Classic Critical Review: Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is worth reading simply because it is arguably the first science-fiction novel ever published, and on that merit alone it is worth a read. Shelley paved the way for H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, China Mieville, and many others. The novel is also interesting because it raises an argument that’s still being debated today: are we the sum of our parts, or our experiences? Finally, when viewed from with a post-structuralist lens with the author and both 19^th century and contemporary literary criticism in mind, it gives the reader a new perspective with regards to sexism and the patriarchy in western society. For that last reason I recommend the Norton critical edition of the novel because it includes both 19^th century and contemporary criticism and analysis of the novel, as well as a decent look at Percy Bysshe Shelley’s contributions to the novel as editor. For readers who simply want the Frankenstein experience with none of the criticism, make sure you get the 1818 edition, as the 1831 edition is heavily revised for the worse (on a related note, the Norton Critical Edition discusses the changes made and the critical reaction to them).

The novel is arranged in an epistolary format in order to lend 19^th century audiences a sense of realism. The story, though the story of natural philosopher Victor Frankenstein and that of his creature, is actually relayed to the reader in letters from explorer Robert Walton written to his sister while on his voyage to discover the Northwest Passage. This framing of the narrative is important because it gives a sort of reason for the telling of the story in the first place, and is perhaps the greatest stylistic decision Shelley made in the writing of this book. Had she just had Frankenstein tell his own story directly to the reader it would have seemed silly and amateurish. If the novel had been told in third person without any framing then it would have just been confusing. Another boon this format lends to the novel is that it creates Victor Frankenstein into an unreliable narrator without any reason to question the conclusion. Without Walton, Frankenstein would be lying to the reader, which unless framed properly, would either come off as silly or simply pass by without notice. As I said before, the framing, from a literary perspective, is the strongest element of the story, and though it is an entertaining read, certain plot elements either fall completely flat or are just textbook examples of bad writing.

A lot of stuff just doesn’t make any sense. Why, of all books, is the creature carrying around Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Werter, and Plutarch’s Lives? Forget the ham fisted connections were supposed to make from these references, forget that Paradise Lost was not only being read by Shelley during the writing of Frankenstein but that the novel itself is so centrally focused on that relationship between Good and Evil that it’s impossible to not make the connection even without it literally being in the novel; it’s just bad writing to have the monster come upon a satchel in the woods that conveniently has all of these books for him to make his literary allusions to. A good story reveals the plot and challenges the reader to find and make the deeper connections behind it, whereas Frankenstein simply tells you everything without a lick of subtlety about it. There’s also one event in the novel that just screams poor writing, but revealing it would be a spoiler so I’ll allow you to indulge yourself in the most obvious and poorly forced in plot device I’ve read this side of a Dan Brown novel. Arguments can be made that Victor is a poorly written character, but I’m fully entrenched in the “unreliable narrator” camp, and write off the bad decisions and strange thinking as signs a descent into madness that began when he first gazed upon his creation and followed him to his death. If you don’t buy into that the novel completely falls apart, so for Shelley’s sake I just go with it. If you’re interested in enjoying the novel for what it is, I suggest you go with that as well. If you’re just reading for a good laugh or to tear it apart, ignore my opinion on the matter. No matter which way you read Frankenstein, you will no doubt enjoy it.

The Catch-22 of the Catch-22 of the Catch-22 in Catch-22

Essay 2 on Catch-22. Essay one can be found here.

What is Catch-22? The fact is that there is no Catch-22, and that in itself is a Catch-22 which is, logically speaking, a Catch-22 of its own. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is filled to the brim with Catch-22’s, a large portion of them simply left for the reader to identify. Though the novel is filled with definitions of what the actual Catch-22 may be, in the end all that it represents is a hopeless situation; a scenario with either no way out or with a way out that is so revolting that it may as well have never been offered in the first place.

The first major Catch-22 that the reader is presented with is the one offered by Doc Daneeka to Yossarian when the latter is begging the former to ground him. The doctor explains to Yossarian that he can’t ground him because of Catch-22 (Heller 45). When pressed by Yossarian he explains that Catch-22 says that he can only ground crazy people, to which Yossarian responds that he is in fact crazy, which the doctor counters that he can’t be crazy because he doesn’t want to fly anymore and that only a crazy person would want to get back up in the air, so therefore he can’t ground him (46). Yossarian then points out that there are men flying still who are crazy, to which the Doc agrees, to which Yossarian asks why the Doc doesn’t ground them if he knows they’re crazy, to which the Doc counters that if they want to be grounded they should just come and talk to him about it; another implied Catch-22. There is yet a third Catch-22 present in this exchange that isn’t fully revealed until the reader catches up with the aftermath of the “death” of the Doc. It is then revealed, through the anecdote detailing the fate of Daneeka’s replacement, that even though there wasn’t really a formal regulation called Catch-22 keeping Daneeka (a fourth Catch-22) from grounding anyone, he would have faced reprisal from the brass if he followed the actual regulations about keeping the mentally unstable from flying and sent to the Pacific front, which at that time was far more dangerous than the European theatre (389). Out of one exchange, that granted is expanded upon later in the novel, the reader is presented with four separate instances of this arcane regulation, of which the actual existence is dubious at best, haunting the characters, which arguably is its own Catch-22 since there was no actual Catch-22 to begin with; only fears of the doctor that turned out to be well founded (33).

Perhaps the ultimate Catch-22 in the novel is discovered in Yossarian’s own realization that there is no actual Catch-22 when he walks into the old man’s brothel after it had been forcibly cleared out by the MPs who cited Catch-22 as their reason for clearing the place out, and then cited Catch-22 as the reason why they don’t have to explain themselves or Catch-22 to the people they are displacing (407). Perhaps Yossarian knew all along that Catch-22 wasn’t an actual thing to be cited, but at this point in the novel it is crystal clear. This situation itself forms another Catch-22, the one that serves as the entire premise of the novel: the non-existence of a tangible law gives it a power and potency that shows its true purpose; to allow the military to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to whomever it wants to do it to, and there’s not a damn thing Yossarian or any of the other people hurt by it can do about it. Arfy gets away with rape and murder because his victim was thrown out a window after curfew: Catch-22 (419). Cathcart orders the bombing of a civilian target that doesn’t give any benefit to the military other than “bombing patterns” that the general he’s trying to impress isn’t even interested in to begin with: Catch-22 (325). Yossarian can go home, but if he goes home he has to sing praises to Cathcart and Korn, and if he doesn’t he has to face court-martial: Catch-22 (428). For a brief moment when all of these realizations dawn on Yossarian and Catch-22 ceases to be a tangible regulation and turns into the reality of the totalitarian bureaucracy that he has been thrust into and within that ethereal state becomes all the more real, and all the more representative of the very real harm that is falling onto both Yossarian and those around him. Through this existential crisis of being and then ceasing to be Catch-22 gains a much more profound and tangible existence than ever before; one that haunts Yossarian much like it did previously, but with his full awareness of the situation he is in.

Works Cited

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Critical Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is an enigma to me because it’s clear that Danielewski is a talented, well read and well-educated writer just using the novel as evidence, but once the novelty of a double narrative written in the form of an academic paper wears off both stories seem to fall flat.

Stylistically the book is near flawless, my only complaint being that the arrangement of the novel and some of the elements of an academic paper slow the narrative of the Navidson Record parts to a tedium so great that at times it feels like a chore to keep reading. The second narrative, that of Johnny Truant, which is told through the use of footnotes and a collection of letters, seems forced and unrealistic, enough to a point that the realism presented by the Navidson narrative’s style of suspension of disbelief is just not enough. From the way he describes himself it seems completely out of character for someone like Truant to be editing something like Zampano’s (the author of the Navidson Record) essay.  It seemed so forced and most of the Truant portions just made me want to put down the novel or skip ahead, of which I did a lot of the latter and none of the former (though it should be noted the some of Zampano’s chapters have that same effect).

The novel seems like it’s just avant-garde for the sake of being so, and that’s just not enough. There are many loose ends by the time it’s over with the Truant story, so many that I was noticeably unhappy with myself for trudging through the whole thing. As far as being the rare literary horror novel, it certainly fits the bill, but it is not nearly accessible enough for me to justify recommending it to someone under that pretense.

The only people I would recommend House of Leaves to are people who are either interested in seeing what all the buzz was about (I admit that it was warranted) and those interested in examining the style, if only to observe where Danielewski succeeded and where he fell short. It could have been a great novel, but it’s only okay at best for a lot of reasons, and the massive effort that is reading it is a big reason to avoid it altogether.

Critical Review: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

I picked up Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee on a whim. One of my favorite professors would always end his handouts with a quote from the guy so the decision seemed to make itself for me, and yes, I did get my namesake from him before I knew anything about him just because I found it funny (if you get the joke…I’m so, so sorry). Much like my first experience with brilliant authors like Alasdair Gray and Cormac McCarthy, I had no idea what to expect, and I was astounded by what I discovered within those pages.

First off, the novel is extremely short. It would be possible to polish it off in an afternoon, but reading it that quickly one would fail to take in the complex beauty of Coetzee’s prose. It was the first novel in a long time that I’ve had to read with a dictionary on hand, though it’s important to note that none of the obscure language seems forced and flows smoothly from sentence to sentence, and even then it’s only common enough to warrant having a dictionary nearby and a reader wouldn’t find themselves constantly leafing through to find out what the narrator is saying. Within a paragraph Coetzee evokes the emotion and imagery that could easily fill pages by a less succinct writer, but again, the flow is still flawless and it never feels like you’re being forced into appreciating the story. I would even argue that the style used in Waiting for the Barbarians is perfect for the first-person narrative that the story is conveyed through, in that you’re actually reading the narrator’s thought process as he moves through the story; rather than being told what he’s thinking, you are able to experience it first-hand. This approach is one of the best I’ve ever read, and it’s lamentable that more authors don’t try to do this, regardless of genre. Unless the framing is just right, a wordy first-person narrative is just unrealistic, and that sense of reality that Coetzee gives to the reader is the chief reason that this is a fantastic work of literature, and leads into the second reason why this novel is a must read for anybody: the realism of the way the story is told and the simple premise of the allegory of the oppressor and oppressed that is expressed in almost every sense that the premise can be taken with makes this novel one of the easiest pieces of literature for almost anyone to be able to identify with. Whether it’s rape, imperialism, militarism, bureaucracy or what have you, that simple relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is drawn out and detailed so vividly and with so much variation that to not be able to identify with at least some aspects of it would be to never have existed in the first place. This theme completely dominates the novel, but again, never in a way that seems forced or obtuse; the narrator finds himself in situation after situation that all fit that common theme but are different enough to throw off the reader just enough to push them to finish the novel. Never is there a sense of repetition of predictability until you have finished the book and begin processing what you just experienced.

As I am vehemently anti-spoiler in my reviews, of the story I will say only this. It takes place on a border hamlet of a vast militaristic and nameless Empire. The main character is a figure of authority in that little town. The chief fear of the Empire is that the natives who are referred to by all the imperial citizens as “barbarians” are trying to push the Empire out of their lands leading the Empire to launch a preemptive strike, and from that initial fear stem all of the conflicts and relationships found within the novel. In a future writing I will analyze the allegory in much more detail, but now, I encourage you to read the novel and analyze it for yourself. Waiting for the Barbarians is one of the finest pieces of literature I have ever read, and much like Poor Things, I recommend it to anyone.

Literary Analysis: Milo Minderbinder, Fascism, and Neoliberalism in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the character Milo Minderbinder serves as Heller’s symbol for profiteering and capitalism in the face of warfare. Throughout the novel Milo plays everyone to his advantage in order to make a profit. To the Nazis he is a valuable trading partner and occasional mercenary whenever it suits him, going so far as to provide them with information by an upcoming American attack and even bombing his own squadron when M&M Enterprises was in dire financial straits (Heller 256). To the Italians he is a trade baron not unlike Lorenzo de Medici; lording over the economy of several Italian cities and states and dominating both their militaries and economies (234). To the Americans he is a plague, though the brass doesn’t tend to see it that way because they buy into his idea of whatever is good for the syndicate is good for the country.  To the men who are actually doing the flying, however, his motivations are crystal clear; he steals the silk out of their parachutes, the morphine out of their first aid kits, and kills several of them in his infamous bombing run (which he wasn’t even punished or) all in the name of making a few bucks, honest or otherwise (436). The only country that Milo has any qualms about making any deals with is the Soviet Union (254), only out of principle and respect for private property and disdain for socialism, but even that belief that the government has no place in business is out the window as soon as Yossarian informs him that there’s money to be made with some help from the government, never mind that all the money he has made has been acquired by selling off government property to pocket for himself (265). Milo’s mind is so racked in pursuit of new markets and ways to exploit someone or something that he can’t even be bothered feeling bad for the things he’s responsible for, justifying and rationalizing everything he can as part of the greater good of his syndicate, and therefore, the nation. Milo is also notable for his callous disregard for people who he proclaims to be his friends, specifically Yossarian, as shown when he completely tosses his well being aside when deliberating with Col. Cathcart about how to get him more medals and missions by having the other men fly in his stead (375).

The fact that Milo seems to favor the Germans and Italians to the Americans and Soviets seems to imply that he is a fascist, but that is not the case. Fascism is a far more complicated movement and set of beliefs than just corporate interests merging with the government for their own betterment (McChesney 8). While it’s true that Hitler and the Nazis did initially gain power with the support of the corporate oligarchy from their promise to remove the Communist threat in Germany, that alone cannot account for all the many facets of fascism. Neither is Milo without ideology, though it’s understandable how such a misconception can be made when he quickly flip flops on the role of government when his profit margins are involved. Milo is a capitalist to the core, or more specifically, he is a neoliberal (9). It’s ironic that Heller would be able to create such a neoliberal archetype by the time of the publication of Catch-22, seeing as the United States, though quite imperialist for the better part of a century by this point, would not begin to start its march toward neoliberalism and the policies it represents until far later in the decade (arguably, even several decades later) (Chomsky 23). Neoliberalism, in its simplest definition, is capitalism taken to its full and logical extension. When markets fail to deliver, when the invisible hand is no longer guiding capital into the deep pockets of the landed and moneyed elites, the capitalist is quick to turn to the government for help (38). All the dogma of bootstraps and being well-to-do is quickly out the window if there’s a chance that the government can help keep profits up, and that kind of “do as I say, not as I do” style of capitalist – true capitalism – is as true of Milo Minderbinder as it is of Goldman Sachs, AIG, and perhaps most fittingly, Halliburton and KBR (58). Milo would no doubt be the last to mention that any gains he has made have been the result of government subsidies, support, and patronage, instead attributing his success to his own hard work and ingenuity.

Two things stand out as the reasons that Milo Minderbinder is the most interesting character of Catch-22. The first is his creation. Historically speaking, Joseph Heller didn’t have much to base the character on, and it is either a sheer coincidence or the sign of a well-read and astute mind that the character has served as such an accurate harbinger of the post-1945 decades to come with regards to American politics, both domestic and foreign.  The second is that, in being such an accurate personification of neoliberalism, Milo Minderbinder might be the most inadvertently studied and analyzed literary figure in the history of storytelling. Just a glance at my own bookshelf shows four writers (Zinn, Chomsky, Klein, and Chang) who have built their reputations and published careers on analyzing and detailing the ideology that the prolific Milo would come to represent.

Works Cited:

Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. 1^st ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. 23-58.

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

McChesney, Robert W. “Introduction.” Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order.1^st ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. 8-9.

Critical Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Pardon the lateness, I was encumbered by a very busy, very hectic, and very stressful weekend, so the review had to be pushed back to Monday.

I have mixed feeling about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. On the one hand, it might be the first great novel of the 21st century. There is no doubt in my mind that, although it’s not generally considered McCarthy’s magnum opus, that The Road will be discussed, debated, analyzed, and taught in high schools and universities in a few decades. The mixed feelings come from the idea of recommending it to casual readers. Anyone who reads a lot of serious literature should have no problems with The Road. They will be perfectly comfortable with the sometimes slow pacing, the style of the dialogue, and the general tone of the novel. The casual reader, on the other hand, may find it tedious, unnecessarily complicated in its simplicity, and generally boring. With that in mind, I recommend The Road to anyone who is interested in getting a head start on academia and reading a fantastic piece of literature before it replaces The Great Gatsby in the classroom.

Simply put, the novel is an exercise in describing and personifying the end of the world, the totality of desolation, in brief but beautiful prose. The Road itself is an example of how a talented writer like McCarthy can tell the story of Armageddon and the aftermath by embracing the cliches of genre-fiction that deals with the same premise and imbuing them with a sense of literary worth. The Road is a masterfully painted picture of the breakdown of humanity, even in the protagonist that we have no choice but to empathize with until the very end. It is bleak, a tragedy of epic proportions where even the few glimmers of hope are quickly struck down before they can materialize, but it is a bleakness and hopelessness that is conveyed to the reader so thoroughly and completely that one can’t help but feel they need to keep reading to the end just to see if the next little flicker pans out for the protagonist, or at least to bear witness to his suffering.

Perhaps that is the greatest achievement of all in The Road. McCarthy creates a world for the reader that no one would wish upon their greatest enemy, a world where there is only dust, death, and destruction, and yet the reader will find themselves plunging deeper and deeper into the novel just to experience the end of all things, which the novel conveys flawlessly.

Critical Review: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things is one of my favorite novels. Before you continue reading my review of it, I urge you now to click the link and buy it. You’d be hard pressed to find any of the Scottish authors works in American bookstores (though Poor Things would be the most likely that you would find) simply because he is not very widely carried this side of the Atlantic. That said, on to the review.

Poor Things is many things. It’s hard to really pin it into a single genre. On the one hand, it’s sci-fi fantasy, but then that quickly gets turned on its head halfway into the book and it becomes realistic and believable – so believable, in fact, that when initially published, bookstores and reviewers simply did not know how to classify it and just labelled it as non-fiction. To avoid reader confusion (as funny as it would be), I’ll clear that up now: the book is entirely fiction, and the Alasdair Gray that is referenced in the book is a fictionalized version. When Gray refers to himself in first person, it’s not the actual Alasdair Gray talking – it’s the character. This epistolary framing of the novel no doubt played a large part in fooling the retail community, though the rest of the novel no doubt contributes to the intrigue.

The novel is structured as such: an introduction by the fictionalized Alasdair Gray, the contents of the manuscript of Archibald McCandless, a letter from his wife Victoria McCandless, and some parting comments from Alasdair Gray (again, fictionalized). The novel has so many themes that it’s impossible to really narrow any down. Feminism, socialism and labor struggles, chauvinism; these are just some of the things touched on by Gray in this novel. I see this novel as the real-life Gray’s critique of British Liberalism, though in that judgment I myself may be among the legions of literary critics and analysts who have been fooled by this brilliant author.

Now, all that aside, here is what the novel is actually about. It is, at heart, a parody of romanticism and Victorianism. It is a kind of retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At the same time, however, it isn’t. It’s really hard to describe Poor Things as anything other than perhaps the most underrated piece of English literature of the 20^th century. It is hilarious from start to finish. It is fully illustrated by the author, who also drew the cover (Gray being an artist by trade). The book is filled to the brim with literary and illustrated symbolism that should not be ignored. The book demands the reader to finish it, and after finishing calls back for a second, possibly third, rereading.

In short, it is a must own. Poor Things is a literary masterpiece and its rarity in the United States makes it a real treasure worthy of placement on any collector or avid reader. I have recommended books on this blog before, but this is the first book that I demand you buy (or at least read if you can get your hands on it from a library). You do yourself a great disservice letting it pass by.

Critical Review: Eden by Tony Monchinski/Tommy Arlin

So I’ve been trying to figure out who to properly credit for the writing of Eden. It’s either Tony Monchinski or Tommy Arlin. The cover says Tony, but the rest of the book says Tommy. For the purposes of this review I’ll just assume that they both contributed to the effort. Another review I saw suggests that Tommy Arlin may himself be a fictional character, but if that’s the case I don’t comprehend what the literary significance of it could be, so I’ll simply pretend I never read that.

As with my review of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, I’ll go over what I dislike about the novel before anything else. The most glaring problem with Eden is that it seems that no one bothered to edit it. It’s full of typos and misused words. If there was an editor they didn’t do a very good job. Honestly, I’m surprised that the book even got published with so many glaring typos, but from the looks of publisher Permuted Press, they don’t really seem to be in the business of serious literature.

Typos aside, as far as pop literature goes (especially the horror zombie sub-sub-genre), it really isn’t half bad. The style is completely disjointed ala Catch-22, and even though one could make the argument that such writing has been done to death, I don’t think the case could be made that it has been done to death…with zombies. Unlike the legendary Catch-22, however, Eden doesn’t really convey any sort of meaningful message; I get that it’s just a zombie novel, but there was potential to do more with it.

That in itself may not be a great selling point, but how this novel stands apart from the rest in this genre is that it’s not just another super-cliché action novel. Rather, it’s a murder mystery. The plot revolves around the character Harris, who is bitten and infected in the very beginning of the novel, and after an investigation into the matter realizes that someone let the zombies into Eden, an NYC based human enclave, in order to kill him and his lover. From then on its him trying to figure out who did it and, more importantly, to avenge himself before his time as a human runs out. To me Harris came off as Eden’s Yossarian but without any of the depth or charm that made him such a sympathetic and memorable character. There’s a little bit here and there, but it’s not much, and none of the characters in general seem to be as traumatized as one would expect the last survivors of the crawling undead plague to be.

The final word on Eden is this. If you like zombie novels, from the few I’ve read this one is definitely one of the better ones. It’s no World War Z which I would recommend to any reader, but it’s certainly worth looking into if this particular sub-sub-genre floats your boat. I’m not really a fan of it myself, and therefore it will probably the one and only novel like it that I will review.

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Classic Critical Review: The role of SMERSH in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale

For the most part, I enjoyed reading Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. As the debut novel of the James Bond series, it serves its purpose well in establishing the mood and technical aspects of Cold War spy games, as well as exposing the world to the character of James Bond. The only problem that I have with the novel is that, even granting that it isn’t a serious work of literature, the entire adventure of 007 and his associates seem completely unnecessary as early as the second chapter with the revelation that MI:6 already suspects that the Soviet anti-spy group SMERSH is already on Le Chiffre’s (the main antagonist) trail (Fleming 19).

Directly after revealing MI:6′s dossier of Le Chiffre, Fleming gives the reader a rundown on the history, efficiency, and merciless brutality of the organization that the Soviet Union used to tie up loose ends in its foreign and domestic intelligence affairs. The group is the most powerful and feared organization in the union, so efficient that it is believed that they have not failed a single mission, that they were responsible for the assassination of Leon Trotsky and other undesirable political elements, and that it was originally a branch of the infamous N.K.V.D. and the only part of the organization to have survived its post-Great Patriotic War dissolution (23). The problem that Le Chiffre faces with this organization is that he has been grossly mismanaging the funds that the Soviet Union had appropriated him for the organization of favorable labor movements in France, and had lost the vast majority of the money in a failed brothel investment (18). Le Chiffre’s plan is to save himself and his position by playing playing a high stakes game of baccarat with what remained of the funds; a game that he as the banker has a slightly worse than 50/50 chance at coming out as a winner. The agency concludes, based on Le Chiffre’s decision to try and win back the money he lost, that he doesn’t yet suspect that he has a SMERSH agent on his tail, which leads the reader into believing that whether Le Chiffre comes up with the money or not, in the end he’s a dead man (19). At the same time however, the agency also concludes that they cannot personally assassinate Le Chiffre in order to prevent him from even attempting to win back the money because Leningrad would simply make a martyr out of him to drum up public support rather than just punishing him (21). The question this brings up is what is to stop SMERSH from simply arranging their own killing of Le Chiffre to look like it was done by MI:6, the CIA, or other similar agencies? More importantly, if the British know that SMERSH is after Le Chiffre, and that Le Chiffre doesn’t yet know that his time is running out regardless of whether he wins the money back or not, why is it even necessary for the French, English, and Americans to get involved and risk losing large amounts of money for what is seemingly a complete non-issue with only one possible ending?

The fact is, it doesn’t. The entire adventure doesn’t make any sense. Not because of a lack of realism, anyway, aside from James Bond and the CIA and French operatives being involved in the matter. Casino Royale, though a classic, does not hold up well to anything beyond superficial scrutiny. Though it does a great job at introducing us to the character of James Bond and setting us up for a series with a well developed protagonist, the plot just comes apart two chapters into the novel. Definitely give it a read just to see where the cultural behemoth that is 007 originated, but don’t expect much in the way of a coherent story.

Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. New York: Macmillan Company, 1953.*

*(The copy I own is a second edition hardcover, so the citations may not match up to a current printing if you try to verify my claims. By the end of the second chapter you should have covered all of them, though.)