By Ian Fleming
1953
181 pgs.
Published by Penguin
The first of Fleming's original James Bond novels comes right at your throat and proceeds to strangle you underneath a baccarat table on the ground floor of the swankiest casino you can imagine. For those unversed in the print version of Mr. 007, Fleming's novels are incredibly surprising when you first pick them up: there's no winking here. In Fleming's mind, Bond is an preternaturally cool individual, yes, but he's also a ferociously cold man. His sexual exploits, while still in the same numbers seen in the series of films, is gone about with a far darker hand in the books: make no mistake, Bond hates women. There's no argument to be made there, he himself says it, in those terms. He enjoys possessing them, even going so far at one point to describe the "sweet tang of rape," but as far as 007 is concerned, women are either a means to an end or a simple test of his own talents. Beyond that, he finds them totally useless.
It makes for odd reading, especially when a quote from Raymond Chandler on the back tells us that "Bond is what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Really?
The entire Bond/Misogyny thing doesn't, obviously, fill up 181 pages. If it did, we wouldn't be entering our fifth decade of Bond films. The plot for the book, one might imagine, would be the prototypical standard Bond plot regarding a nefarious criminal organization and a dastardly madman. Surprisingly, that isn't the case (which may also be why Casino is only now becoming a film.) No, Casino is about a young secret agent given twenty five million francs and being sent into France to humiliate (and thereby bring about the end of) a Russian spy. The book isn't about gadgets, women or cars, and there's no big laser: Bond is just supposed to play cards and make a commie look bad. Excepting an incredibly brutal torture sequence (involving 007's "secret weapon") and one of the most unsurprising twist endings of all time, that's the entire story. It's refreshingly vulgar, fast paced, and, in all honesty, quite entertaining; it also takes about the equivalent amount of time to read as it would to watch a Bond movie--which means that if you are having trouble getting your TBS signal, then you now have an official alternative.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
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