My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Took me a long time to get through this, much much longer than needed. You decide if that’s good or bad– I was able to put it down for long periods of time, but always able to come back to it. All things considered, a pretty straight-forward read.
This is the only Fleming I’ve read, so I can’t compare this one with other Bond novels. I can compare it with the films, I suppose, though I’ve never seen the film version of Goldfinger (although I have seen A View to a Kill, which was based on Goldfinger). To say the book Bond is different from the film Bond is a huge understatement. The book Bond goes in for the finer things, cars, wines, delicacies, exotic women. But otherwise he’s nowhere near as slick. Full of doubt, not nearly as cocksure and confident. Less of a McGyver, and not at all equipped with cool gadgets.
The book includes unabashed sexism, which we might claim to see in the films. But the racism is almost reason to not read the book at all. Other than that, the plot itself is simply ridiculous. And Bond doesn’t really do much at all except follow Goldfinger around Europe. There are a few “spy” scenes with the sneaking around and the intel-gathering, but they’re meager– or, at least, not at all what I expected. Sort of boring, really, which is the opposite of what spy-work should be, in my opinion.
That said, I’m sure Fleming fans are just as satisfied with Godlfinger as they are with other Bond novels. This is not a book that’s going to change one’s status as a reader or non-reader of Ian Fleming. I only started it myself because I wanted to write a spy novel myself and I felt I should look at the archetype. Turns out what I wanted to write was the book version of the movie versions, not the original books themselves. Lesson learned.