It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
But Fleming writes:
Since the narrator in the books is a reliable one, I think this should be taken as an accurate portrayal of Bond's feelings, which certainly feel genuine.
You're correct that nearly a decade later, in OHMSS, Fleming decides to tell us Bond annually visited Vesper's grave, and he also has Bond mention her in Goldfinger. But while Bond apparently had a change of heart, it didn't take place in Casino Royale itself but over time, as one would realistically expect. We know that Fleming reread his books before he wrote Goldfinger, which indeed reads like a self-pastiche, and this probably brought Vesper back to his mind. And in OHMSS, which was intended as a return-to-form and the book where Bond gets married, mentioning the woman Bond almost married would have made sense.
Though Quantum of Solace had its problems as a film, I agree that it did a good job of wrapping up CR's loose ends and having Bond let his anger go. So it fills in the blank Fleming left in Bond's feelings toward Vesper between CR and GF.
In the long run, no. In the short-run of CR and LALD, yes. I think it's significant that in LALD Bond's feelings about his previous case only concern revenge toward Smersh. No grief over Vesper, or indeed any thought of her at all. She has been "relegated to the boxroom of his mind." Perhaps his feelings toward her softened after he fell in love again, and perhaps after Tiffany Case left him he made the first pilgrimage to Vesper's grave.
I think this holds true in the film, as well, though both it and the novel don't make it all obvious. Bond suspects everyone in the novel, even the damn concierge of his hotel and the man who operates the lift, but not the one that counted. He is blinded to Vesper the entire time, and never once thinks she could cross him like that.
@Revelator, all those details are right on the money, and I think that the films have had Bond develop in a similar way as he shows a human reaction to what he experiences. His narration at the end of the book is caught between reliability and unreliability. This is the man who, for the entire book, suspects so many people of being his enemy, but never Vesper. His mind clouded him from being truly impartial, and he lost the edge he so adamantly says he follows to the letter in the first chapter. After being so burned in the heart and ego, it's no surprise that Bond's first reaction is to call Vesper a bitch and contend that she means nothing to him. As I said though, it's quite clear that this feeling of his towards her is a very impulsive one and not his true feelings, otherwise he wouldn't feel compelled to visit her grave all the time or think of her in the last moments before he thinks he will die and see her in heaven. That's a man who still very much has feelings for her, and not someone who pushes all thoughts of her to the back of his mind. It's just that, fresh from a betrayal, Bond has trained himself to brush off the parts of himself he doesn't want to examine because it telegraphs a weakness. M would think lowly of him, possibly, for having a soft one for the double agent that embarrassed their whole service, and so Bond mourns in silence while putting on an indifferent face the way he is expected to by his employers.
CR and QoS recreated this complex development of Bond's inner life expertly, and I think it's the crowning achievement of the era. Like in the book Bond plays it up that Vesper is a bitch and worthless to him, but we all know from jump that she has gotten to him and has made him "feel it." Over the course of the film we see Bond stealing her photo to hold on to, and later on the airplane he pretends to forget the name of the drink he named after her when speaking with Mathis. Bond is having a very natural reaction, compelled by his anger to write the woman off as nothing to him while in the same breath trying to hide how much he cared about her. The mix of his anger at her betrayal and his race to save her in Venice isn't choppy writing, but the very real inner battle of a man who got his heart and job confused, and doesn't know how to act appropriately.
So when Fleming writes about Bond reacting to the fresh betrayal and later makes mention of Vesper in later books, he's showing us how the spy's initial impulse and anger has given way to the clarity his turbulent emotions wouldn't allow him to feel. With distance from the pain, he sees Vesper differently and is seemingly able to forgive her because she was ultimately victimized by the same people she was working for, manipulating into spying to avoid the death of her lover. Bond was unable to see the moral grays and trauma she was dealing with while crossing him and the guilt she felt (so much so that she was driven to suicide), but as time passed his logical mind and capacity for reason allowed him to see the dimension of the tragedy and understand why Vesper acted as she did. The masculine burst of testosterone and the need he felt to man up faded, and his mind returned to clear stability.
I think Fleming's narration throughout all of the Bond books is reliable--I can't think of any passages where it misleads the reader. When Fleming tells us what Bond thinks, or what Spectre is up to, we trust him because he proves accurate.
Technically, it isn't his first reaction--Bond initially sheds tears. Then, after reading Vesper's letter, he gradually considers the scale of her treachery, its effects, and his own foolishness, and after having considered all this, he finally shows that Vesper (as far as this specific book is concerned) is dead to him by referring to her with the same dismissive word he'd used before falling in love with her.
"Bitch" is literally Bond's final word on Vesper in the book, and for the next six years as well. After all that time had passed, Fleming, in a nostalgic mood, decided Bond had made peace with the character. But had he not done so, CR would have been the bleakest possible ending to the relationship, because there's nothing in the book to suggest Bond would ever love her again. Instead the cold machine that Mathis described reasserts itself: "he could only think of her treachery to the Service and to her country, and of the damage it had done. His professional mind was completely absorbed with the consequences." CR's ending is doubly tragic because not only Vesper but also Bond's human side dies. And arguably doesn't return until he falls in love again, this time with Tiffany Case.
I don't object to either Fleming or QoS later having Bond bury the hatchet after taking some time for reflection. But the power of CR's bleak ending would be diluted if this happened within the book. I can understand why the filmmakers went for a different ending, since next to the sad ending of OHMSS, CR's is harsher and would have ended the movie without a single note of consolation for the audience. But I can't help regretting that the 2006 film was not the adaptation I had hoped for and which might have been possible with a more daring set of filmmakers. However, I am probably in the minority on this issue--Goodreads has a list called "The Film Was Better Than the Book," and Casino Royale has a prominent place on it. I get angry just remembering that, but I can't refute the preferences of the public and undoubtedly many Bond fans. Though I do wonder how Tarantino would have handled his adaptation...
So it's less about Fleming's narration and more how Bond himself acts and talks, which I should've worded better. When he says, "The bitch is dead," that's a very surface comment that, to me, doesn't represent what he truly feels. We can talk about what that line meant that that time in 1953, but with the full set of novels now available to us we can see that Bond was having the sort of grief stricken episode of denial I was trying to describe that he later overcame once the cloud of anger faded.
Chapter 1- The Secret Agent
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”
It doesn’t get much better than that. While many literary maestros would likely disregard Fleming’s opening as a distortion of their fine writing form with its lack of commas or condensed language, what the man does here sets the tone of the entire series immediately. His drawn out description of Bond’s surroundings and the repetitive usage of “and” to bog down his list of details make the narration come off as one of a man droning on through half-awakeness to paint a picture to you. The sloppy and extended opening description recreates, in a very meta way, the feeling of “soul-erosion” the spy is experiencing as he takes a break from his gambling rounds to scope out Le Chiffre from above, a predator admiring his prey.
There really is no secret why I, as a writing student in college, chose to select the opening of Casino Royale as one of the best first paragraphs in literature-alongside Fahrenheit 451’s “It was a pleasure to burn”-for an assignment given by my instructor. On the face of it we have an interesting description that goes against the finely oiled machine of grammatical practice (ie. boring writing), but read on past the opening and you will see how minutely Fleming describes the whole of Bond’s life and job, and the feelings that it can create in him.
If Fleming had any skill as a writer, it was in his ability to craft characters from passages absent of any dialogue. Playing with images like a cinematographer, he tells us all we need to know about the figures of his fiction by the way he paints those pictures. Take the card playing Le Chiffre, for example, as Bond stares him down from the balcony above. “There was an untidy pile of flecked hundred-mille plaques in front of him,” Fleming writes, only giving us a small look at the man who shall become the villain of the piece.
We don’t know why Bond is there, for what purpose Le Chiffre serves or why he is at the gambling tables, but everything about his body language does. In a sea of miscellaneous information Fleming points out the untidiness of the man and how he stacks his winnings, telegraphing a certain sense of unrest in the man. You can’t help but get images of Le Chiffre winning a big pot and immediately shuffling his plaques from the center table to his side, lost in a strewn mess. This tells us that, though the winnings are his prime directive, he is so focused on the game at hand that he doesn’t even have the time to carefully and calmly stack his plaques in an orderly manner; he’s wired and sparking. It’s clear already that this man isn’t at the casino by choice or simple recreation, and is instead trying against the promise of death to win big. Fleming gives us this peek and leaves us hanging, offering a little taste of the apple before he cuts it from the tree chapters later and engorges us with it.
The real reason why this chapter functions so well, and is one of my favorite chapters in all of fiction, is in how the writer builds up the character of James Bond. For those unfamiliar with Fleming’s spy original, you could give them just this chapter to read and already they’d be set off with a better idea of who he is and why he became such a compelling icon. To offer us details about James Bond, Fleming often helps us to view him through the lens of paranoia. Immediately after spying on Le Chiffre, Bond calculates in his head the odds of the man trying to steal money directly from the casino, matching them against the odds of the man hiring a small team to pull off a robbery. In this moment we are placed right inside Bond’s brain stream of consciousness style as we experience the room through his eyes. He meticulously runs through the obstacles in the way of a thief, from the gun-saddled clerk at the table to the distance that it would take for the robber to escape with the cash, even running through the validity of a man jumping over the chin-high barrier to get at the money and past the mechanism at the front door that would stop any man from pursuing such a suicidal venture.
In the next moment, still thinking on the likelihood of a casino robbery, Bond plays out the meeting between the casino committee that next morning, predicting how the men will view the house’s losses and the profits and luck of the gamblers under their roof from the day before. It seems a common practice for this man to actively play the roles of other people surrounding him in order to understand fully how he may misstep around them or how they could come to challenge him in the future. These passages show less a sense of paranoia in Bond, but more the pragmatist who is constantly absorbing the minutia of his environment that most repress to sap them of their details and dangers. While 99% of the population would walk into a casino and expect major losses or gains to their coffers, Bond sees a complex system of possible crimes that could unfold at any minute, from a minor robbery to a veritable heist. But, as he remarks later in the chapter, “He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.” For this man, it’s all about survival and awareness.
In between these descriptions and story-building moments, Fleming stops at times to rest with Bond in thought, giving readers particular details about the man. While the James Bond films often have the overt goal of making everything that James Bond does fall in line with an Anglo-Saxon distortion of an Übermensch, in Casino Royale Fleming often delivers to us very raw and unglamorous details about his spy character that make him more man than superman. On page three of the text, Fleming pauses the action as Bond heads outside the casino and describes the severe taste lingering in his mouth-likely from the tar of seventy smoked cigarettes-the sopping nature of his clothes wet from the sweat caking his armpits, the strain of his eyeballs languishing in their sockets and the congestion that his nose and antrum are suffering through.
These invasive details about Bond’s body, his taste and his scent are not in touch with the sex-laden image of a powerful Sean Connery in a finely tailored suit gracefully striding out of a casino, and that’s what makes them so jarring and interesting to uncover. Fleming forsakes glorified imagery to share with us a man who is more like us than above us. The raconteur didn’t just want us to see Bond as a rough and blunt instrument of government utility, he wanted us to at times feel on his level. In that aspect, the closeness we feel to Bond and his worn out nature, his sweating form and his clogged nasal passages, open us up to fall deeper into the story that is being told to us. Because Bond isn’t that Übermensch, it’s not an intimidating concept to follow him on this journey of his.
As the chapter goes on Fleming piles more extraneous data and details on us to paint a picture of how Bond operates as a spy. With the finesse and penetration of a stenographer, we uncover the complex negotiations that’ve gone down between Bond and M at Regent’s Park, M and Clements, the head of the department, Bond and his Jamaican contact Fawcett, and all the dealings between the service and the French bank in between. By doing so, Fleming shows the depth and conspiracy that lies in plain sight, and how the head of a department at a Jamaican paper could in fact have heavy connections to major intelligence bodies around the world. These details accompany Bond’s paranoid ramblings of contingency plans quite well, because he is a man who has learned to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the danger in the dull.
Fleming decides to close out the opening chapter of his debut Bond novel exactly how he started it, bookending the piece with paranoia. As Bond answers his cable from Jamaica and makes his way to his room on the first floor of the Hotel Splendide, we again come in contact with his always-alert mind. With every step he retrospectively examines every choice he made to critique if it was the most effective in advancing his goals, all while pondering what traps lie in wait around him as he goes forward. Following his response to the Jamaican wire, Bond immediately wonders if the concierge at the desk is a planted mole sat there to spy on his communications with London and Jamaica.
As he approaches the lift that would take him to the next floor seconds afterward, he immediately thinks against that mode of travel and heads for the stairs, preferring their ability to give him a more subdued entrance to the next floor, and a certain element of surprise. If a gunman was in wait for the lift, Bond would be at their mercy, trapped inside a steel box with nowhere to hide. These minute details, of a man seeing danger in the random faces around him, again tells us just what kind of job he has and what kinds of modus operandi he must keep constant to survive in it. It’s second nature for Bond to act and react in this way, like programming, and you can be sure that on some job in the past Bond was sabotaged by a man he thought was background dressing in his environment. From that day on he chose to never be duped by anyone again, at any costs.
The chapter comes to a close as Bond finally enters his hotel room, gun drawn for any possible enemies who may be lying in wait. In short form Fleming runs us through the kinds of strategic “burglar-alarms” that Bond implements when he’s in the field, like strands of his hairs or bits of talcum powder that he uses to uncover if his drawers have been disturbed, or markings on his toilet to sniff out possible visitors. Like all of his actions in the field, these feel like those any man in his position would have to take to survive. It would be a fool’s errand to avoid the planning and constant thought Bond always implements on his missions, because you immediately lower your life expectancy by becoming complacent and blind to your surroundings.
The images that Fleming leaves us with before heading on to chapter two are powerful despite their subtlety. Fresh from a shower to cleanse his exterior of a hard day, Bond lies down and attempts to send himself off to sleep. Even while going to bed, it seems that the spy has a certain ritual he must complete before he allows his eyes to close with any sort of surrender. Starting off by lying on his left side, Bond reflects on the activities of his day, balancing his goals between the possible gains of his enemy, and how that balance could equalize or upset either party the next day. Once this practice is done and his thoughts are clear, he turns on his right side to finally get some rest.
And yet, though he is committing himself to sleep, he always has the fingers of his right hand ready to grasp the gun hidden beneath his pillow in case an attacker plans to surprise him in the middle of the night. You must wonder how much sleep Bond really gets, and if he’s capable of anything but a half-sleep at all. I always imagine that he’s trained himself through extensive practice to engage in a deep sleep that can be broken through by extraneous noise the way a light sleeper could be stirred. Thus, Bond can get his rest, but can also be on guard for any outside forces attempting to disrupt his slumber.
The final line of the chapter tells us all we need to know about Bond as a man, with sleeping finally coming to him. With “the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished,” I get the sense that the “taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold,” is not just a mask, but his default and original state. For this spy, the warm features appear to be the elements of himself that he must put on, like a performance, and the man he returns to when in private are those that are native to him, as unpleasant as they may be.
Chapter 2- Dossier For M
I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’re all fans of Fleming and his writing style-otherwise we wouldn’t be here. That being said, this chapter has to be one of my least favorites he ever wrote, and will surely be my least favorite of this particular novel, no matter what.
As an aspiring writer myself I find it a drag to read through another author who just presents us with exposition in the form of endless files. It’s clear that with this chapter Fleming was trying to simulate for us what Bond goes through as a new operations folder pops up on his desk and he absorbs all the necessary data, but that approach comes off very poorly in an actual novel. I think the information that the chapter provides us, which is essentially just dedicated to underlining what kind of man Le Chiffre is and who SMERSH is as an enemy to the service, could’ve been more effectively relayed to readers if this chapter and the next chapter were melded into one. Have Bond showing up to Regent’s Park for a meeting with M, and have all this background on Le Chiffre delivered organically in their discussion about the operation. Bond could have his little reactions to certain features of Le Chiffre’s life, like his fetish for being whipped during acts of coitus, and M could present his pitch to entice Bond to sign up as the lead agent of the operation because of his adept gambling capacities.
The way the chapter plays out now, starting with some clever integration of M’s reactions and impressions on the information, eventually just degrades into an endless stream of information that needed some spark to liven it up. The lack of character, dialogue or anything of the sort makes it come off less as storytelling and more as messy expositional plastering. Maybe this is the mark of a man who was just getting into fiction having a hard time trying to find a way to feed information to his readers and Fleming improves on his delivery of the plot and its stakes much better in later novels. At least I hope so.
This all being said, I do enjoy the details we get about Le Chiffre here, though Fleming largely keeps him a mystery. It’s interesting to note his origins, with the record of his activities only being known until after he took up the name of “Le Chiffre.” It is revealed that he was an inmate in a camp for displaced persons in Dachau, Germany, so I think it’s safe to infer-along with his Jewish features-that he had spent some time in internment camps during World War II. The experiences he could’ve had in such dreadful and demoralizing environments could be the triggers that cemented his personality as an adult, as his file describes him as one who “smiles infrequently” and “does not laugh.” It is also recorded that, fresh from the displaced persons camp, Le Chiffre feigned amnesia and a difficulty to speak. I think it’s fairly supportable that, given the horrors he could’ve seen following his internment around Germany, this man pretended to forget the details of the last few years and lied about his ability to talk simply so that he wouldn’t have to discuss his experiences with anyone and drum up old traumas.
I also find it interesting that, despite his skill with mathematics that no doubt landed him his job as SMERSH paymaster, Le Chiffre chose to call himself by that moniker because he started his new life as just a number on a passport. This glimpse at his origin helps to give us a better idea of the man, and actually makes him a more sympathetic character than the film adaptation really does. The sense of humanity he lacked in the camps and the repressed traumas of his wartime experiences add a layer of tragedy to him that offset his villainy. He’s less of a bad man and more a misguided one, lost and trying to put his life back together. Fleming reveals this very expertly by first making us think that the man gave himself the name of Le Chiffre for his skill with numbers before peeling back the layers that give us a window into his tragic past.
The chapter ultimately starts to pay off on the tease that Fleming gave us in chapter 1, taking us into the recent past to detail how Le Chiffre ended up at the card tables desperately trying to gain winnings. The causation of his financial straits via the shutdown of his brothels is very much of the time, but I do like the added detail that argues that he wasn’t risking all that money for his personal gain, but more for his organization’s. In a way you can appreciate his sense of care for his union’s finances, but on the other hand you can’t help but think he should’ve invested far more wisely instead of risking so much capital on a taboo venture. It’s clear that, as with many villains from all eras of storytelling from the Greek myths to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Doyle’s Moriarty, “bad men” are often undone by hubris alone.
I also like the idea that, despite having an issue with his lungs that he uses an inhaler to alleviate, Le Chiffre still smokes cigarettes. By trying to cut back on the nicotine in the cigarettes he’s helping to mitigate the effects of the vice on his already strained breathing, and could also be trying to avoid getting too addicted, as he seems to have an obsessive personality-at least when it comes to sex. Maybe this was Fleming’s way of showing that every man has his vices, even Bond, which he so openly details in the debut chapter.
Chapter 3- Number 007
Chapter three does a far better job of kicking off the lead-up to the big mission and setting the stakes of the story than chapter two. We get the inclusion of actual dialogue, first the very amusing one with Head of Section S and Tanner, another with Head of S and M himself (unheard but referenced) and a final one with Head of S and his own underling agent. In this last example Fleming teases Bond’s involvement with the operation in a bit of dialogue that confirms M’s selection of him for the job. In this dialogue we are given a bit of backstory on Bond’s past work with the service, involving a casino job at Monte Carlo where he worked with French Intelligence to clean out some enemies before walking away with a clean million francs for his troubles.
This dialogue not only effectively enters our hero into the action, but also explains why he is on the job in the first place. M wants the best card player the service has and Bond is built up to be this same sort of man that is needed. Even Mathis of French intelligence is given a bit of a tease before his big introduction in the next chapter as we learn about the history he and Bond share and how much this Le Chiffre job will likely make them experience a bit of déjà vu.
The meeting with Bond and M does a great job of setting up the professional relationship of the two men that was so well translated to the screen with Sean Connery and Bernard Lee. From the very beginning we see that M is the man to whom Bond will bend, but it’s nice to see that, as in the films, their dynamic comes from a place of respect. When Bond confesses to a certain worry over the facts and figures of the game and the odds stacked against him, M is there to reassure him of his abilities and warn that Le Chiffre could have a cock up or two just the same.
The last paragraph of the chapter, like the one that ended chapter one, tells us a lot about how Bond views his work. He prefers to face things alone in the field (likely to decrease liabilities), and his worry at being teamed up with a partner who is disloyal is a nice foreshadowing for the traumatic rollercoaster ride that Vesper Lynd will take him down in the ensuing chapters.
Chapter 4- L’Ennemi Écoute
L’Ennemi Écoute (translation)- The Enemy Listens*
*I’d just like to mention that I really enjoy the fact that Fleming plays with so many French titles in this novel, giving the book a real sense of place and a certain vivacity and cultural flavor. The books have very pulpy origins, but he always found a way to make them more than the genre-bound fiction they were labeled as. In short, he gave a bit of sophistication to an underappreciated market of fiction novels.
With the state of play underlined and Bond’s role in the operation detailed, Fleming places us back into the “current” timeline that the story opened on. It’s clear that Fleming sectioned off chapters by isolating certain key moments in his novels, and with the translated title of this particular one being “The Enemy Listens,” the man does just that. The entire chapter is restricted to Bond’s hotel room where the main conceit and driving force of the information we get is through a discussion with Mathis as a radio plays. Once this little slice of stimuli ends, a new chapter with a new isolated moment begins.
This has always been a favorite chapter of mine, and a perfect sort of recreation of what I could see real spies having to do in the field. I love the very cartoonish nature of Mathis playing a role to get to Bond’s room, and how the men use loud radio programs to stop the agents above them from listening in on them as they plan their counter-attack and discuss the mission at hand once they are given a short window of time to debate things. It’s at times a very amusing chapter despite the very real dangers to Bond and his blown cover, simply because Mathis gets so much unrepentant joy from screwing with the Muntz couple above.
Throughout the chapter Fleming sprinkles more details about James Bond and his habits, operational protocols and his views on women in a broader scale. Since arriving on location two days earlier we learn that Bond has been trying to increase his cash load by a few million to reach the total twenty-five million that Le Chiffre is playing with. We can tell that Bond is quite the careful and clear-headed player, because he only plays roulette when he knows the odds are even to favor a win or loss equally, and if he fails to make profit on a game of chemi-de-fer he gives up beyond a second loss. He knows his mission and is there to conserve cash, carefully increasing his hold only when the odds are more predictable than dubious. Like a predator, we also know that he has taken to mapping out the casino’s lay of the land in his head, knowledge that could aid him if things went awry, and has burnished his card playing faculties while scoping out those of Le Chiffre to prepare for their ultimate face-off. Once again his twelve-steps-ahead thinking materializes.
Fleming later details Bond’s morning habits for us, his preferred breakfast meal and smoking habits, again cementing the spy as a ritual driven man who forms his life around a stream of activities made second nature through practice and implementation. By giving his life structure, Bond is always tuning his mind towards thinking and reacting to what is around him, and by creating patterns in his own life he is able to see patterns that have shifted or gone out of practice in those of others.
The fun and frivolity of the chapter comes to an end once Mathis mentions Bond’s contact and “Number Two” on the mission, none other than a woman. It’s a very interesting reveal to his character that Bond has such a lack of warmth to the news, and is only more conflicted and concerned about the mission’s success after discovering the truth. The instant that Mathis describes this woman as beautiful, Fleming inserts a reaction mid-sentence to tell us that Bond is frowning in reaction to hearing it. Perhaps he is concerned about getting distracted by the dame and her pleasing features-or vice versa-or maybe he doesn’t like the idea of a nice girl getting wrapped up in what he sees as man’s business. Bond’s comments about the mission not being a picnic could underscore this last point, about how he viewed women not befitting his line of work.
Bond’s mention that, “Women were for reaction,” and how “they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around,” makes it plain to see that the spy hasn’t run into many of the opposite sex who truly impressed him. As a man of Fleming’s generation and adoptive of some of the author’s own character traits, the dark and dangerous world of spies wasn’t meant for women and he viewed their presence in it as an unwelcomed problem or worse, a possible casualty.
This view of women could be less of an original personality trait girted by Fleming to his creation, and far more a commonality that both men shared inherently. It’s possible that the death of Fleming’s one-time love Muriel Wright could’ve formed his hardline impression of women involved in conflict that Bond also mirrors in this particular chapter. While it is said that Fleming ran from woman to woman while with Wright, it was her death during an air raid in World War II that really shook the man up and likely gave him the cold perspective he later passed on to his spy character. Following Wright’s death Fleming was called in to identify the body as hers, and by doing so he directly faced the impact that war can have on innocent women without a stake in the fight and took it all to heart.
Fleming’s possible view of women as individuals to be cherished and protected instead of involved in the destruction and horror of war could’ve fed into why Bond has such a similar distaste for the role of women in his own world of spies. Perhaps he had seen many a woman fall by the wayside on operations in the past, women who tried to compensate for a gender that was called unfitting for the job, and this misguidedness led them to death or torture at the hands of the enemy. Because he doesn’t view women as welcome, it seems that Bond labels them as a liability on all fronts and unneeded distractions to the mission at hand. As he says, women were those who “one had to look out for…and take care of them.”
Ultimately, this impression of women that Bond represents seems to come more from a place of concern than true condescension or hatred toward their gender. He follows the pre and post-war mantra that women should be sheltered at home and men are the ones that face the horrors and fatalistic consequences of war, because they are expendable. In short, men were programmed for the work that Bond does, whereas women were intended for purposes beyond sacrifice and as pawns on a chessboard.
Fleming’s later use of women in the novels, materialized as birds with broken wings or at the heel of powers beyond their ability to challenge, including Honey Rider, Tatiana Romanova, Jill and Tilly Masterton and Tracy di Vicenzo back up this impression that the man and his hero may’ve held for women. I don’t think it’s any accident that Fleming emphasized the very pure and natural images of these beautiful women and the very sacred nature of their sensuality in these books. Descriptions of a Venus-like Honey stripped bare in nature and the sight of a delicate Tracy walking in a gorgeous haze to be claimed by the sea really serves to paint a contrast of what happens when Bond’s world intersects with those of these women.
In each story these figures of beauty and-often-innocence stick out as not belonging, because we worry for their safety the way Bond inherently seems to. Their deaths aren’t expected casualties as they would be for males, but more unfortunate and tragic outcomes that shouldn’t come to pass. Perhaps it’s the maternal sort of instincts in women that make us instantly want to run to their aid, and the shock of their beauty in ugly scenarios that makes those like Bond wish they didn’t have to face the dastardly designs and evil deeds that men propagate.
Beyond these added details about Bond’s character, this chapter also has two instances of very black humor, but humor nonetheless that really made me grin. In the first example Mathis has just confessed to Bond that Le Chiffre’s men are meeting with a bunch of enemies who speak Bulgarian, making it likely that Russians are using them as their preferred killing machines once again. This not only foreshadows the use of Bulgars in From Russia, With Love down the line, but also helps to create the specter of fear for Bond as a hit team could be breathing down his neck. Mathis describes the Bulgars unfavorably as “stupid, but obedient,” and says that the Russians “use them for simple killings or as fall-guys for more complicated ones.” This remark then makes Bond dryly wonder whether the hit on him would be classified by SMERSH as a simple or complicated kill, giving us a window into the sardonic humor his cold world has crafted inside of him.
The second and final instance of black humor occurs at the very last paragraph of the chapter, where Bond lets out his anger at how his mission has warped itself into a problem by uttering the word, “bitch.” He seems to say the curse quietly the first time because, with the gained knowledge that he’s being listened in on, he repeats it all the louder a second time so that his enemies can make note of his mood. I really like this reaction Bond has, a sort of, “who gives a damn,” response that shows how little he believes in the success of the operation and the low value he stakes in his cover. This moment really changes everything before the mission even begins or Bond touches a single card, because we already know that much has been compromised and that the facades are now essentially useless for the spy and his team. He’s already dangling over the flames while being surrounded by killers everywhere, and by throwing himself into it he risks being burned alive.
Chapter 5- The Girl From Headquarters
Fleming begins the chapter by dipping into the sort of journalistic travelogue writing he was invested in before turning to fiction, offering us details about the area that Bond is surrounded by. At times these moments of the text are hit and miss for me, as it’s all about how a writer delivers exposition. I think Fleming often goes on far more than he needs to about many details, in the way a Thomas Hardy or Herman Melville did, but he keeps it all to just under two pages and we move along without too much momentum lost.
Just as previous chapters captured the isolated moments of Bond walking out of the casino, M reading a dossier on Le Chiffre, Bond meeting with M and Bond and Mathis discussing their blown covers inside the hotel room, chapter 5 continues off of this pattern by detailing to us the hyped up moment that Bond and Vesper Lynd meet inside the Hermitage bar.
While Bond waits for his company to arrive we overhear a quick dialogue being exchanged by a French couple who discuss dry martinis down to the ingredients they prefer in them, and it makes me wonder if Bond took note of the recipe, found it to his liking, and went on to order a similar type of drink later on during the card game.
Our first look at Vesper is in the arms of Mathis as they approach the bar from outside, locked in an embrace that lacked intimacy from Bond’s perspective. Right off the bat we can sense the impact this woman has on the spy, and I personally picture something of a Jane Russell type dame with a face that can wear expressions of both sultriness and concern in rotation and like second skins. Bond notes how the woman lacks affectation of movement and is very restrained, giving her a very robotic feeling. Perhaps Fleming provided the character with this tough shell and imperceptible sort of personality to have it contrast later on with the emotional wreck she gradually crumbles into being beside Bond. At the start, however, it’s a hell of a performance and you’d never expect this girl to be compromised.
It’s interesting how Bond seems to view Vesper’s presence as both a challenge and bit of intrigue. He views her disinterest in him as an opportunity to prove her wrong, and he dreams openly of acting on his attraction to her after the mission is over, much like the rule that Bond has in the film. It’s interesting how Fleming builds up the character of Vesper in the exterior, making the prominent colors of her features and her ensembles dark black. This color palette gives her a femme fatale persona, a bit of a red flag, but also provides a sense of mystery. This mystery is further underscored by the way that she refuses to really speak or react to anything while Mathis is around, but opens up when she and Bond are alone. This could be down to her own mission and the distance she could be ordered to narrow between herself and Bond. Because of this, she focuses all of her energies on him and nobody else, since he is the main target of SMERSH.
I find it interesting that, when Bond invites Vesper to dinner he observes that the girl, “smiled with the first hint of conspiracy she had shown.” I don’t really know what Fleming meant by this. Was Vesper sending off red flags to Bond, who briefly perceived something amiss with her, or was it Vesper that seemed to be alerted to some greater danger?
Following the admission from Bond that he may’ve been wrong about the girl, the chapter closes with the first major bit of action in the novel as an explosion from outside the bar rattles our characters and sends Mathis on hot pursuit. It’s the first chapter that ends with an actual cliffhanger punctuated by a dire happening, whereas the last paragraphs of the other chapters transitioned into a new scene that continued to build up the framework of the story. Now the action has begun and we don’t stop from here on in.
Chapter 6- Two Men in Straw Hats
This chapter is very interesting not only for its stirring imagery, but by how it backtracks us and plays out events from Bond’s perspective. By showing us Bond departing from Mathis and Vesper at the end of the last chapter before a bomb rang out, Fleming instantly makes you wonder about where the spy is at and what, if any, injuries he has undergone. This chapter then goes about capturing the isolated moment of showing us the blast from Bond’s point of view, from the time he leaves the Hermitage bar to the instant the explosion rattles him.
I like that Fleming begins the chapter by having Bond encounter seemingly regular people out in public all before making the spy paranoid that he is being ambushed. In seconds, the spy attempts to predict the weapons the men would have on them and prepares to race for cover as they fire on him. While Bond’s suspicious impressions of the concierge and lift in chapter one may’ve just been nerves, here the payoff and surprise is that he is completely correct to fear for his life. His brush with death as the blast goes up, rescued by the shelter of a tree trunk, gives credence to his tendency to see dangers in the people around him. If he wasn’t always on guard, he would’ve been dead long ago.
I find it interesting that the items these enemies are wearing, straw hats with black ribbons, is exactly the head wear that Vesper has with her as she meets with Bond. I don’t know if Fleming intended for the image of straw hats with black ribbons to be signifiers of cruel intent in the story, but I find it odd that he would make mention of them just a few pages apart. I’m wary of the use of black in most pieces of art anyway, as it seldom means anything good from a symbolic perspective.
The blast itself is very jarring and shocking in content, as Fleming holds no details back. I’m sure that for some readers in his day and even now it’s a sequence that is hard to get through. As much as I dream of seeing a faithful 60s adaption of the novel with Sean Connery, I don’t believe even the 2006 version of the film could’ve presented this moment as directly and uncensored as Fleming does here, sparing no adjectives to paint the picture of the horrors Bond has survived.
Later on a recuperating Bond gets a call from Vesper and they share a brief conversation where she seemingly just wanted to hear his voice and know he was okay. This could be a sign of guilt she feels for putting him in danger, the growing concern of a normal woman turned into a double-crosser, or maybe something else. I like the image of Bond eating his lunch that closes out the chapter, how he savers every bite and promises to give the waiter one helluva tip. This is a man in a dangerous business celebrating being alive, and sparing no expense in doing so.
Sorry, but your theories don't hold any water. We can be absolutely sure that Fleming meant what he wrote because he doesn't even bother to mention her in the next novel where Bond is going against Smersh and would have any reason to relate to what has happened the novel before and how it fired up as his hate. That he had a change of heart a decade later ( when he already felt the heavy hand of the reaper on his shoulder ) doesn't matter at all.
As already stated, why would Bond rip open a fresh wound come Live and Let Die? He still felt the sting of Vesper and at that time was repressing everything he felt, to everyone, so he wouldn't mention her or make note of her. I don't think he'd want to spill his guts to M and say, "You know that dame that lied to us all and screwed up our last operation? I loved her." He had to appear cold and indifferent to her, like she hadn't moved his heart an inch to preserve both his own dignity and the professionalism that M expects of him. He'd be laughed out of the service if he was honest about all that went down between he and Vesper, and how she was able to fool him upside down and left to right, especially when the job literally rested on his shoulders alone. It was the smarter move for himself to pretend she didn't exist when speaking with others, and choosing not to bring it up because it was one of his biggest failures as an agent and as a man. When you face trauma you commonly don't shout about the details on the street corner to all who are near; you keep it wrapped inside where it inevitably festers until you're ready to properly deal with it.
That's why I see the line, "The bitch is dead" as Bond attempting to sell a story to himself, and create a villain in Vesper that he can then rage at and move on from forever. Admitting how he feels would be admitting weakness, and he obviously doesn't want to do that. We don't know how he finally came to forgive her, but we know that he does, showing his change of heart and the fact that his words at the time were motivated by his own embarrassment at being duped rather than what he truly felt. Once he was able to gain clarity about her again and see that she was just a victim like he was, similar to the film, I think that's when it clicked for Bond that she was not his enemy.
It's all down to perspective so this doesn't have to be a big argument about who is right. I just see a difference between a writer and the characters he writes, where the former's reliability has nothing to do with it and the latter's reliability can be put into question because characters in fiction often do and say things they don't mean as designed by said writer. From my point of view, Fleming was consciously showing Bond in denial following Vesper's betrayal, avoiding certain truths that would've made him feel sympathy for her so that he could instead forget her and the pain she caused by sloppily marking her as a villain to him and the service.
Bond is clearly a sex fiend, with his first thought about Vesper running to the same carnal passions, but the fact that he wants to immediately jump on the next girl only continues to support his attempts to forget the last girl and move on. In a sense, he could screwing to avoid the thought of the last broad when the distraction is presented.
I'm a little rougher on Live & Let Die when it comes to Solitaire, so I'll have to see how I feel when I reread it once again and study Bond's reactions to her.
I don't think this is accurate; if anything, Fleming was an inside biographer, with a God's Eye view of his creations. The narration in the Bond books is omniscient and it is never incorrect or misleading. There are no examples to prove otherwise. That narration is our only way into Bond's head.
But Bond isn't telling himself any lies. Everything he feels is genuine. A few years down the line he softens toward Vesper's memory, but not now.
I think the power of the novel's last line--which has the force of a slap to the reader's face--is greatly reduced if Bond doesn't truly feel that way. To reiterate, "bitch" is what Bond called Vesper before he came to love her. His reuse of that word is Fleming's way of letting us know that he doesn't love her anymore, and that she is truly nothing but a spy to him. The Bond who had theorized about the nature of evil and contemplated resigning from the service was Bond in love. He dies and is replaced by the cold, harsh man from the beginning of the novel, who now has new purpose to his existence--smashing Smersh.
Perhaps, but then why does he not even think of her? Not until Goldfinger does he do so.
But Vesper is a villain: As we are told, "Now he could only think of her treachery to the Service and to her country, and of the damage it had done. His professional mind was completely absorbed with the consequences — the covers which must have been blown over the years, the codes which the enemy must have broken, the secrets which must have leaked from the centre of the very section devoted to penetrating the Soviet Union. It was ghastly. God knew how the mess would be cleared up." [Italics added.]
There is no reason to doubt any of this or doubt that Vesper did real damage. Bond's "professional mind" is rightly occupied with it. And unlike the film, Vesper does not mitigate that damage by giving Bond vital information to catch villains with.
She was going to jail for life for espionage.
Movie Vesper, though was quite salvagable. M even showed a soft spot. She was more a one-off victim of Quantum.
For me , Bond's harsh attitude towards Vesper is very understandable in the book. It's what you'd expect. The bitch is dead line rings true.
In the movie, I find the line rings hollow. It seems like too much. She wasn't as far gone. M might have taken her under her wing, and helped her get back a life.
I doubt if the book hadn't existed, if the screenwriters would have even considered such a line, but the book did exist, so they tossed it in as an homage.
In the book, Bond is truly angry at Vesper. There is nothing salvagable here.
In the movie, the scenario IMO is quite salvagable.
Bond is angry, but I think his anger should be more directed at her choosing to suicide, when there was still hope for redemption.
In the book though, it was game over. She was going down for high treason. No hope for her.
Fleming's characterization of the tragedy that was Vesper had massive impact. It was devestating on so many levels. Powerful writing.
By comparison, I found the movie scenario, again by comparison, somewhat meh. Not awful, but not as impactful
It would be great to get a real faithful, mini-movie, rendition of CR, with the Vesper Bond thing designed for maximum Fleming impact.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see another motion-picture adaptation anytime soon, but the Daily Express comic strip of Casino Royale was extremely faithful to the novel, with just two major omissions--the "nature of evil" dialogue and the word "bitch" (Bond merely says "She's dead now!"). Given the medium and date, both omissions are understandable, and the strip is still highly recommended. I'd also add that the only faithful visual adaptations in existence of LALD, MR, DAF, YOLT, and TMWTGG all happen to be the Daily Express versions.
I've heard a modern comic adaptation of CR was under consideration, but don't know anything more about the project, or whether it's still underway.
Ben Hecht's unfilmed script for Casino Royale also preserved much of the original, though with some intriguing changes--in the end Bond walks into Vesper's hotel room to find her dying but still conscious. As her life ebbs away, she tells Bond she is a traitor, begs his forgiveness, and with her last ounce of strength hands him a letter giving the full details of her treachery. It's a great pity that Charles Feldman, the producer, chose to throw out Hecht's script and make his braindead parody version instead.
Great book. A brutal tragic love tale.
Casino Royale (1953)
Scrambled eggs count: 1
Onward to Live and Let Die tomorrow!
And Fleming of course inserts a monster-size excerpt from The Traveller's Tree into LALD. I don't know of any other novel which quotes a travel book at such length. Extremely unusual. But Fermor, who was a very good friend of Ann Fleming, must have been terrifically pleased.
Start now, we're only on Book 2!
Rouge et Noir (translation)- Red And Black
It’s in this chapter that the overall theme of this novel, gambling, really kicks into high gear. We once again find Bond at the tables gaining some profits to aid him in the coming baccarat game, running through some rounds of roulette with great enthusiasm. While I have never gambled a day in my life and all his talk of facts and figures, odds and tricks are well over my head, I do enjoy hearing Bond’s philosophies on luck. In between these spouts of gambling Fleming again teases the coming betrayal of Vesper as Bond contends that one day “he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.” I don’t think he ever expected for both pitfalls to sink him one after the other, however.
Bond’s gambling activities grow into a transitional way to introduce us to Felix Leiter, who joins in on the action at the roulette wheel and takes an interest in the man’s luck. It’s at this time that Bond addresses himself in a way that wouldn’t become famous until another nine years as Fleming plants seeds that will be sowed at another time and place.
While Bond and the American chat we get to see a glimpse of the more snobbish side of the secret agent as he shows off while ordering a martini and even goes so far as to test and challenge the barman. I quite like the details we get of Felix during this time, including his past service with the marines and NATO. While the man has a very lax demeanor, he seems to have the history to offer some utility to Bond should the need arise. I also find it amusing that Bond chooses not to judge Felix for having tight lips about his colleagues and problems outside the CIA’s jurisdiction, as he too seems like a man who puts his own service first and everything else second.
The chapter closes with Bond and Felix walking from the casino to their rooms at the hotel just before the night of gambling is to begin. As they make their way across they spot cleaning crews trying to wipe away the memory of the day’s bombing with immense tenacity and dedication. It’s amazing that they could work that fast, but I’m sure that the operators of the businesses and casino are powerful enough to send their best men in to erase the mess and rebuild the blocks of street to make it appear to possible gamblers that there are no dangers awaiting them. Bond knows this cover-up act well from Monte Carlo, and the lengths people will go to in order to ensure that their pockets will keep on getting filled by misguided gamblers.
In a last bit of dialogue Bond approaches the hotel concierge, unsure of his allegiances, and plants the idea that he is still feeling the brunt of the blast from earlier in the day. The fact that the man knows that Bond was a victim of the explosion is suspicious, and the spy uses the moment to strategically make Le Chiffre feel more confident in his ability to defeat him later on. The mind games of spy craft begin as Bond starts his bluffing before ever reaching the card tables.
Chapter 8- Pink Lights and Champagne
This chapter does double-duty of brining Bond and Vesper into another rendezvous, while also building up Bond’s particular traditions and rituals as a man and spy. We get to experience him putting on his “armor” for battle at the tables down to his ritual with his gun, how he wears his holster, what elements of dress he prefers to wear on such nights and of course, what his now-famous face looks like with the comma of hair hanging on the right side and the scar snaking down his cheek on the same side.
During the dinner Bond and Vesper share we are once again treated to even more of his snobby demeanor while ordering food, during which he notes to himself that he often comes off as very pretentious about it. Fleming is smart to explain this side of Bond and his pickiness with drinks and foods as being just another extension of his detail oriented style of operation, a style that has long kept him amongst the living. The spy life has bled into his personal habits and recreations, such that they are inseparable now.
I like that Bond actually listens to the advice of the waiters at dinner when they suggest a superior wine to him, showing that he is always open to trying new things, or at the very least that he is able to recognize an authority on drinks even greater than his own. I think this is what makes Bond such a man of the world, where he is able to let the cultures and sacred practices of the places he visits wash over him instead of holding them back with a questioning gaze.
Chapter 9- The Game is Baccarat
While this novel bears clear signs that it is the first major work of a fiction author, it is easy to see that Fleming had the makings of a talent in him even at debut. This chapter in particular is a good example of what a skilled writer with a feeling for convention and storytelling can do with just eight pages. In it Fleming moves the plot along by brining to the forefront past events, teases dangers to come, continues to build Bond and Vesper’s dynamic, tells us more in conversation about how Bond views his job and how others view him, and sets us up for the major card game that will take up the next chapters.
It is fitting that the title of the chapter is called “The Game is Baccarat,” because Fleming is almost playing the role of mentor in it and, through Bond’s talk with Vesper, teaches any readers unfamiliar with the game how it is played and the stakes that stand in the way of the spy and Le Chiffre. Despite not being a gambling man in the least, I am familiar with the game of blackjack that is not far removed from the odds and rules of baccarat, so I could follow Bond’s directions quite easily. That being said, it’s quite smart of Fleming to invite his readers to engage in the story by outlining the rules for them.
Because the game of baccarat is such a giant part of the novel and really is the major aspect of Bond’s mission in it, Fleming wanted his readers to be invested in the game as it built to crescendo, which could only be possible if the rules were explained beforehand to those ignorant of them. He couldn’t be sure that everyone who picked up his book would know the game and had hit their local card tables to play a few hands of it themselves, so he smartly did the work to make sure that past chapter nine nobody would have any questions about what baccarat was or how it was played. This writing choice shows a very keen sense of audience and underscores the duty to entertain that Fleming felt for his readers. Never wanting to leave them confused or behind on the excitement being presented, he extended a hand and led them to the knowledge necessary to experience the plot to its fullest.
My favorite sections of the chapter, like all the chapters really, are those that feed us information about Bond through his dialogues or in his subtle reactions to things. As Vesper recounts the sabotaged deaths of the bombers to Bond we see him responding with respect for the villains who were able to trick the stooges. This aspect of his personality, willing to call out a move well made like a chess master would to their partner across the board, recalls to me how Sean Connery’s Bond in particular often congratulated his own enemies on their gained advantages. Being quite the strategist himself, it’s clear that Bond can value and appreciate that sort of acumen in anyone, even his enemies.
One of my favorite bits of dialogue from any I’ve read of the novels comes shortly after the above, when Vesper breathlessly calls Bond a hero, almost romanticizing him and his actions as a Double-O, a group that seem to be held on a pedestal at her station. I love how nastily Bond reacts to hearing this, and how he downplays the compliment by pointing out the very crude and dehumanizing acts he had to complete to earn his status. It’s here that we get our first prominent hints that he’s a man that kills but does not get any thrill from it, and that he views his enemies less as bad men and more as pawns like himself playing the same old game. You almost imagine that he internally repeats the words, “It’s nothing personal, just business,” before each kill he makes in the field, because that’s exactly what it is. I think it’s this trait of his that takes Bond from being a hard man to one worth supporting. He has a compassion and sense of principle that separates him from those he often faces, and I think it’s this crucial part of him and the humanity he emphasizes in himself through keen self-awareness that makes him so fascinating.
As the chapter comes to a close we cut to Vesper’s perspective, who describes Bond’s mood as one approaching “abstract passion” as he runs through the rules of baccarat. I like this small little detail because of how it juxtaposes itself against the information we learn about Bond above. He really dislikes the lethal parts of his job, an always-present component, but there are other areas of the work that really get him off and engage a heightened part of himself. It’s clear to see that, behind the part of him that wants to stop Le Chiffre for the good of the deed, there lies another part of himself that really gets a kick out of meeting a challenging player on equal terms and engaging in a fair fight. He craves a certain rivalry, a chance to show what he’s got to those he views as worthy.
We can tell that this part of Bond exists, because when Vesper seemed indifferent to him during their first meeting something inside Bond clicked and he spent all his energy charming her to gain what he felt he’d not even gotten a chance to lose yet. Freud would maybe refer to this habit of his as a sort of syndrome common in orphans. Having grown into manhood from an early age without the constant reassurance of his worth or potence by authority figures, Bond seeks to prove himself with the flair and death wish of an adrenaline junkie.
Lastly, I find it very interesting that Fleming takes just a paragraph to drop us from the story and ongoing dialogue over dinner into Vesper’s mind where we share her perspective on what is going on with Bond. In fiction writing it’s seen as a big taboo to jump perspectives as Fleming does here, but those folks are snobs and I can’t be bothered with them. This brief glimpse into Vesper’s thoughts tell us much about how she is reacting to Bond’s challenge that he was a hero Double-O. She and Bond seem to share a challenge-prone personality, because the woman took the reports of Bond’s coldness via her boss as a chance to prove that the spy could be charmed. Somewhere along the line the fun of playing with Bond’s passion turned more serious to her and Vesper was really enjoying being around him. When his hyper-focused workaholic self came out, however, along with all his other principles about his dark job, she saw the man that she was warned about. Bond’s coldness seems to startle her, like she didn’t believe that the man she’d met with Mathis that first time could be the same one who her superiors had built ghost stories around.
In a way this reaction in Vesper goes a long way towards proving Bond’s initial concerns about her in his hotel room, where he uttered, “bitch” in fury. She was very much treating him like a fun pursuit and the object of a game to be played, completely blocking out the very real dangers open to his life during the mission and the kind of hard man he would have to be to fill the position he does. In short, the woman was telling herself fairy tales and on this count, Bond was right to doubt the presence of a woman in his affairs.
Chapter 10- The High Table
The structure of this novel is one of the most interesting things about it for me. The mission is all about the big game between Bond and Le Chiffre, yet it comes and is wrapped up before page 100 of a story that is, at that point, far from over. Fleming definitely makes some unexpected moves as a storyteller, and throws things at Bond-and the reader-even after the section of the book that you’d think would be the climax peaking moment arriving just short of the big resolution. Yet he lingers and makes sure that Bond’s mission doesn’t end with a victory in a single card game, showing how complications can be created from well-intended plans.
The little detail we get from Vesper’s perspective at the start of the chapter, of a Bond who is calm while flaring his nostrils, immediately made me think of how Sean would do the same thing in his Bond films, especially in Goldfinger. I guess it’s no secret why I’ve consciously been picturing Sean as Bond while reading, and haven’t been able to stop.
In the brief little meeting between Felix and Bond, we again learn about the kinds of principles our spy has. He’s not the type to lean back and screw around at gambling to blow off some steam as he burns his cash by the pile. He’s got no lucky numbers, doesn’t count on superstition to give him grace, and he takes the process of squaring up opponents and gaining advantage very seriously. Felix knows he’s not there to win, it’s all riding on Bond, so he lays back and indulges himself with some light entertainment. For 007, however, the game is an earnest one and would be even if much wasn’t riding on it and he was back home playing a quiet round at Blades. When Felix says, “He’s a very serious gambler, Miss Lynd,,,And I guess he has to be,” we know exactly what he means by it.
The rest of the chapter does a brilliant job at showing just what a match Bond and Le Chiffre are for each other, and all the due diligence the former performs to make sure he has the best chances to come out a winner. Bond maps the table and squares up the players one by one, predicting their slip-ups or gains in the coming hours by their demeanors and personal backgrounds, giving him the clarity of who to back if the banker becomes too wealthy and which are just dead weights burning money. The extra detail Fleming throws in, of Bond pushing a paper at the chief of the game to get all the names of the players memorized, further underscores how in this he is until the end. It’s easy to see why Bond was picked for this mission, and Fleming never makes you question his credibility as a player.
As the big Greek plays the first hands with Le Chiffre, Fleming is there to assist us in following the action, like a play-by-play without all the annoying commentary. He has a brilliant way of explaining things that invites you to get absorbed in the action. Somehow cards being pushed around and flipped on a table becomes just as interesting as a sequence of action, if not more so.
I like the small detail we get at the end of the chapter, where Fleming explains that the banker who is borrowing the table from the casino can pay their percentage for its use in a pre-paid lump sum or during the match in amounts that are subtracted from their winnings as play develops. We learn that Le Chiffre has chosen to pay the house with parts of his bank during the game, telling us that he didn’t want to risk using any of the twenty-five million francs he had as he arrived in town. It was imperative that he conserved money and didn’t lose more than he already had, and by agreeing to pay out during the game he is giving himself room to constantly win money by playing the odds of the table and destroying opponents, as he does with the Greek in the chapter. This fact also adds a bit of drama to the proceedings as well, because for all the money Le Chiffre gains, both he and Bond know that parts of his bank will constantly have to be sectioned off by the house. Even as Le Chiffre gains, he takes losses, and it’s easy to imagine him sweating it at times with his head on the line.
Chapter 11- Moment of Truth
The real magic of this chapter is in how Fleming weaves the gambling stakes and a run through of each hand with the tense and protracted gazes Bond and Le Chiffre share. If ever two men were sizing each other up, it is here. I love the way he opens the chapter, doing one of my favorite things writers do with villains by comparing Le Chiffre to a beast, in this case a “black-fleeced Minotaur.” These kinds of metaphors really help to create a memorable villain while making it easy to picture them in your head. There are few images more unsettling than Le Chiffre shooting his nostrils with his inhaler’s drug as he glues his eyes on Bond and takes in a loud and obscene whiff of air like it’s his last sniff of it. I picture Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre in the novel, with those same dead eyes. Perfect casting for the original 50s production of the piece, I say.
There are some interesting character details to be had in the chapter that show us that Bond is very much in it on his own, and has a different view of cards than most. After failing to meet a bet and losing out on a big pot, Mrs. Du Pont at his side says, “You don’t think I do this for pleasure.” While I’d say the majority of gamblers play to win money, I think for Bond the feeling of challenge and the taste of ultimate victory are just as important to him. In this way he might be viewed as a little off his rocker by those like the Du Ponts who are only in the game for the profit, and not as much for the feeling of it as Bond is.
In between all the high stakes bets and losses of the card game, Fleming creates language that just jumps off the page. Sometimes I pause and grin widely at the way he words things, or describes characters. Like how he details the tall and fidgety guard of Le Chiffre through Bond’s eyes: “Bond guessed that he would kill without interest or concern for what he killed and that he would prefer strangling.” We follow the spy along with his belief in the man’s danger before he suddenly drops the random intimation that the man gives off the vibes of a strangler. It’s such an odd detail that leaves me curious as to how Bond perceived it, but one that gives immense flavor, imagination and edge to the text. Just a paragraph later Fleming repeats the exercise by detailing the hairy guard of Le Chiffre with the cane, who Bond thinks would be “an obscene object” if seen naked. The image says it all, and Bond’s colorful language always keeps you engaged.
As a writer, Fleming plays with structure here, opening the chapter with a gigantic win by Bond that sets a comfortable and promising mood, only to end it with the cliffhanger of his big clean-out at the hands of Le Chiffre. While I think the film adaptation sells Bond’s loss more impactfully-helped by his confidence in his ability and the use of a tell for Le Chiffre that adds some conspiracy to it-ultimately Fleming successfully leaves both you and Bond with a feeling of, “What now?” There’s an unpredictability to the coming sequences that is exciting, and the dubious title of the next chapter, “The Deadly Tube” only keeps you guessing.
Chapter 12- The Deadly Tube
Fresh off his big loss, Fleming lets us know Bond’s reactions in great detail as his defeat sinks in. We learn of his embarrassment and fury, of the shame he wants to escape in the false sympathy expressed by Vesper, Mathis, Felix and later, M. The implied effect his failure will have on his reputation, knowing how big the mission was and how he’d had it riding on his shoulders alone. I love that through all his losses Vesper is at the sidelines smiling encouragingly at him, but neither we nor Bond ever seem sure if she’s doing this as a supportive partner or because she’s too ignorant about the game to tell when Bond isn’t doing well. Considering how much she blanked out during dinner as Bond explained the game to her, I’m leaning on the latter quite heavily.
Bond’s surprise rescue via the CIA money is rousing, but the moment that makes the chapter memorable is the agent’s second brush with death, this time through the barrel of a gun. The image of Bond sat in a chair with a disguised weapon pressing into his spine is chilling, and you feel the heat of the moment. It reminds me very much of the scene in Thunderball where Bond has to escape Fiona and her men by spilling into a crowded dance club. The loud and harsh noises of the music and dancers mask Bond’s plight, where a bullet could hit him and the sound would register as just a random bit of percussion. You feel that same sense of fear in this moment of the novel, where you know that the sound of the bullet entering Bond’s spine will be quieted by the furor surrounding the big bet he has promised to take on. In this way, Bond was damned no matter what he did. If he dropped out Le Chiffre would have a path to victory, and if he chose to pursue the man the crowd’s exaltations in response to him would deliver the gunman behind him the perfect cover for an assassination.
This deadly scenario feels like something that could actually happen in the Cold War era between spies, and this grounds Bond’s tough spot in a lot of reality. The way Fleming juxtaposes the Corsican gunman’s countdown with Bond’s hyper-active observations as the seconds tick by gives the scene a feeling of despair that is purposefully prolonged to sap all its tension out.
When Bond finds a way to bounce out of the crosshairs we exhale with the same relief that he does, too aware at what was at stake. We get a bit of dark comedy at the end of the chapter as Bond feigns exhaustion as the cause of his spill, enticing the other gamblers at the table to admit that they’re feeling the elements of the game too. Nobody but Bond, the gunmen and Le Chiffre know how close the former came to his end, and the game plays on.
Chapter 13- ‘A Whisper of Love, a Whisper of Hate’
In this chapter Fleming effectively pays off all the expectations that he set up in the first two chapters of the book, taking Bond and Le Chiffre’s game to its ultimate conclusion. I get a kick out of how he delivers Bond another pair of sucker cards just after he’d been saved via Felix’s cash, always keeping his character on the ropes and feeling the heat. It’s a great moment when the 9 of hearts is revealed and we-along with Bond-know what it spells while Le Chiffre is faced with the choice of pushing for more cards or staying and hedging his bets. In this moment Fleming plays with a nice bit of symbolism, referring to the card of nine Bond holds as a “whisper of love, a whisper of hate.” Depending on the cards a gambler has a nine could be the sweetest luck imaginable (as in Bond’s case with his two dead cards), but if the pair of cards you had amounted to the value of one to five, you would be placed in a very poor position. I think this case is what Bond means when he says that he plays by odds instead of putting a strange faith in the cards. No trust in the luck of a special number will make the decision any easier when you must choose to stay or proceed from a mysterious card that could equally spell your doom or your favor.
It’s a unique thrill to watch Bond destroy Le Chiffre as his bank crumbles by the heap and the game races to a close. I love how Bond mentions that, if the game he was playing happened to be a friendly one, he’d have shown his two queens and ended the game quickly for his opponent. Here, however, he’s playing with a man who wanted to kill him without a second thought and you can bet your ass that the spy is going to make the man feel the defeat. He’ll embarrass him, feeding off of the tension in the room to shatter him from the inside out as his true card value is revealed to be the value that is Le Chiffre’s worst nightmare. One thing the film really adapted perfectly was this game of cat and mouse that Bond and Le Chiffre play from across the table. You can hear a pin drop as they stare into each other’s souls, looking for any hint of weakness. It’s a testament to Bond’s bluffing ability that he is able to seem as stone cold with a pair of dead cards as he is a natural nine.
As the chapter comes to a close we find our hero in great spirits, reflecting “cheerfully” on how he had managed to survive certain death while on his mission. It’s once again clear that Bond is very challenge-minded and he gets a great pleasure from overcoming the schemes and evil designs of men who wish to silence him. Considering his line of work, it’s no wonder he toasts his survival so effusively.
When his thoughts carry to Vesper we get a sense of the sexual beast that Bond is as craves her intensely. He has beaten one challenge via Le Chiffre and counts on making good on the other presented to him by Vesper’s earlier indifference to him. I think this aspect of the character was best realized by Sean Connery’s Bond, who perfectly replicated the hunger for women that Fleming’s original has as a base conviction of his spirit.
As for the question of Bond's 00 licence and his visits to America, I've assumed that he got his two kills during the war as a man working his way up to new work as the conflict wound itself down. If he got his licence around 44 or 45, it'd put him as being a 00 for eight or nine years. What does Pearson's biography have to say about when Bond fully became a 00?
I get that stance on the Pearson book. I'll probably get a copy at some point, but like you my interest in the Bond books is strictly focused on Fleming. Everything else can wait, and I don't care if I ever read the continuation stuff. Everything else fails in comparison to the God's word.
Many thanks for pushing me to write more, by the way. Some of my proudest work has been the Bond reviews I've done, and I've gotten a real kick out of doing such in-depth pieces on them. It led me to finally kicking off a Bond blog, and getting some of it published on top of that, so it's been a great ride so far. Between doing the films and now the books, the next year will continue to be an all-time high for me when it comes to my obsession with this character and I'll easily surpass writing at least a thousand pages of writing on the spy in some form or another before the year is out. I'm shocked I've not been burnt out yet, really, as my marathons of things don't ever last this long until I have to cleanse my palette with something else. I guess it shows how much of a hold Bond can have on me.
GHOST OF THE VODOO PRIEST
Second Norwegian edition from the 60s
TO LIVE AND LET DIE
Neat! A Bond cover I haven't seen before! And a good one too, taken directly from the book.
I agree that Colonel Sun should be made an honorary member of the Bondathon.
Amis's role in TMWTGG was that of a copyeditor--he assembled a list of errors and gave some stylistic advice--but there's nothing to suggest he did any rewriting, especially since pages of Fleming's manuscript have turned up that are identical to the published book and contain corrections made in Fleming's handwriting.
Amis and Fleming certainly became friendly, though it might be stretch to call them friends. We know that Amis had dinner with the Flemings at least once (Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh, "Kingsley Amis came to dinner...I suspected he wrote of Ian to further his own sales, but it seemed a genuine admiration, he thinks Ian should write a straight novel." ) Additionally, Amis and Ian did met at least once to review the The James Bond Dossier. Fleming was pleased and contributed minor several corrections, along with a positive verdict: "Intelligent, perceptive, and of course to me highly entertaining. The whole jape is quite spiffing and heaven knows what a smart reviewer will do about the book."
I'm all for continuing with Colonel Sun. I actually had the same thought myself when we started. No reason why not to if there's interest. For that matter, I wouldn't mind going on to the first—probably—eight of Gardner's. That's where I'd check out, I think. I might be the only one left here at that point, but Draggers could probably be enticed I'm sure.
Please do!
One of my favorites. Fleming comfortably in his element. Sadism, escapism, and a first foray for Bond into the world of high adventure (on the back of a plot involving pirate's gold no less!).
1. The Red Carpet
Bond in America. Beautiful opening few paragraphs, demonstrating right off Fleming's talent for making the mundane—entry through an airport—sound exciting, even exotic. Truly Fleming's prose elevates these novels.
The opening paragraph is a capsule summary on the fun side of Bond's work. Following on from CR, things are going to get more adventurous, more escapist, and Fleming sets that up from paragraph one.
Love Bond's reply to the Communist money he's offered: "I'll try to spend it where it does most harm. I'm glad to have some working capital. It's certainly good to know it's been provided by the opposition."
As with CR, against all expectations, the villain of the story is introduced here in the first chapter, just a few pages in, with Mr. Big locking eyes with Bond through the rear window of his Cadillac, which is driven by—erm—"a fine-looking Negress in a black chauffeur's uniform" (easiest I guess just to accept the copious "Negro/Negress" references as part of antiquated 50s culture, though I believe the term was being frowned upon even at the time). Anyway, point is: Mr. Big shows up fast. It's a cut and dry story here. Hero, villain. Have at.
Wonderfully humorous exchange between Bond and Felix, the camaraderie firing right up.
Felix: "Arranging the flowers by your bed. Part of the famous CIA 'Service With A Smile.'"
Bond: "And what the hell are you doing in my bedroom anyway?"
It is, as Captain Dexter silently observes, "unprofessional ebullience." How very well put.
Interestingly, Bond seems to imply that he has the right to accept or refuses cases from M.
Martinis with Felix. Does it get any better? Damn, it's great just to see the two of them working together. Can't help but read Hedison into the part here, though Book Felix tends to be his own thing in my head.
Bond is not a fan of melted butterscotch. Really, Bond? You're just no fun, are you? Anyway, that sounds like a beautiful meal—especially the melted butterscotch.
2. Interview with M
As with the opening of CR, we flashback from the start of the mission to the briefing. Here we go from ice cream with melted butterscotch, Chesterfields, and cracking jokes with Felix amidst a setting of luxury to "the dreary half-light of a London fog." An abrupt shift, but Fleming begins where he knows he'll grab his reader.
Reference back to the previous mission: the cutting of "Spion" into Bond's hand. Bond is still raw, his hands clenched on the wheel at the thought of it. Revenge is on his mind, and in his discussion with M, the old man appears to note this is the case with his agent. Curious that he doesn't see that as something that might cloud Bond's judgment, but rather as a positive—Bond's incentive to get back at them. "This will particularly interest you, Bond..."
Moneypenny ever so briefly on display. Described as "desirable" from Bond's loose POV.
3. A Visiting Card
The villain backstory chapter.
Buonaparte Ignace Gallia. Always have loved that name.
Only known vice: women (like Le Chiffre).
His heart disease imparts the grayish tinge to his skin (defined by his sickliness, his imperfections, a common Fleming trait for villains).
Bond is raring for revenge against SMERSH, whom he dubs "the whisper of death." Mr. Big is "ready for the crushing," for "a giant, a Homeric slaying." Curious how eager Bond is to deal out death here. He really is described as quite revenge-driven here. When Bond looks out the window at the beautiful day and smiles, Fleming states that "no man, not even Mr. Big, would have liked the expression on his face." Kind of chilling actually.
"...three eggs, lightly scrambled...got it?"
Bond receives a close-trimmed military haircut, still long enough, however, to allow the "thick comma of black hair above his right eyebrow" to hang down some. The idea here being to make him appear more 'Merican. Good ol' Leiter advises you can get by in conversation with "Yeah," "Nope," and "Sure."
The lengthy excerpt from Fermor's voodoo writing serves twofold: 1) to lend authenticity to the voodoo aspect of the story, making the threat of Mr. Big more real, more visceral, darker, and more bizarre; and 2) to set up the ticking bomb in the parcel, transporting that threat from distant Haiti and harmless hardcover to the immediacy of Bond's hotel room. Mr. Big's threat—"THE BEATS OF YOUR OWN HEART ARE NUMBERED. I KNOW THAT NUMBER..."—plays directly into the voodoo angle.
Chapter 14- ‘La Vie en Rose?’
La Vie en Rose (translation)- Life in Pink/Life Through Rose-Tinted Glasses
After finishing off the big game between Bond and Le Chiffre, Fleming presents us with a chapter that shows us that all has not been what it seemed. The French title of this one, translating roughly to “Life Through Rose-Tinted Glasses,” is apt considering that Bond realizes during it the cost of being complacent and not suspecting some foul play to be afoot. His blindness for Vesper will soon get its payoff, and teach him a valuable lesson about the kind of work he does.
I really enjoy the juxtaposition of details as Bond and Vesper share a meal here. The music and atmosphere of the scene are befitting to romance and passionate lovers, and Bond even comments that he wouldn’t be surprised if the band’s song didn’t make men and women touch each other from underneath the table. All of this very warm and romantic imagery is contrasted with Bond and Vesper’s own dinner, which is played very quietly, bogged down with a sense of discomfort and awkwardness.
The observant man he is, Bond spots a lot of nervous ticks in Vesper, like her hands going white from the pressure she’s putting them in and her half-there consciousness to how she keeps kicking the ash out of a cigarette she wasn’t actively smoking. Bond tries to have a bit of banter with her and warm her up to the evening, but it’s all doomed to silence. It’s a snapshot of what would be a really bad first date, and after a night of victory it clearly saps Bond of his mojo. He was riding on cloud nine and now he’s headed for a nosedive of disappointment.
The red alert Bond gets about Vesper’s departure and the note from Mathis kicks off the rest of the book with a load of paranoia. Like a child searching for his mother, Bond darts around the casino looking for the girl, only to find her implicated as the victim of an apparent kidnapping. When he finds the forged letter, he knows the game is far from over. Which is frankly something he shouldn’t figured all along.
Chapter 15- Black Hare and Grey Hound
This chapter is one that really unearths a lot of things about Bond that make him an anti-hero figure, and, at times, a real bastard. This isn’t the devil may care hero of the films who goes after the girl until she’s safe and sound. Bond is pissed, royally so, and is perfectly willing to let the “”silly bitch” that he thinks Vesper is deal with the consequences of her actions. Denoting the time he was in and that period’s view of machismo, Bond espouses the cliché of “men doing men’s work,” laying the fault of Vesper’s inability to get through it on her gender.
It’s a passage laying Bond out most bare, where his anger at so much of his work being put to pasture or at least at risk unearths a lot of his inner thoughts, whether they are his genuine ones or those that anger is egging on and manipulating. The coldness Vesper was warned about is on full display as Bond tells himself that he’ll lie to everyone, from M to Mathis, to cover this error of hers up. If Le Chiffre contacts him with a threat on the girl’s life he’ll push it out of his mind and accept what has happened, and if the girl gets killed in the process, well, he’ll sleep just fine. It’s during these moments of the book that Fleming excels are realizing his goal with Bond, by not making him a very likable man and revealing his ugly parts. He’s a product of his job and time, and the writer never hides that fact, giving the character some of his own maxims in the process.
It’s interesting that Fleming swaps mid-chapter from Bond to Le Chiffre, giving us the perspective of the villains as they tear down the coastal roadways outside the casino and hotel. The little detail about Le Chiffre being an expert driver is called back to here as he takes the wheel in the chase. I like this, as major villains in the films usually do very little and let their pawns deal with their problems. One thing that makes Le Chiffre a greater departure from these kinds of threats is that the novel depicts him as a man well on his own. He’s got no organization to turn to, because he’s betrayed their trust, so he has to complete much of the heavy lifting himself, alongside a few hired thugs. This makes he and Bond feel more common than different as a hero and villain mash-up, because each act by themselves for themselves at the card tables and off. Over the course of the book there is a feeling of, “It’s just you and me,” when Bond and Le Chiffre collide, as both men know who each other are and why they are on the sides they are.
Chapter 16- The Crawling of the Skin
Fleming once again picks a very suitable chapter title here, textually symbolizing the feeling one has when they sense fear and dread that they can’t stop, a sensation that sub-dermally eggs itself on as we feel an itch we can’t scratch. We find Bond completely spent and resigned to fate here, helpless and out of miracles to save him. Following his crash he shows no sign of a fight left in him and marches forward, doing as he’s told. As Le Chiffre orders him onward Bond observes that, “His face showed neither pleasure nor excitement.” Though he’s clearly capable of dastardly things, Le Chiffre didn’t want to have to do what he is, but his survival is on the line and so he must strike back at Bond to save himself. He’s on the clock, and time is winding down.
When he sees Vesper in the back of the Citroën, Bond’s earlier anger at her experiences a mutation. He thinks of her and sees red, but when confronted with her tied up and stripped bare in the back seat, he reconnects to her as a victim and softens on his more hard-edged comments at the beginning of the last chapter. It’s clear that he cares, even through his rage, and finds the whole situation very disagreeable for them both. That he yet doesn’t know the truth about her is another problem for later, but one that will again put him on a rollercoaster ride of feeling over her until he doesn’t know up from down.
In the paragraphs that follow Bond realizes what put him in his dire position: hubris and those rose-tinted glasses. The feeling of a job well done, a victory achieved, had made him complacent, presenting the perfect opportunity for Le Chiffre to act. He even thinks to blame it all on London, but common sense prevails as he puts all the blame on his shoulders in a very level-headed way. What results here is really Bond at his most daft. The man built up as a very detail-oriented character in the first chapter dilutes himself into one who misses red flags or at the very least doesn’t put in the finely-tuned work to make sure the mission concludes itself favorably. I guess we are to assume that the key distraction for Bond has been Vesper. When he should’ve been worrying about where Le Chiffre was and if he was planning a counter-strike against him, he was dreaming of making Vesper yell his name in a carnal fashion, and all the glories her body could make him achieve like a general going on a battle march.
The novel sets up a mission that could teach Bond to not take things at face-value, to never trust anything as certain (Vesper) and to always focus on the mission with a clear-head without distraction. I guess one of my hang-ups with it is that you’d think Bond would’ve already learned this stuff already on the job. Further, I never feel that the distraction posed by Vesper here really is one. I don’t find her to be a terribly exciting or mind-blowing character, nor do I see what Bond sees in her. It seems that a lot of his attraction for her is motivated by her looks, which speaks to a very base level of sexual obsession to him, and the need he feels to show her that he is not a man to be treated with indifference. One area where the film adaptation utterly blows the book out of the water is in this depiction of Vesper and why Bond is attracted to her. In live-action, there is no mystery as to why he feels so compelled.
The long trip to the abandoned place Le Chiffre has set up for his interrogation of Bond and Vesper sells their coming despair. It’s vacant and exiled from population, leaving them truly on their own. Bond has already run through the details of how fast the French investigators will work when they find his toppled over car, and how long it will take Mathis and Felix to figure that anything is amiss. In short, not soon enough. As the pair are helplessly marched inside the home, Bond’s last desperate attempt to leverage anything in his favor via combat is met with a continued beating from his enemies. Like a private dick from a bit of noir fiction, Bond nihilistically resigns himself to what will come to him, entirely out of options.
Chapter 17- ‘My Dear Boy’
Man, what a chapter. If ever one had to catalogue the best passages written by Fleming, this would have to be in there somewhere. His creation of human dread on the page, of absolute torture and a sense of hopelessness, agony and defiance through Bond’s character is really quite masterful.
Throughout the torture scene Fleming peppers in a lot of meta referencing to fiction, partaking in an amusing commentary on genre and heroic tales. Condescendingly, Le Chiffre comments about how Bond’s story isn’t that of a man who defeats the villain, lives on and gets the girl-even though that’s exactly what it is. He further mentions that those kinds of miracles just don’t happen in real life, giving value and significance to writing like Fleming’s own that pushed forth an escapist sort of excitement and glamor to escape to from our realities. It’s an entertaining part of the book to read through for me, where the character spouting these philosophies is the punch line of their own joke, unaware that in our world they are the villain of the kind of hero myths they disparage.
I was really taken aback by Bond’s thoughts on torture as it’s happening to him throughout. The “parabola of agony” signified by its touch, and how he was thinking about what people who survived torture during World War II told him to give him some sense of comfort if he ended up in similar circumstances. The sort of “warmth and languor” that torture can provide if applied brutally over time would be a sign of grace for a torture victim, but Bond resists the temptation to fall into that space in the faint hopes that his life may not be over. To survive, he must actually take himself to the brink of ruin; if he shows pleasure, he welcomes death.
Le Chiffre’s dissection of torture is one of my favorite villain dialogues of all time, and not just because it’s terrifyingly true. As in most cases, the simplest action can pain the most and a torturer doesn’t need to devise a complex system of tools to ravish a man through a journey of obscene and surreal pain. All you have to do is threaten to take the thing that comes most natural to him, and that signifies his manhood and sense of sexual pleasure. No more, no less.
As the chapter gradually goes on we see Bond slip in and out of it, in a haze of half-consciousness. At times the clarity of thought slips in, my favorite moment being the one where he commits to his endurance through Le Chiffre’s trials full-stop. “Well, if he had to die anyway,” he thinks, “he might as well try it the hard way.” I respect the choice and hope that, in a similar situation, I’d be motivated to do the same. If one must go out at the hands of a bastard, one should be an equal bastard about it till the end.
Through Bond’s commitment to this end, we see Le Chiffre rise to meet him quite crudely. While he often feels to me like a man who gets no pleasure in the acts he commits, here he has a complete turn and shows some of his true colors. He’s not happy to be spending his time doing this to Bond, as he just wants his money, but a part of him is like a scientist testing the long-term effects of painful stimuli on a lab rat. There’s an inherent curiosity he has that mixes with a bit of sadism, creating a very disconcerting villain for Bond to face. A man who can look at the pain he unleashes and justify it through his fascination with how long his “patient” will allow him to implement it before he breaks in two both psychologically and physically.
The chapter ends very much how it began, with us wondering how Bond will get out of it. Like the fate of many villains before him in the fiction he mocks, Le Chiffre is about to be the victim of what could be described-on Bond’s part-as a miracle.
Chapter 18- A Crag-like Face
In the short span of a few pages, we find Bond receiving a miracle in the form of a merciless SMERSH spy, and see Le Chiffre finally pay for his recklessness. I always love it when villains who are portrayed to enjoy their power finally get what is coming to them, and in this little scene we see Le Chiffre leak the fear he wanted to cause in Bond and Vesper as he reverts from a punisher to a victim. Unlike Bond, he didn’t have the makings of a man and immediately shriveled the moment retribution came his way. And instead of accepting his fate like the spy, he was prepared to beg and plead if not stopped by the SMERSH operative’s bullet.
One thing I really like about literary Bond is that, in this scene, he gets marked or “branded” by SMERSH before he really knows what that means. This mission in particular-and what happens to him in it-later becomes a set of memories that he finds difficult to discuss (especially Vesper), and so I think it’s only fitting that he gets a physical mark to accompany his mental one to haunt him for the coming days of his life. Whenever he looks at the scar he’ll remember the pain of the mission and what he experienced, but he’ll also remember what happens when he slips up and gets distracted on the job. In short, he may view it as a bittersweet token of the past, both an omen and a lesson in tandem.
As the chapter closes I love how Fleming juxtaposes the horror and imagery of Bond’s torture with that of the summer day and its sounds. Tragedy with beauty, much like Vesper herself.
Chapter 19- The White Tent
This chapter largely serves expositional duties, but in between there are nuggets of goodness. We open up with Bond discussing dreams with a sentence that feels ripped out of Freud’s own dream diary: “You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.” It’s in the first few paragraphs where we really see how traumatically affected Bond has been by his torture. Slipping in and out of it, he throws himself back into dreams, if only because his reality and the real pain he feels frightens him. In this hospital bed his arms are tied to restrict his movement, but Bond is unaware of where he is and thinks he’s still strapped to that cane chair and will soon receive more torture. It’s really the picture of a broken man, and it’s hard to read at times.
When Bond finally breaks through his spell of traumatic shock, Fleming calls back to two adjectives he used two chapters ago as his spy feels the warm and languorous sensations in his bed that he was once told he’d feel if his torture were prolonged long enough. The implied juxtaposition of the torture and his feeling of ease in recovery is interesting.
When Mathis comes in to speak with Bond we also find out that M made a special-and unprecedented-call to the Frenchman to check up on his agent. It’s clear that M feels a sort of guilt about what happened, as he sent Bond off without a satisfactory picture of just what Le Chiffre had gotten himself into and what resources he had open to him. An easy job on the face of it mutated into a waking and prolonged horror, surprising all of the London team I’m sure.
As Bond is left alone again to recuperate his mind drifts off to Vesper, but it’s hard to place his feelings about her at this point. Has his anger faded? Is he willing to forgive and forget simply because he’s alive and everyone who counted is in one piece? Is the lust and attraction still there?
I don't think the term was widely frowned upon until the mid-60s, though I could be wrong. The point is worth making in light of some of the less justifiable choices Fleming later makes in his depiction of African Americans, which we will undoubtedly be discussing later on....
Yes, and I would also point out that Fleming is ultimately having fun at Bond's expense, since Vesper is not guilty of incompetence at all, and is really playing Bond for a fool. So his angry machismo is finally just a form of impotence, a prelude to the impotence Bond feels at the very end of the novel.
I agree. Movie Vesper is a much richer and more human character than the original. Even Fleming's defenders weren't been able to warm to her--Amis called her "rather insipid," and several positive reviewers in 1953 felt the same. Vesper doesn't begin to come alive until near the end, when she grows desperate and depressed. Her lack of character is the novel's most glaring flaw.
Yes, and this is why people are wrong to detect a supposed homosexual subtext. Le Chiffre's sadism isn't sexually motivated, it's just pure sadism. He sets the template for Bond villains in being (a) genuinely interested in inflicting pain and (b) a warped sort of father/authority figure. The latter is what makes his words toward Bond truly creepy. He even views M as Bond's nanny!