Having not read a James Bond thriller for
about forty years I picked this one as part of my 2015 reading challenge, to
tick off the ‘published in the year of your birth’ box.
So it is 62 years old and was Fleming’s
first novel. To be honest both of these are evident. The prose is clunky, the
dialogue strained, the structure unbalanced and the attitudes dated.
The plot is simple but still hard to credit.
The top Russian agent in France, Monsieur Le Chiffre, has been borrowing
Leningrad funds, supplied to support French communist trade unions, for
personal investments; these have gone pear-shaped so he’s heading for disaster
unless he can generate some cash quick.
His cunning plan is to win big at the high-roller
card games at the Casino Royale. MI6’s equally implausible response is to send in
James Bond, not to kill him but to beat him at cards – 007 licenced to bet – and
so deprive him of his winnings and seal his fate with his Russian paymasters.
After introducing the secret agent, his world,
and his martini, the first half of the book is devoted to Bond first playing
roulette against the house (to warm up his gambler’s instinct and increase his
stake money) then baccarat against Le Chiffre, who has ‘bought’ the bank. It reads
rather like a useful primer on the two games, until the stakes rise and with them
the tension.
The aftermath of the game is more typical
007 action – damsel in distress, car chase, violence, mayhem and teeth-gritting
resilience from Bond.
Damsel (Vesper Lynd) rescued (surely no
spoiler that), James extracts his due and it his attitude to her throughout that
is hard to take in these enlightened times, but sadly is probably accurate for
then.
So it is a quick easy read; uncomfortably
violent and sexist in places but good to tick off the original Bond book, and
that box in the reading challenge.
No comments:
Post a Comment