled why it hasn't shown up in a Bond film yet.
He was a bit of a disappointment to me. I would have preferred the toad-like, whites-around-the-eyes version, since Fleming's best villains are usually physically monstrous, warped father figures. Casting a younger actor as LeChiffre meant that the torture scene was less disturbing--it took on homoerotic overtones instead of the more sinister father-son vibe in Fleming.
That's the one area where the movie was much better than the book. Fleming's Vesper didn't really come alive until she began breaking down. To be honest, none of his pre-DAF heroines are well-drawn. Green's Vesper is a fully-rounded character and convincingly human.
Quite the way to kick off this series, it's one of my favorites and it's so engaging each time; I felt like the casino scene was much shorter than my last reading, just because of how quickly I was barreling through it.
I'll probably be in the same scenario you were in last time - a book or two ahead of everyone else. Despite going back and forth between two separate books lately, now that CR is done I don't think I'll be able to wait another nine days to kick off LALD.
And in terms of the current discussion, something else I enjoy about CR: getting to enjoy the presence of both Mathis and Leiter. Fantastic characters; Leiter coolly hooking Bond up with the funds necessary to beat Le Chiffre after Bond has run out of his own money is always a great moment. It's that type of camaraderie and closeness I want to see between the two characters again in the films, should Leiter ever manage to return once again.
The cover is by Fay Dalton, who also did the illustrations for the Folio Society. Here are the two side by side - different times on the same evening, perhaps?
The graphic novel follows the book pretty faithfully, and is divided into the same chapters. The one significant difference I noticed is the reveal that the note from Mathis is a forgery. In the comic, this comes at the end of chapter 14; in the original, it's saved for the opening of chapter 15.
Fleming's text accompanies the comic panels, but it's pared down to the essentials, with surplus material stripped away and much of each scene's flavour conveyed by pictures instead of words. Some of the narrative also passes to Bond himself. In 'Bond view', we see his mind at work calculating odds and noticing the details of Vesper's outfit or the casino layout.
Thanks, perhaps, to this streamlined format, I even noticed a couple of details I'd never picked up before: the foreshadowing 'flagellant' on Le Chiffre's dossier in chapter 2 (probably I'd skipped over this because when I first read CR in my teens I had no idea what it meant), and Le Chiffre's use of the phrase 'We have all the time in the world' before he begins the torture.
The artwork itself is full of movement and detail, with fantastic use of colour and shadow to make Le Chiffre thoroughly sinister and add an extra frisson to the most terrifying cane chair in Western literature.
Bond is drawn as cool, reserved, perhaps even a little boring, but better-looking than average and with smoulder below the surface. The face sometimes has a touch of Connery, sometimes of Craig, while towards the end, as he embarks on his vendetta against Smersh, it's Dalton's gunbarrel pose he assumes.
Fleming's legendary product placement is such a powerful thing that I broke off in the middle of my reading to search eBay for 1950s Ronson table lighters (I think it was the 'tiny jaws' that got me), but managed to stop myself before making any purchases.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/leese/vintage-ronson-lighters/?lp=true
Would have fitted well in the film adaptation.
CASINO THRILLS (Daily Telegraph, April 24, 1953)
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming should, I suppose, rightly have been relegated to the reviewer of thrillers. But those who know the sweating excitement of gambling in a casino, the dry shuffle of cards, the intent faces of the gamblers pretending to be bored, and the awful depression of staking everything and losing, will be excited by this spy story for other than the usual thriller reasons.
It is exciting as a gamble, as well as a story of an English secret service agent who is employed to out-gamble a Communist agent, who has foolishly been spending his Trade Union funds in a French Casino. It suffers from falling apart two-thirds of the way through, when it becomes a rather physical love stoyv on a different plane from the earlier part of the book.
Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art—a secret which Neville Shute told me lately—which is to work up to a climax unrevealed at the end of each chapter. Thus the reader has to go on reading.
While transcribing that piece, I also decided to upload another vintage review. Since it ran in Fleming's home paper The Sunday Times it's unsurprisingly positive:
CARDS ON THE TABLE (Sunday Times, April 12, 1953)
Casino Royale, By Ian Fleming. (Cape. 10s. 6d.)
By Christopher Pym
For long enough now the most persuasive and readable novels of crime and espionage--the most adult thrillers--have been those that explored the side streets and back bedrooms of Graham Greeneland. Here is a new writer who takes us back to the casinos of le Queux and Oppenheim, the world of caviar and fat Macedonian cigarettes. But with how much more pace in the writing, how much less sentimentality in the tone of voice, how much more knowing a look! Swallow an initial implausibility or so, and you can convince yourself that counter-espionage could be a little like this, that an all-night sitting at the baccarat table must be, and that here, surely, is the most agonisingly simple torture scene ever devised.
From the first evocative words to the last savagely ironic sentence, this is a novel with its own flavour and its own sometimes startlingly vivid turn of phrase (the Greek gambler's "pale hairy hands lay inert like two watchful pink crabs on the table"). If Mr. Fleming's next story has half the swiftness of this, as astringent an accent, and a shade more probability, we can be certain that here is the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler. One is pretty certain already.
You're welcome! In case I didn't make it clear enough, I really liked the adaptation and would recommend it if you're on the fence about purchasing.
If you're on the fence about purchasing this I'd urge you to get off the fence already! This is the best shot we'll ever have about getting the whole series of Fleming novels adapted, in order and in period, just as Fleming envisioned it. But the publisher needs to make money from the series in order to keep churning them out. If ever there was a comic book Bond series that deserved the support of Bond fans world wide, this is it! Pick up CR the adaptation ASAP -- YOUR purchase could be the one the convinces Dynamite to put LALD on the production schedule!
I'll probably cave and start up LALD today after work.
Van Jensen said he has a script, and Dennis Calero says they are having a new team work on it. I hope that means that LALD and MR are coming soon! Perhaps in time for Bond 25.
I can finally join in now, as I am done with school. Reading time here I come!
Very nice! Get yourself caught up, we've still a few days until we "officially" begin LALD (though I couldn't help myself and I started it about 20 minutes ago).
page 72
page 93:
Similar to the film, the CIA rescue Bond with funds but here there's no refusal of support from Vesper. Works fine in my favorite Fleming novel, but I see the film as improved to play up the conflicted, impossible situation Vesper was entrapped in--something to reflect on when she outright betrays him at film's end. (And also in the film I love how Felix has to stop and explain to and outright convince Bond--who's committed to murdering Le Chiffre in the casino proper--he's fronting the money to continue, as if it's beyond Bond's ability to understand in that moment).
Question: could Vesper's own boss have been influenced by SMERSH to assign her to this mission? People everywhere? Of course it's not supported by the Fleming books, but the possibility fits the story like a glove.
page 95: Wikipedia says: Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin is a French Champagne house based in Reims, specializing in premium products. Founded in 1772 by Philippe Clicquot, Veuve Clicquot played an important role in establishing champagne as a favored drink of haute bourgeoisie and nobility throughout Europe.
page 114: Throw out a sprat to catch a mackerel
http://proverbhunter.com/throw-out-a-sprat-to-catch-a-mackerel/
If we use a small fish as a bait, we shall shall catch a large one. It is worth sacrificing a little in order to gain a great deal more. A present to a rich aunt, given in the hope of inheriting her fortune is a sprat to catch a mackerel.
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Sprat: A sprat is the common name applied to a group of forage fish belonging to the genus Sprattus in the family Clupeidae. The term also is applied to a number of other small sprat-like forage fish (Clupeoides, Clupeonella, Corica, Ehirava, Hyperlophus, Microthrissa, Nannothrissa, Platanichthys, Ramnogaster, Rhinosardinia and Stolothrissa). Like most forage fishes, sprats are highly active, small oily fish. They travel in large schools with other fish and swim continuously throughout the day.
Adding to the list of items mentioned early and late in the novel.
- First two kills (the Japanese in NY, the Norwegian in Stockholm).
- The Muntzes.
+ The cane chair. (Vesper mentions it as related to her black velvet dress; Le Chiffre uses one in delivering the torture instrument; there's also the "chunky Malacca cane" that threatens Bond as he plays baccarat, so named for the material.)
I'm not on the readathon right now, but I've been reading your posts and loving them all. I'll quickly chime in, but please correct anything since the book isn't fresh in my mind at the moment;
Bond begins to suspect something is wrong with Vesper after his rehabilitation. They're going off for a little R&R and, on the way to their destination, Vesper's convinced they're being followed.
This trip, where, if memory serves, was supposed to bring them together, and Bond perhaps asking for her hand in marriage. Instead, this trip becomes a nightmare where her paranoia gets worse and worse (yes the man who she thought was following them on the road, was indeed staying at the same place as them. But, as Bond noted, seemingly showed no interest in them). This leads to a breakdown between the couple-- there are arguments over her mood and so on...
And then, their last night together, she seemingly turns a corner. Gets drunk with Bond and they make love, I believe a couple of times-- one was full of passion, the other time full of tears.
I think that's the long and short of it, @PropertyOfALady...
Poor Bond! Too in love to see that Vesper knows she is doomed and so is their love. The dramatic ironies of the last section of the novel redeem any sense of anti-climax. Vesper's characterization also grows more vivid, as she struggles in the trap she's set for herself. I wish the movie had a passage as poignant as this one.
Incredible writing. Fleming was magical. Thanks for posting @Revelator -- it's heart-breaking work. Fleming certainly knew how to paint melancholy with his words. And you're right, Bond's instincts have been dulled by love.
The film's "missing line" for me is the gale of the world mention, another example something at beginning and end. Would make a decent film title.
Picked up a couple more details.
page 141: mention of eunuch, a Greek word.
page 119: packet of Gauloises (Gaul women) cigarettes.