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My review will be posted while I am at work, in several hours, since I will not triple post from the work computer. Sigh ... thanks for your patience.
Carry on! Anybody else who would like to give a brief mini review of Casino Royale, the novel, is very welcome. Also any comments regarding this novel are welcome. Thanks! :-bd
Or let us consider the point of Bond’s interest in the opposite sex, very nearly an insatiable drive if one is to believe the movies. But in CR, when he is informed that he will be working with a female agent, Bond originally considers her “a pest of a girl…Women were for recreation. On the job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.” Even after Bond has met Vesper and found himself attracted to her, he still finds her something of an unwelcome distraction: “As a woman, he wanted to sleep with her but only when the job had been done.” Is this the same James Bond who has never met a villain whose girl friend he’s not seduced, in order to get under said villain’s skin? Starting in the next novel, Live And Let Die, that manuever will become a standard weapon in Bond’s arsenal!
What are we to make of these literary false trails? Is Fleming’s lead character taking his creator by surprise, with the author starting off in one direction, only to have the character insist, “No, no…THIS is the way I behave! Get it right, will you?” Or is Fleming acting the part of a stage magician, misdirecting the audience OVER HERE with scent and smoke and sweat while a vodka martini with a half measure of Kina Lillet is waiting OVER THERE to enchant the waiting world? I suspect the truth lies partially in each direction…but there’s one thing for certain in this first novel: while Fleming is quite the spell binder as an author, he’s also something of a rule breaker.
One of the most important rules a beginning writer learns is, “Don’t TELL the reader something…SHOW it instead!” In other words, don’t TELL the audience your hero is noble or your villain is corrupt…SHOW them the heroism, the corruption, SHOW them all the important stuff in your story. And yet, flaunting the rules with impeccable style, Fleming is continually TELLING the reader important things, and showing trivialities. He shows us every meal Bond eats and every cocktail he drinks, he shows us every card dealt in the casino…but the introduction of his villain is established by memos sent to M, essentially telling us why and how Le Chiffre needs to be taken down. Most surprisingly, he TELLS us that our leading lady has committed suicide, and why…rather than showing it to us, as occurs in Casino Royale the Eon film. It shouldn’t work….and yet it does. Perhaps the most effective part of the magic spell that Fleming creates is that we accept his misdirection without objection. In fact, we are anxious to see where the rule breaking storyteller is going to take us next. “The bitch” may be dead…but the spell that Fleming weaves is as alive as ever!
Fleming is nothing if not intruguing and colorful.
That said, here's another example of Fleming "changing his mind" on a particular topic:in Casino Royale, Bond sizes up one of Le Chiffre's men thusly: "He had something of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but his inhumanity would not come from infantilism but from drugs. Marihuana, decided Bond." Okay, the fifties were not a time that held much sympathies for those suffering from Reefer Madness. But by the series' end, one gets the feeling that the author has had a bit of a change in his opinion on this particular topic. In The Man With The Golden Gun, written in the midsixties, Bond is in charge of a party for a group of criminals, and he tells the band leader, "Smoke weed if you like. We're private here. No one's going to tell on you." Now, it may be that Bond had previously come to the conclusion that musicians in general (and Jamaican musicians in particular) were already a subhuman lot, and that there would be no loss in encouraging them to engage in their particular vice...but somehow that's not quite the impression that I am left with. It seems to me fairly well easy to conclude that Fleming's opinion (and therefore Bond's opinion) on the subject of marihuana had evolved somewhat in the intervening decade. No big deal, really, a lot of people's opinions changed on that subject during that time. Hey, wait until will get to Fleming's published opinions on Castro for a real surprise...
...and if you think that I'm doing my best to encourage all & sundry to take up reading Fleming on their own, well, you'd be right!
Very interesting observations there on the changes in Fleming, @BeatlesSansEarmuffs.
Sorry, no. Just remember reading it somewhere, so it has status as gossip unless someone else can shed a light on it? Jamaican police, do you know anything?
Oh good; no double/triple post. :)>-
I apologize again for the delay in my actual mini review (various and sundry things getting in the way of that ...) and I will try again, but it will have to be much later today.
Meanwhile, have fun and thanks to all for discussing various aspects of the novel, Fleming, his smoking habits and companions - all rather interesting to contemplate.
OBVIOUSLY, I can rarely post from my home computer now due to glitches.
I do apologize; I have tried everything I know.
Carry on without me, chaps and ladies - and thanks!!
NOT posting again today.
(the bolding is mine, not the website's ...)
from: http://www.strangemag.com/recentadditions/mysticaljamesbond.html
The Magick of Bond
Some qualities of Blofeld that did not come from Fleming came from a notorious person of whom he knew.
Gardiner, like Pearson and others before him, examines the famous anecdote about Fleming trying to involve Aleister Crowley in the effort to interrogate the captured Nazi Rudolf Hess, who had landed in Britain during World War II. Having been fascinated by Crowley's image for years, Fleming had devised, and spymaster Maxwell Knight had approved, a plan in which Crowley could exploit Hess's interests in the occult. Knight headed up Department 5, the counterespionage unit within MI5. Crowley corresponded that he would be ready to assist. But the plan was vetoed higher-up, and apparently Fleming never met Crowley face to face.
One biography, The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight by Anthony Masters, claims that Fleming was behind the plan that actually lured Hess to Scotland, but is the only book so far to assert this.
Gardiner presents a few versions of the Hess incident, since the actual truth is not fully known. He sees the Crowley anecdote as an indication of Fleming's interests in magic and the occult, and tries to make as many links with Crowley as possible. He also links to Crowley through Maxwell Knight, one of the models for the character "M." Knight had been introduced to Crowley through thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. Both Knight and Wheatley had attended Crowley rituals, out of intellectual rather than magical interest.
Gardiner feels that the use of gold coins as a catalyst in the novel Live and Let Die is another link to Crowley, but this is probably debatable. That Fleming had some knowledge of the occult, and incorporated aspects of Crowley's persona into villains like Le Chiffre and Blofeld, does not mean that Crowley is really a major element of the majority of the books. Fleming was a wide reader, whose readings informed his writings in countless ways, from the Manichean perspective of Bond (dualistic, with the human as the battleground) to the erudition shown by Fleming on many other matters.
Yet touchstones to the esoteric appear in many places in Fleming's writings. There is a Bill Templar in Diamonds Are Forever, alluding to the Knights Templar. The Ourobourous (the alchemical symbol of a serpent eating its own tail) is part of the name of the Ourobouros Worm and Bait Company in Live and Let Die.
The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was also the first in which the villain had a ciphered name. Bond works through the code, so to speak, and when Le Chiffre (the black knight to Bond's knight errant, the dark side of the psyche to Bond's lighter side) dies, the bullet wound resembles the third eye of illumination.
B-) Casino Royale has given me two distinct types of excitement and pleasure. When I read it for the very first time, as a young teenager (I think I was 15), it was AFTER I had read Live and Let Die, which was my first Bond book. I am pretty sure CR was my second. So even though I had fallen in love with Bond and his world with LALD (much more on that in due time), Casino Royale still hit me hard (and at that point I realized it was the first in the series, so I read as an intro to the character, and I loved it from the first page).
CR's main thrill for me is the world of gambling: How Fleming excels at describing this! So exotic and strange, and something that held no personal interest for me, but that I found fascinating to read about. It was truly an alien world for me. The opening paragraphs hit my senses and immediately soaked into me that smoky, alcohol fueled, glamorous, dangerous, and chilling world of James Bond. Fleming's descriptions, and those little details, really let you breathe in that atmosphere, feel the sweat and smoke, the buzzing high and sinking despair that are the twins always lurking in gambling (especially high stakes). This English spy, and what he went through and encountered in this particular story, was something rather ... tangible for me. It is an unforgettable story.
The second kind of excitement and pleasure that I get from reading Casino Royale is one of affirmation, appreciation, and a sense of returning to the roots of the character. I like diving back into what is now a favorite place for me to read about Bond's exploits - being among the wealthy and corrupt, and especially in a casino. He is so very much in his element. A servant of his government, to root out the bad apples and evil scum and make our world more secure, yes. So politics and catching (or dispatching) criminals are always part of Bond's story. And what is politics or policing if not gambling at times? Gambling what to do, how to draw the other person out;, how to be victorious in a tricky situation; gambling everything on a daring, physically near impossible escape - all the while with people who hate you (and some who would kill you) surrounding you. Even those you thought you could trust sometimes. All of Bond's world involves gambling, all the time. Just not always at the gaming tables; but that is a wonderful place for Bond to revel in. Gambling and seduction; to seduce and to be seduced.
The rest of the story is not so perfectly drawn for me. I felt that Vesper was not fully realized, that Fleming had some notions about sex that I disagreed with (and always will), and her death was (even on my first reading) rather a let down, instead of feeling like the most apt ending. I disliked her just sleeping herself into oblivion while he slept next door. It was jarring (and frankly almost boring) and not in a good way. I understood that it was, again just in my opinion, a good thing to have him be hurt so deeply by a woman that it would influence him for the rest of the series of stories. I simply felt Fleming could have written the latter part of the novel a bit better. But that is also because I am comparing it to the first half of the novel, which shines so brightly. And Fleming's writing regarding women is often mixed for me with startling statements I disagree with and dislike, but that has never stopped me from thoroughly enjoying the novels.
CR is important, of course. It is not my very favorite Bond story, but it draws me back from time to time to really sink into that exciting, steamy beginning of Bond, the man he started out as and how he came out of it, even though he was nearly broken. It is a very finely told story overall and I won't quibble about the last parts of the novel. It was in no way a big letdown; just a subtle change. I always recommend Casino Royale, and I do tell people to read it first in the series of course. And about that ending ... and those words ... I feel that was a strong and appropriate ending. I may not interpret that exactly like others do, but I think it was a very fitting and strong way to end the novel. Many things about CR stick with the reader. I appreciate this one a lot.
(And I see this is not nearly as "mini" as it should be; sorry! I'll do better in the future.)
:)>-