Casino Royale

"If you would like to know what an Ian Fleming James Bond book is like, Casino Royale is the perfect place to start. It’s a really good, punchy novel. It’s the birth of James Bond: the first time he’s out in the world on the page. You can see so much of what is key and familiar from the James Bond stories is in there. But you can also see that Ian Fleming is still finding his way on exactly how these stories work. The book is set in a place called Royale-les-Eaux, which is probably based on Deauville in northern France, a place Fleming visited a lot. Fleming loved gambling and he loved travel. He puts in a lot of detail of the stuff that he’s interested in and knows about. He also comes up with this slightly crazy plot. He beds it in reality, and then takes it one stage further. [SPOILER ALERT]. Le Chiffre is a communist agent. He’s the banker for the communist infiltration of the trade unions in France, and he’s a big gambler. He’s lost all the Russian money, and the Brits find out he’s going to go and try and make it all back by gambling at this casino in Royale. They think, ‘What if we sent in an agent to bring him down?’ And so James Bond is sent in. “He came up with the idea of a very blunt, straightforward man of action with a very simple, unfussy name” It’s a ridiculous plot on some levels, but fascinating on others. They play Baccarat, which is a game of pure chance. There is no skill involved, so the idea that James Bond could be a better gambler than Le Chiffre…but it’s that aspect of gambling as a one-on-one human combat. It’s about psyching out your opponent and psychologically beating them so that they make a mistake. It’s got that great sequence at the heart of it. It’s also the story of him meeting and falling in love with Vesper. Bond is about 35 in the book, and he says that as a Double O agent for MI6, he has a limited lifespan. Agents very rarely last beyond 40—they either retire because they’re burnt out or they’re dead. He is seriously thinking it might be the last mission he does. When he falls in love, he says, ‘That’s it. I’m getting out of this because I couldn’t have a relationship with her if I stay as a secret agent. My life is going to be in danger. I’m going to be away a lot of the time and her life is going to be in danger. But if I retire, then I can finally settle down and live a happy life as a normal person.’ But things happen at the end of the book—a huge betrayal which is evidence of what he sees as the awful amorality of the Russian secret service—and he decides: ‘No, I’m not going to retire. I’m going to devote the rest of my life to fighting these people.’ It’s quite a dark book. It’s a cold book in some ways, but it is the first time we see 007 walking onto the world stage."

"I think it’s the best of them, and it’s wonderful because it reveals what I think is the essential Bond. The film Bond is very, very different from the character that Ian Fleming invented. The real character was unknowable. There’s something rather creepy and peculiar about the original James Bond and you get that in buckets in Casino Royale. He’s a tough man and he’s absolutely ruthless. He’s a rather distant character and when Vesper commits suicide at the end, he feels nothing. He says: ‘The bitch is dead.’ It was 1953 and it was very remarkable for the time, because Bond was so cruel. He’s horribly tortured in the book and there are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it’s Fleming’s best writing. It wings along – it’s very hard to stop reading. It’s also brilliant at place. He manages to summon up the smoky stench of a casino in a way that no one else has ever managed to do. And it was incredibly glamorous. Here was Britain emerging from the depredations of war in a time of great austerity and here was a character on an apparently limitless expense account, having guilt-free sex and ordering dry martinis in the most glamorous places. It was a wonderful bit of escapism for the time. It’s a tour de force and by far his best novel. I don’t think the Americans do it nearly as well as we do. Yes, there are lots, but they’re all fairly derivative and I don’t think they have the same psychological depth. The British are particularly good not just at spying but at writing about spying. I think it’s to do with the natural theatricality of the British character and also a public-school system that for many generations encouraged a covering-up of what you really felt and thought. Hidden homosexuality, hidden feelings about loneliness. The British class system encouraged a certain amount of subterfuge. I think there’s an imaginative flair too. If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the more elaborate ruses that have been pulled off are British. Nobody does it better."

"This is totally different. We’re at the other end of the scale here, in terms of thrillers and espionage. Broadly, the way I look at it is that at one end of the scale, there are people like le Carré. The books are very cerebral and clever and authentic. They can feel a little bit static and conversational: they’re not really thrillers in that it’s not thrills and spills and action. At the other end, there are books like James Bond, which are very exciting but not cerebral at all. I suppose I’ve always clung to the belief that somewhere there’s a middle ground to be found, where you can write something which is propulsive and kinetic and action-packed, but also clever. A life’s work is probably finding that sweet spot and I don’t suppose I’ve done it yet but, broadly, that’s my mission. Fleming knew a bit about intelligence work—like John le Carré and so many of these writers. It’s a bit disputed what Fleming actually got up to in the war, but he was involved in naval intelligence. Casino Royale was his first book. I have a complicated relationship with Ian Fleming. I find his racism and sexism and homophobia difficult, although the books are a product of their era: we have to judge people by the standards of the time they lived in. But it’s impossible to get away from him. If you’re trying to write anything vaguely action and espionage-related, it’s this presence that’s always there. At some point, you have to come to terms with it. Casino Royale interests me because it’s about the relationship between Britain and the foreign, exotic world. In the book, we actually only get as far as Northern France. That’s probably about as much exoticism as any British reader could handle in 1953, before the age of mass tourism. There’s a fair amount of post war drudgery and reconstruction in Britain. It was this fairly dull, grey world and France was this impossibly glamorous Other: a world of gambling and premarital sex and fine dining and champagne. Casino Royale was this irresistible piece of escapism that Fleming wrote. And Bond is, of course, this irresistible figure. If you’re a young man reading Fleming in 1953… here’s a man going on adventures, entangling himself with women who don’t appear to expect him to produce an engagement ring. My latest book, The Exile , is set much in the same period, in the early 1950s, and I was very interested in the idea of luxury and glamour and temptation. My book has a heroine, not a hero, but she ends up in Paris. She’s come from the austere world of the Eastern bloc and is surrounded by these constant temptations—champagne, cocaine, parties, young suitors. Can she survive? Can she retain the moral purity that’s there in her character or will she be tempted away from the path of righteousness by all the temptations of Paris? Casino Royale was a book that I kept going back to. I had it in mind as a model as I wrote mine. Fleming does ruin the whole thing. There’s a conversation where James Bond is impressing the girl. He’s ordering food for her (of course!) and he says, ‘Should we have the ‘45 Taittinger, or the ‘43?’ He’s bullshitting about wine and then he orders an avocado pear for dessert. It’s a terrible faux pas and the whole facade slips. You realise that Ian Fleming almost certainly wasn’t as sophisticated as he would have us believe. No, it’s a standalone book. It’s got my favourite character. My heroine, in every sense of the phrase, is a woman called Greta, who’s a Lithuanian partisan. It’s a series of novels about her and her journey from somebody who is run over by history and powerless, to somebody who is a very strong, cold warrior after the war. But if you’re writing about early 1950s France, you can’t really get away from books like Casino Royale . In some ways, what I was trying to do with The Exile was to remind people a little bit of books like that, but subvert them. Women are decorative in the Bond books, whereas my books are pretty much always based around heroines rather than heroes."