Goldfinger

I’m reading some of my childhood favorites aloud with my teenaged son. We did Dr. No, which he loved. Goldfinger is holding his interest, but it’s not the same. Fleming knows a lot about a lot of things, and in this one, he can’t resist proving it to you. So, there’s a golf game. All eighteen holes. Seriously. Each one is described. Then there’s the long section where Bond tracks Goldfinger’s Rolls down the back roads of France. You hear about all the turns. He name- drops hotels and restaurants. It’s just a bit much. Still, it’s Bond, and worth checking out, if only to remind yourself how much more realistic the books were than the silliness of the movies (Goldfinger wasn’t that silly a movie, but it was early). The racism and sexism are hard to ignore for modern readers, and I have to say that I’m coming to the conclusion that Fleming was probably not a person I’d have liked much. The rudimentary spycraft stuff (hidden cameras!) is fun. Still, I don’t think I’d rate this as one of his best, in spite of its famous title.

Ian Fleming can write a heck of an adventure story. He has a knack for pulling a reader through outrageous situations and putting a heck of a spin on even mundane happenings. I honestly never expected to be enthralled with the written description of a golf game, but even with the anachronistic language I found the duel between Goldfinger and Bond a page turner. I will note that the sequence of events in the latter half of the novel feels unlikely and stretch believability far more than any prior Bond adventure. We go from a fairly strait forward escapade giving a rich twat his comeuppance to an unlikely plot to destroy the American economy in a few pages. The character of Goldfinger thus becomes the epitome of the Bond Villain who mysteriously keeps the agent along for a ride instead of ending things with a bullet.
The problem with Bond is the problem of colonial worldview. As with his thoughts on Africans and the Chinese, Bond finds Koreans to be subhuman. Every depiction of a Korean in the novel is riddled with animal imagery, and the characters oblige with little compunction for human life. We further discover Bonds view of pansies and Lesbians in Goldfinger. Evidently they are a sad result of the vote and equality for women. Gender roles becoming all mixed up. To a man like Bond, the lesbian Pussy Galore just needs a real man to return to the side of the angels, and the resulting notch on his bedpost marking her conversion would be the equivalent achievement of Goldfinger successfully robbing Fort Knox.
This was not so much a genre potboiler as a literary sensation in its time. It created one of the most enduring media franchises. It is instructive to see how a jetsetting Brit of the 50s felt about the world his peers and admirers were building around him. A world that provides most of the foundations of our reality today.

Having only seen the films over the years, I had no idea what the books would be like. They are thoroughly entertaining! They definitely a product of their time and place, Granted, the occasional racism, misogyny, and thinly veiled contempt that the protagonist /author have for anyone who is not a straight, white male, can be off putting. Its still a fun read, if one can keep in mind, that it is truly fiction and fantasy of a primarily “hetro” nature, and not to be taken seriously….

The seventh novel in the Ian Fleming James Bond series is quite good, while the big-screen cinematic adaptation is only marginally superior. Unlike some 007 escapades, “Goldfinger” was rather audacious for its time. The Bank of England is losing gold, and the Bank has determined through its own investigation that Goldfinger is the wealthiest man in England. The problem is that Goldfinger is smuggling vast amounts out of the country to India where he can sell it for greater profits. The British Secret Service dispatches Bond to shadow Goldfinger. Interestingly enough, Bond has encountered Goldfinger before he is assigned to follow him. At the outset of the novel, Bond is sitting in the Miami Airport Terminal, reflecting on having killed a Mexican drug thug when Mr. DuPont approaches him out of the blue. DuPont remembers Bond from their meeting in France in the first Bond novel “Casino Royal” and asks him to help him with a private matter. DuPont is being taken to the cleaners by a man who never seems to lose, and he wants to know if Bond can figure out how his adversary is beating him so consistently at cards. This sounds a little like M’s request in “Moonraker” when he wants Bond to figure out how Sir Hugo Drax has won so much without losing. Bond discovers that Goldfinger is cheating DuPont because he has a beautiful girl in the hotel room above them looking at DuPont’s cards and relaying the information to Goldfinger by means of a rake hearing aid. Bond shatters Goldfinger’s spree. Anyway, Goldfinger plans the crime of the century, takes Bond hostage, and forces him to work with him or suffer the penalty of death. Goldfinger wants to knock over Fort Knox and invites the major crime bosses in America to join him. The heist is incredible, and it is different from the one in the Sean Connery movie. Goldfinger’s Korean bodyguard Oddjob is in the book and he has his deadly bowler hat. Fleming writes concisely, but the golf game between 007 and he is for golf enthusiasts only. Yes, the lesbian crime gal Pussy Galore appears, but she runs an army of chat burglars instead of a flying circus as in the movie. The novel “Goldfinger” with its ambitious caper ranks as one of the more imaginative Bond novels. I have read it three times now and still love it.

I bought the first seven Bond novels when they were on offer a while back and have been working through them; having got to this, the seventh, I have decided that enough is enough.
The very poor writing of the first two or three improves as the series goes along and I can live with the formula, viz.: outlandish pantomime villain, OTT plot and OTT action.
What puts me off are Bond’s (and, presumably, IF’s) attitudes and prejudices – racism sexism, snobbishness, etc. – I know they are of their time but, sixty years later, they just grate too much.
In this one, we have Goldfinger, who is short and a ranga (I only learned that word a few days ago, when Prince Harry was confronted in Australia by a little girl holding a sign saying “Rangas Rule” – he was delighted when he was told that ranga is an Aussie term of endearment for redheads – I bet nobody told him that it is derived from orang-utan); Bond’s thoughts on Goldfinger are: “Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world. And what about a misshapen short man with red hair and a bizarre face? That might add up to a really formidable misfit.”
Further on, amongst all the rest of the isms and after learning about the true natures of Koreans, we have: “Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and sex equality. As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.”
Then in the final scene, we find that Bond is just the man to “cure” Pussy Galore of her lesbianism.
That’s enough for me.

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