Casino Royale (1952): a Marxist view

A law for the lawless

Casino Royale (1952) by Ian Fleming

reviewed by Jay Rothermel ________________________________________________________



Casino Royale (1953) is certainly more sinned-against than sinning. A quaintly eccentric novel of the stone age on Cold War pop culture, it has for decades suffered under the shadow of a white elephant movie version (1966) and the fact that for legal reasons it did not come under the Broccoli empire's canonical purview until 2006.

The central conceit of the book is certainly unique among plots for spy novels: beat a French communist labor leader (and of course he is also a Soviet agent) at baccarat amid the louche environs of a fustian French casino; then wait for his handlers to lower the boom when it becomes clear he was playing fast and loose with union funds and - we assume - Moscow's gold.

Baccarat, a game for the dessicated and exiled rich who swim between European playgrounds spending a birthright accumulated from centuries of sweated and wage labor, is the novel's locus of action. The melodramatic mummery that follows the "great game" at the casino is a reductive denouement the contemporary reader quickly deciphers.

To breathe life into a game of cards is Fleming's signal achievement here. The sadistic brutality meted out to Bond's testicles in a torture/interrogation scene after the card game (he is to be robbed of the winnings by the villain, who goes by the prematurely modern name Le Chiffre, i.e. "the cipher") goes deep into Mel Gibson territory.

Fleming spends as much time in the novel on the maiming and slow recovery of said anatomy as anything else; to a man, how could there be any other priority? This sequence of the novel finishes with Bond raping the double-agent Vesper Lynd, a loathsomely piquant prefiguring of the Playboy Lifestyle ethos of petty bourgeois inwardness that emerged later in the decade in the U.S. and UK.

This section of the novel clearly and with little subtlety expresses the declining fortunes of imperial clubmen: letting their fears and prejudices out for a last run before sunset. Here too is the fury of the affronted bourgeois who see their historical and personal fortunes entering a period of permanent and painful eclipse.

With juvenile sangfroid Ian Fleming thrived as a novelist summing-up and defending a jungle-law view of relations between people and nations, the ideological expression of normality under the law of value. For Bond the enemy must be destroyed because its triumph (the dictatorship of the proletariat, we communists might call it) would spell the finish of any social necessity for cocktails and casinos.

In the UK after World War Two, the declining fortunes and moral authority of empire builders confronting rising and victorious anti-colonial struggles was seen in everything from the novels of Graham Greene to the actions of class "traitors" like Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

Readers who take their pleasure today in novels like Casino Royale must acknowledge the belated and retrospective nature of their enjoyment. That the market continues to tin-plate and regurgitate such fare is suitable confirmation of a wider and more profound bankruptcy than ever occurred in the funk of a clapped-out coastal casino, no matter how royal - or royale.

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Jay Rothermel is the editor of Marxist Update. He is on Facebook.