Late last year when I was making my reading list, I decided to include an action/adventure section as a catchall for books in which stuff blows up and/or people leave their houses and get into situations that involve travel by boat and/or lots of rope. One of the books I chose for this section was Ian Fleming's first Bond book, Casino Royale. Shari gave me an extra copy she had on Oscar weekend, and I read it last weekend.
It's almost incomprehensible to me that not long ago I'd never seen an entire Bond film. Now, I've seen roughly half of them and parts of most of the others. While reading reviews of the films, I noticed the tendency of reviewers to flaunt the fact that they had read the books and understood the "tone" or "spirit." This understanding is then used to either condemn or congratulate the film's ability to capture the same tone and/or spirit.
After encountering such claims time and time again, I realized that if all of these people were correct, a single book in the series would be thousands of pages and cover most literary genres as well as making up a few to mix things up. This is why I decided to read the first book this year, and I'm extremely glad that I did.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the spirit or the tone of the book is. It was rather British, but I doubt that's a "spirit" though I guess you could debate its application to tonality. It's a very pulpy, straightforward book. Stuff happens; Bond reacts; more stuff happens; Bond reacts some more. However, a large portion of the end of the book is given over to reflection with Bond calmly deciding perhaps he should give up the life of a spy. He's terribly British about the whole thing. He never broods or shouts his misgivings at M (who is also terribly British about the whole thing).
Reading the book was like reading a script complete with staging directions. Every new location is set in intimate detail for the ensuing scene. Fleming makes sure that we properly picture the casino, Bond's hotel room, the cafe where he meets Mathis and Vesper. This is important so we can fully understand the action as it unfolds. We know every important move made by every important character. We can visualize the actions clearly and concisely.
Literary Bond was very different from any cinematic Bond I've seen. (To be fair, I haven't seen Timothy Dalton as Bond, but I have seen The Year of the Comet so I'm fairly certain he's not literary Bond.) He never reaches the angst-laden pitch of Daniel Craig's Bond and doesn't exude the charm of Sean Connery's Bond. He's not flippant or urbane like Roger Moore or sexily confident and physical like Pierce Brosnan. Above all, literary Bond is a man obsessed with details. He knows everything from the best place to hide an important document to what wine to have with dinner. He is charming and sexy but in a controlled, calculated way.
All in all, I enjoyed the book but not enough to immediately pick up the next book in the series. If I get read all the things that I want to before year's end, I may read another.
I Do Say, That Bomb Nearly Killed Me!
Posted by Jeremiah Goodman at 6:44 PM Labels: James Bond, literature
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1 comments:
I think when a thing becomes a franchise, superceding book and movie and action figure to embed itself in the collective consciousness, people have trouble pinpointing the "real" version of it. The book came first, and talking about books makes people sound smart, so people tend to gravitate toward the book when they want to sound authoritative, but I think that at the core, what Bond is isn't contained in the books any more than in one specific film; it's the franchise. Your experience sounds a little like mine reading Dead Until Dark, though probably much less painful -- it's bewildering to see the smallness of a thing and wonder what you're missing when others use big dramatic phrases like "capturing the spirit." The detail-obsessed, very British Bond of Casino Royale the book doesn't sound any more like the "real" Bond than the action hero of Casino Royale the film. The trouble is that there is no one specific "real" Bond to be pointed at and used as a standard, which is probably too meta-narrativey a concept for most people to be able or want to get.
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