Saturday 7 July 2012

Book Eighteen - Casino Royale

For someone that generations of men have looked up to I was a little unimpressed with James Bond's first outing.

If anything the 2006 reboot with Daniel Craig is a good interpretation of the darkness the book presents. 

Bond does not like closeness and tries to distinguish between love and work. He will dabble with women, but he cannot commit to them, let alone work with them. 

Here enters Vesper Lynch, enigmatic and the first woman to shoot Bond where it hurts, in the heart. 

She doesn't come across well in the book and her final actions make her former toughness seem false and seems to suggest that being a spy is a man's job. 

The action scenes work much better on the screen, especially the torture scene where Bond suffers greatly at the hands of Le Chiffe. Le Chiffe is a terrible villain, in the sense he doesn't really do much and even the casino game can not build up much tension. 

You cannot sympathise with Bond, he isn't a likeable character and Fleming always calls him Bond which seems to suggest that he doesn't care for the spy either.

Whether the series picks up I do not know, but the spy didn't leave me shaken or stirred. 

Rowen's Review

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