Um Bond desconhecido

'It's all very fine,' said Bond, 'but I've been thinking about these things and I'm wondering whose side I ought to be on. I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance. There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.

'So,' continued Bond, warming to his argument, 'Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.'

Ian Fleming escreveu estas palavras em Casino Royale, na boca de um espião que, durante toda a aventura, não usa gadgets nem por uma vez dispara a sua arma. A recente versão para cinema é um passo de gigante em relação à personagem de BD que Brosnan vinha encarnando, mas está ainda longe deste animal seco, bizarro, quase medieval, com um sentido do dever extremado de origens pouco claras e uma visão (ainda mais) obtusa das mulheres. É um livro distante, quase esquemático, coberto por uma pátina que lhe dá um interesse lateral como "curiosidade". Ainda assim, muito melhor do que eu esperava.