James Bond got much cooler, and a bit dumber, with his seventh novel. Subtlety got ejected as pure escapism took the wheel, delivered with gusto and without apology.
It’s not Ian Fleming’s best novel, or even a particularly good one. But Goldfinger is closer in spirit to what we think of today as a 007 adventure, an adrenaline-charged thriller with a campy twist. It also became the springboard for the most culturally important of Bond films, unleashing superhuman Korean henchmen, gorgeous lesbian gangsters, and a plot to steal billions of dollars in pure gold from Fort Knox.
Sounds crazy, yes, but most of the way Goldfinger is simply a ripping good yarn, with an intriguing set-up, some clever misdirection, and a nifty three-part structure based on a warning Bond is given by the chief villain and title character: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
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| Author Ian Fleming, as sculpted by Anthony Smith to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth in 2008. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming. |
Of course, Bond doesn’t care so much whether Goldfinger is alerted to him. Like the reader, he’s just wants some enemy action.
Bond’s ruthlessness was established long ago, if gentled by a certain ennui. Here Fleming doubles down on his hardness in the opening page:
It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it…If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional – worse, it was death-watch beetle in the soul.
Goldfinger starts Bond at the end of a dangerous mission, nursing his second double bourbon at a Miami airport remembering with surprising pathos how he got the drop on a marijuana-glazed assassin the day before:
...life had gone of the body so quickly, so utterly, that Bond had almost seen it come out his mouth as it does, in the shape of a bird, in Haitian primitives.
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| As Goldfinger begins, Bond has just destroyed an opium-producing poppy field in Mexico like this one. Fleming returned to illegal opium production for one of his few non-Bond projects, a film treatment called "The Poppy Is Also A Flower," produced after his death. Photo by James Fredrick from https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/01/14/571184153/. |
Bond’s gloomy musings are broken up by a fellow named Du Pont, himself a nice callback to the climactic card game in Casino Royale. It’s Du Pont that introduces Bond to a shady business tycoon named Auric Goldfinger, recalling Bond’s way with cards and suggesting maybe he can help figure out how Goldfinger cheats Du Pont at canasta.
Bond, looking for lighter work, says sure. So he goes undercover as a salesman and meets Goldfinger for the first time, noticing the man wears a hearing aid and insists on facing the hotel. Ocean views trigger his agoraphobia, he claims.
Figuring out Goldfinger’s trickery proves surprisingly easy, not to mention fortuitous for Bond when he meets Goldfinger’s beautiful accomplice, Jill Masterson, who finds Bond appealing, too. Bond pockets a cool ten grand for a job well done and takes Jill on a train ride to do some rolling on the tracks.
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| Unlike card games in other Bond novels, Bond doesn't play canasta in Goldfinger. Rather, he watches Goldfinger play and figures out how he knows his opponent's cards. Image from https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/canasta-card-game-rules-411125. |
Up to here the novel is enjoyably low-key fun, entertaining if not actually lively. At least it moves better than Fleming’s prior novel, the inert Doctor No.
Fleming ups the ante with one of his best-ever set pieces, Bond and Goldfinger squaring off in a game of golf.
The setting is Royal St. Marks, a posh links course in Kent where Bond learned the game as a youth. A member himself, Goldfinger happily offers double-or-nothing stakes for Bond’s canasta takings. Their tensely-played match is offset by a bucolic ambiance:
As Bond handed his clubs to Hawker and strolled off in the wake of the more impatient Goldfinger, he smelled the sweet smell of the beginning of a knock-down-and-drag-out game of golf on a beautiful day in May with the larks singing over the greatest seaside course in the world.
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| Royal St. George's, a links golf course in Sandwich, was the inspiration for Royal St. Marks in the novel. The same year Goldfinger was published, St. George's annual Challenge Cup was won by a young American named Jack Nicklaus. Image from https://www.hiddenlinksgolf.com/england-golf-courses/royal-st-georges-golf-club/. |
It reveals something of Bond, too, that he knows how to turn this attitude to his own advantage and enjoys the clash of wills at least as much as he does the final victory.
Time and again, Fleming explains this curious trait of Bond’s, this need to test himself, as a kind of impulse he chooses not to control. That it is a form of self-destructive madness for a secret agent doesn’t faze Bond, even if he concedes the point. It comes up during the golf match, where Bond unwisely counters Goldfinger’s efficient style with overaggressive play that lands him in the sand. It also shows up in the way he continually ups the ante with Goldfinger.
Bond was always so. Back in Casino Royale we witnessed his grim fatalism that someday “he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.” But Goldfinger is the first time I began to wonder if Bond was more driven by risk, and not merely accepting of it.
When Goldfinger leaves Bond alone in his palatial estate, Bond smells a trap but can’t help himself from exploring, which proves a bad move. Another time, shadowing Goldfinger through Switzerland, Bond gets too close and winds up strapped to a table as Goldfinger lays out a lowball offer: First talk, then die.
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| "Hey, I didn't read anything about lasers in the novel..." Also missing from the book but in the 1964 movie starring Sean Connery is an Aston-Martin with ejector seat, a golden dead girl in Bond's bed, and a wetsuit that becomes a tuxedo. Image from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-20/goldfinger-laser-scene-2/10638560?nw=0. |
How does Bond get out of this? Apparently he finds in Goldfinger someone even more addicted to risk than himself.
Two novels ago, in From Russia, With Love, Bond faced danger in a grounded setting stocked with believable villains. Here, continuing the trend of Doctor No and his metal hands, the bad guys are right out of Dick Tracy:
The man turned the hands sideways. Down each side of the hands was a hard ridge of the same bony substance…This was not a man of flesh and blood. This was a living club, perhaps the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.
Thus we are introduced to Oddjob, Goldfinger’s faithful Korean manservant, who obliging destroys much of his master’s main hall to give Bond a demonstration of his powers.
Oddjob is but one nod to this outré direction. There are also a slew of gangsters with names like Jack Sprat, Jed Midnight, and Pussy Galore. Pussy’s Cement Mixers are a gang of lesbian cat burglars whose talent Goldfinger hires for his big plan. Pussy is as hard as they come, until she meets Bond:
“I came from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case I couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve. That’s not so good, James.”
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| Honor Blackman (center) plays Pussy Galore in the 1964 movie, which changed her from cat-burglar to pilot but kept the lesbian angle. Image from https://twitter.com/007/status/987730183984689153. |
There’s something to offend everyone about Pussy, but she gets your attention, which is where Goldfinger succeeds for me.
I think the movie does it better, even if I also think the movie overrated. Yet for all his missteps, it’s hard not to admire Fleming’s commitment in Goldfinger. The plot is supercharged, constantly switching gears and changing lanes, yet there is a tight structure and a clear sense of mission. Despite his faults, Bond makes for amusing company.
Thrills may be cheaper, and more than a bit nonsensical, but classic Fleming descriptions abound. Regarding the locker room of Royal St. Marks, Fleming sniffs: Why was it a tradition of the most famous golf clubs that their standard of hygiene should be that of a Victorian private school?
Fleming’s snobbery is far less welcome when it comes to describing Oddjob and his fellow Koreans. He describes them as brutal and subhuman in no uncertain terms, which takes a good deal of pleasure from the confrontations between Oddjob and Bond. I’m not sure what sparked this animus, but it crosses the line into pure race hatred and rightly left a black mark on Fleming’s record.
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| The dust jacket of the first edition, published by Jonathan Cape. Ten years ago, this autographed copy of the book sold for $5,000 British pounds. Image from https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/18992/lot/458/. |
That’s unquestionably the worst part of the book, but not far behind is Fleming’s overplotting when it comes to Goldfinger’s big plan to knock off Fort Knox, which is both gimmicky and ridiculous.
Fleming knows this, too; and assures us it is just audacity at work: When one examined these things, while they had a touch of magic, of genius even, they were logical exercises. They were bizarre only in their magnitude.
[SPOILER ALERT] Actually, Goldfinger’s plan of lifting the entire gold supply from Fort Knox would require more than a single train, a Russian sub, and a poisoned water supply. Of course it’s not Goldfinger’s audacity we wonder at, but Fleming’s. Clearly Fleming bit off more than he could chew: the battle of Fort Knox and the final fight with Goldfinger both become confusing messes which would be mercifully simplified in the film. Fleming seems to give up on these battles the same tired way he did wrapping up Doctor No.
Yet audacity has its virtues, and as the motto of the British Special Air Service reminds us, “Who Dares Wins.” Most of the time, Goldfinger is a teetering high-dive of a novel that exceeds the bounds of taste both then and now and muffs its landing but somehow left me wanting more.
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