BOOK EXTRACTS

Two similar passages from The Lifeline and Casino Royale.

Mark woke in a room full of light. Since there was light, he could not be blind, though his eyes were bandaged. He could still feel their savage thrusts against his lids. A long shudder shook him, but pain warned him not to let himself shudder again. He could not move his head or his legs.

Fever and thirst filled his consciousness. All his body was in a dull bruised state of massive pain. He could hear Ida’s voice a long way off, saying over and over again, ‘Drink this! Drink this!’ but he could not tell what she meant until at last his throat swallowed, and his thirst slackened.

He felt the touch of her hands, and heard her say,

‘It is all right now,

Mark! It is quite all right!’ But afterwards nightmares, restless, endless nightmares came and went.

The Lifeline,

Phyllis Bottome, 1946

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming. During the next two days James Bnd was permanently in this state without regaining consciousness. He watched the procession of his dreams go by without any effort to disturb their sequence, though many of them were terrifying and all were painful. He knew that he was in bed and that he was lying on his back and could not move and in one of his twilight moments he thought there were people round him, but he made no effort to open his eyes and re-enter the world…

…A woman’s voice was speaking and the words gradually penetrated to him. It seemed to be a kind voice and it slowly came to him that he was being comforted and that this was a friend and not an enemy. Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1953

Immediately after this section, Mark Chalmers and James Bond have a similar bedside conversation with a local contact in which they reflect on their own status and on the nature of good and evil.