Notes on Goldfinger
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Jill Masterton (Shirley Eaton) Falls foul of Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (1964)
While last week’s Book Club episode covering Goldfinger did a good job covering Fleming’s life and career and this particular entry in the Bond series, Sandbrook and Tabby did unfortunately cave to the temptation to jeer a bit too often for my taste. It’s not as bad as the discussion I once heard on another podcast, in which a couple of vegetarian Mormon hipsters snickered at and completely misunderstood it for a half-hour, but it did make me want to jot down a few items if only for my own sake.
Goldfinger is not my favorite of the Bond series but it has one of its best villains and served as the basis—with some actual improvements by the screenwriter—of one of the best Connery films. So, a few notes and observations:
Goldfinger isn’t the best place to dive into Fleming’s novels. I enjoy it, but as I noted on Goodreads my last time through the book, it’s the first novel of the series to feel like one of the Bond movies: a little more outlandish, a little more exotic, a little more extreme in its sentiments. The original reader approaching Goldfinger did so through six previous novels, all of which—per Buchan, whom Dominic rightly credits as an influence—“defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible” but were still more grounded adventures. Fleming intended the books to work as standalones but I think Goldfinger is best served by approaching it in publication order, or at least after first reading Casino Royale and From Russia, with Love to see the baseline from which Fleming was beginning to depart.
Dominic and Tabby make a lot of the “Bond formula” but as I’ve mentioned many times here and elsewhere, the formula is a convention of the movies. Fleming liked to experiment with form and no two Bond novels are structured exactly the same. Read Goldfinger alongside the book immediately preceding it, Dr No, and the book immediately following it, Thunderball, and you’ll see this clearly. The contrast with some of the great volumes in the series, like Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or the handful of Bond short stories is especially strong.
A lot of Dominic and Tabby’s scoffing has to do with Bond’s attitudes about… everything. I’ll simply point out two mistakes here: First, it is a great mistake to take the things Bond says when angry or frustrated as his normal perspective. Like most people, Bond says things he either doesn’t mean or regrets later. He lashes out. (The best example has to be the closing line of Casino Royale. That’s not misogyny or whatever, it’s pain.) Second, it is an even greater mistake to assume that Bond’s opinions are always Fleming’s. Fleming intentionally designed Bond to differ from himself in a variety of ways—Fleming preferred scrambled eggs to fancy food and readers often wrote to correct him on details of cuisine (or, most famously, firearms)—though Bond’s fundamental discouragement and sense of purposelessness as the Empire crumbles are certainly his creator’s.
I also think it’s a mistake to dismiss Bond’s suspicion of Goldfinger as classist because Goldfinger cheats at golf. Petty cheating is a character flaw in several Bond villains (like Hugo Drax in Moonraker) and suggests deeper corruption and a pragmatic, predatory tendency. The members of M’s club in Moonraker or the caddy in Goldfinger may scoff at Goldfinger’s new money tackiness, but Bond sees beyond this.
Goldfinger is underrated as a villain. Bond resents his cruelty and especially his parasitic character—a big contrast to other Bond villains, who often have genuine skills and accomplishments to their credit. Goldfinger is just a thief and a hoarder, a dragon sitting on his pile under a mountain. See my Goodreads notes linked above for more on this score.
Re. the stuff in the Bond novels, it’s a bit much to call Fleming’s use of real brand names “product placement.” Fleming was after verisimilitude. Ditto the details of Bond’s travel. I’ve seen it pointed out that under postwar austerity, the British reading public especially was starved for travel and enjoyed even the mundane details of airport lounges and hotel accommodations. It’s another sign of Fleming’s art that he could use Bond sitting silently at an airport to establish—from the first page—mood, tension, and character. This is the not the only time Fleming does this.
Related: Dominic and Tabby are quite right to praise Fleming’s writing. I don’t fault them for leaving it out—the episode is about the book, not every detail of Fleming’s life—but Fleming’s time working for Reuters in the 1930s was formative. Both then and in his wartime work he learned to be clear, concise, and to precisely calculate the emphasis he wanted to impart.
Finally, about Pussy Galore’s backstory: a lot of the women in the Bond series are damaged or wounded, as Bond himself is. Pussy’s background isn’t given space to breathe—though it is worth noting that it’s the hard, flippant Pussy herself who is relating it, which must have something to do with the tone—but it’s not unlike the much more detailed and sympathetically related story of Honey Rider in Dr No.
Again, it’s still mostly a good discussion but these items nagged at me. The best tribute I can pay to Dominic and Tabby is that, even though some Bond discussion on Substack and gotten me eager to reread the novels again, their episode convinced me it’s time. I have Casino Royale on standby. (As I tried to finish writing this last night, one of the kids came down with a croupy cough and we made a late-night visit to the ER for some oral steroids. I took Casino Royale with me. It’s great.) I’m just afraid that once I start I’ll ignore everything else I’m reading. (Too early to tell: I’m mostly just tired today. Stay tuned.)
The Book Club continues to be a good listen. My hope is that, having done a good job on Buchan and a reasonable job on Fleming—though I hope they’ll cover more of both—they might get to Eric Ambler sometime soon.
