James Bond has two origin stories. One starts on a February morning in 1952. Seeking distraction from his upcoming wedding, Ian Fleming sat down at his Royal portable typewriter in Jamaica and wrote what—after a few amendments—would become an immortal line in literature, and my favourite opening of any novel: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’ The authority of this sentence hints at the other, earlier origin for James Bond, more than a distraction from impending married life. When World War Two broke out, Ian Fleming went from a career of exciting journalism, and then boredom as a banker, to joining naval intelligence. In 1944, as a commander—Bond’s later rank—Fleming created the intelligence-gathering 30 Commando Assault Unit, which he dubbed ‘Red Indians’, that would assist in the invasion of Normandy. That same year, Fleming told a friend: ‘I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.’ Eight years on, Fleming hammered out two thousand words a day between dawn and the first cocktail at his villa GoldenEye in Jamaica (a creative process I can only hope to emulate). James Bond might have been conceived partly as escapism, and has indeed given countless readers the joy of escape since 1953, but even more than this, Casino Royale would, as Fleming promised, become the spy story to reinvent spy fiction forever. Like the perfect martini, all the right ingredients are here.
Before James Bond, the archetypal spy in fiction was an amateur and often a gentleman, two characteristics that spackled Victorian distaste for spying with a sheen of respectability, seen with different inflections in early incarnations like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Robert Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and continuing in Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) and John Buchan’s Richard Hannay trilogy (1915–19). Other preceding popular thrillers featured what E. M. Forster termed flat characters, a ‘type’ who is ‘constructed around a single idea or quality’. Take, for instance, ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, a character so flat he is an unyielding symbol for a reactionary idea of Britishness.
The two world wars changed both espionage and attitudes to espionage. Fleming gave us a spy who is a professional, and a rounded character, capable of change and ‘surprising in a convincing way’. For those who only know Bond on-screen, you might be surprised by his character arc on the page, a concept only recently explored directly in film during Daniel Craig’s tenure. The Bond of the novels is changed by his experiences, starting here with Casino Royale. Yet he also has the ‘great advantage of flat characters’, to be ‘easily recognised whenever they come in—recognised by the reader’s emotional eye, not by the visual eye which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name’. It is this cocktail (shaken, not stirred) that has kept Bond evergreen. He is both human and iconic.
It is telling that Fleming does not call the chapter ‘The Spy’Fleming sets out this intention from the very first chapter title: ‘The Secret Agent’. With the quick brandishing of a definite article, James Bond becomes the secret agent above all others. It is telling that Fleming does not call the chapter ‘The Spy’. A secret agent is ‘a person engaged on secret service, especially espionage’—with its suggestion of employment (‘engaged’) and duty (‘service’), the term connotes professional espionage for one’s country. Amateur gentleman no longer. Ian Fleming famously borrowed the name for his secret agent from the author of a book about birds, because he thought it was anonymous enough to invite readers to project their desires and fantasies onto its blank screen. We learn next to nothing about Bond’s family or past. When Bond goes to sleep at the end of the first chapter, ‘the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold’. Like a blank name, this ‘mask’ can be read as a blank face inviting projection, were it not for the particular character etched into it.
Similarly, while ‘The Secret Agent’ could simply be a Brechtian placard for a flat type representing the spy, Fleming quickly establishes Bond’s character. We are told in the second paragraph that ‘James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge.’ This knowledge shows Bond’s professional experience, which we see further as he assesses the casino security and examines his hotel room for tampering. He has personal habits, too: making ‘a good breakfast’ of ‘orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon and a double portion of coffee without sugar’. He smokes ‘a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street’ with ‘the triple gold band’. His car is ‘his only personal hobby’. He ‘had always been a gambler’. He gives ‘a final pull at his narrow tie’ before leaving a room. He is ‘pernickety’ about food and drink, which ‘comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details’. These details, which remain consistent, make for a character vividly recognisable to the emotional eye—an icon.
But there is human depth here that goes beyond the icon. Bond begins the novel certain of his professional duty. Vesper Lynd is Bond’s ‘Number Two’ on the mission to take down Le Chiffre, an agent of SMERSH, by bankrupting him at the gaming table. Bond tells Vesper:
It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people . . . I’ve got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O. Probably quite decent people. They just got caught up in the gale of the world . . . It’s a confusing business but if it’s one’s profession, one does what one’s told.
This faith in duty reflects the certainty of Britain in another time. After World War Two, Fleming would recall: ‘What non- sense they were, those romantic Red Indian daydreams so many of us indulged in at the beginning of the war,’ invoking the name he gave his commando unit. An outdated term, ‘Red Indian’ conjures early twentieth-century childish play of ‘cowboys and Indians’. The faith and certainty of such childish ‘daydreams’ will be shaken if not shattered by the end of the novel.
Casino Royale is a fictional location, which can be read as a metaphor for Bond himself. The setting gives off ‘a strong whiff of Victorian elegance and luxury’, ‘revived since the war’ with the promise of ‘[n]ostalgia for more spacious, golden times’. There is hope such nostalgia might prove ‘a source of revenue’ (how right Fleming was). If this sounds metafictional to you—meaning fiction about fiction, or Deadpool, for an even quicker shorthand—it’s because it is. Bond is a reminder of more certain days gone by. But this is quickly complicated by framing Bond as an actor ‘[a]gainst the background of this luminous and spark- ling stage’, where he ‘felt his mission to be incongruous and remote and his dark profession an affront to his fellow actors’. Here, Fleming reminds us of the staged or fictional nature of the story we are consuming, that this symbol of Victorian certainty is only a symbol. We might think that soul-searching concern- ing Britain’s identity is a modern phenomenon. But the war had compromised the sparkling long weekend of Britain’s glory (for some of its citizens). Fleming sets Bond up to represent old certainties, then pulls down the glittering backdrop.
Fleming’s vivid imagery plays a large part in upsetting the scene. Near the start of Casino Royale, Fleming’s descriptions are beautiful and lulling, particularly about place: ‘the fishing fleet from Dieppe string out towards the June heat-haze followed by a paperchase of herring-gulls’. But as Bond’s mission falters, the imagery turns uncanny. The villain Le Chiffre’s eyes are ‘two blackcurrants poached in blood’. Hands scuttle across a card table like ‘two pink crabs’. The green baize becomes ‘furry and almost choking, its colour as livid as the grass on a fresh tomb’. That many of these uncanny images come at the card table is significant. Rudyard Kipling first applied the geopolitical phrase ‘the Great Game’ to spying in Kim. Fleming gives this metaphor life, whether through gambling or golf, as we see in Goldfinger. Games have rules, and those rules are central to the Etonian world order of ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ A player is secure inside rules, and though Bond knows one day ‘he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck’, he does not want to accept ‘fallibility’, sitting down at the roulette table with ‘confidence’, trusting his routine of noting the ‘history’ of the ball to determine his play.
Confidence in history and rejection of fallibility won’t last. Bond is too vulnerable for that, a trait not primarily associated with 007, but key to what makes him a rounded, human character. As luck turns against him, Bond feels ‘flat’ and ‘tired’, wanting a ‘cheerful face’ and ‘a word of congratulation’. This humanity grows as Bond’s luck turns worse. Captured by Le Chiffre, ‘fear came to Bond and crawled up his spine’, leaving him ‘puny and impotent’. Stripped naked for one of literature’s most famous torture scenes, Bond’s body is emasculated, not heroic. But Bond’s human vulnerability is actually what makes him a hero. He is fallible, defeated, brutalised, but never gives in. This vulnerability is cracked by Vesper. Near the start, Bond reflects that women are ‘for recreation’. He believes (rather presumptuously) that on a job, women ‘got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings’. But when he meets Vesper, Bond is ‘excited by her beauty and intrigued by her composure. The prospect of working with her stimulated him. At the same time he felt a vague disquiet. On an impulse he touched wood.’ This call for luck won’t help. Towards the end, the image of ‘Red Indians’ becomes crucial. Le Chiffre accuses 007 of ‘playing Red Indians’ and Bond agrees, saying, ‘when one’s young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong, but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it’s easy to pick out one’s own villains and heroes and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains.’ Bond realises that Le Chiffre thinks of himself as a hero: ‘The villains and heroes get all mixed up.’ While ‘patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right’, Bond reflects that ‘this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date . . . History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.’ We are back to the language of play-acting on a stage, but now there is no certainty. The rules are gone, there is no script.
Bond falls in love with Vesper and is ‘quite certain’ he wants to leave the world of espionage and propose to her. The tragic ending shatters that last certainty. Bond locks ‘their love and his grief’ into ‘the box room of his mind’, a trauma that will reverberate throughout his later relationships. Bond commits to his duty: ‘While he, Bond, had been playing Red Indians through the years . . . the real enemy had been working quietly, coldly, without heroics, right there at his elbow.’ He will become a counter-spy and dedicate himself to destroying SMERSH.
Mathis gives Bond two pieces of contrasting advice: ‘Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles . . . But don’t let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine.’ Bond almost becomes so human he quits as a secret agent, but his broken heart ensures he will remain a mechanism in the Great Game. This is Fleming’s balancing act, creating a hero who is at once unyielding enough for iconography and rounded enough to be indelibly, humanly James Bond. This balance allows for Bond’s reinvention through the decades, a talisman of literature constantly capable of surprise. If this is your first time reading Casino Royale—or James Bond—you are in for this surprise, which also feels utterly inevitable. Ian Fleming changed spy fiction forever, forging a character against which all other spies are measured. By the time you reach the final, famous line, you will forget spy fiction was ever anything other than James Bond.
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