UBC #2: Goldfinger

[truepenny]

UBC #2:
Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. 1959. Introd. Anthony Burgess. London: Coronet-Hodder & Stoughton, 1989.

omg I am so not the intended audience for this book.

Entirely leaving aside the racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and rampant bigotry, this is a book for people (unlike Mr. Fleming, I will not assume all of them are male) who like sports. Sports and cars and card games. Things you can win at. Things that make you feel macho.

And yet.

I did get caught up in the story, ridiculous as it is. Fleming made me, for the first time in my life, care about golf. He even made me understand golf, at least a little bit. And he writes lines like, "Mr. Springer had the glazed eyes of someone who is either very rich or very dead." So while there are things deeply, deeply wrong with the world view of this book, although it is as dated as a pint of whipping cream that's been in the back of the fridge long enough to develop an ecosystem and primitive culture, it was an enjoyable read.

There are still paragraphs that hurt, though. I won't quote them, because they are just brutally offensive, but trust me. I noticed. You'd notice, too. If James Bond survives much farther into the twenty-first century, it's going to be the movies that carry him, because in the movies, he can shed the baggage given him by his creator.

Comments

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. Goldfinger is the one where Bond has a mental monologue in which he reflects on how everything has gone downhill since women were allowed to vote, isn't it? And offers his thoughts on "gender confusion" as a result. And romantically entrances a lesbian by... uh... walking into the room.

I've read all of Fleming's novels, and am a Bond appreciator, if not what you'd call a die-hard lunatic fan. And yeah, there is shit in those books that makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. If I remember correctly, Goldfinger is probably the most offensive of all.

The film's story was a definite improvement on the book's. Not that that would be, y'know, particularly difficult. Plot was not Fleming's forte.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's the one. Also with the "explanation" of why Goldfinger's staff are all Koreans. And the immortal line: "Their eyes met and exchanged a flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals."

All Pussy Galore needs is the love of a good man to set her to rights.

... Pity she has to make do with Bond.

[sovay]

"Their eyes met and exchanged a flurry of masculine/feminine master/slave signals."

. . . Thank you, I'd managed to forget that line.

I recently saw Goldfinger for the first time: I'm now torn between a desire to re-read the novel for comparison and my actual memories of the book. Oddly enough, I don't remember so many of the same problems with From Russia With Love, although I've read it less recently (and still never seen the film).* Are you working your way through the entire Bond corpus?

*Although this remark in the introductory description of Tatiana Romanova has always left me slightly puzzled: "A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man's." Okay, Mr. Fleming, if you say so . . .

[larryhammer]

No, a purist would have looked at her behind and approved of her being a hottie.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Are you working your way through the entire Bond corpus?

Maybe. *g*

That is, I'm reading through the ones we have, either until I run out of them or I get bored.

Also, it just occurred to me that the description of Tatiana Romanova's posterior has more than a few things in common with the description of Oddjob's hands. ... flat and hard at the sides ...

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

The only James Bond I've read was the first book. Yeah, he is sexist, racist, etc, but he was a much more sympathetic character than he was in most of the movies. There was a not so quiet dispare to the character in that first book, a sort of feeling that his life was empty, and anything that wasn't meaningless in his life was well beyond his ability to deal with. Oh and he was beginning to realize that he was a self-destructive alcoholic. Do the later books shed those issues?

[stevenagy.livejournal.com]

He does have his moments. The section headings for Goldfinger -- pulled from Goldfinger's dialogue -- was probably the best in this particular book. Of course, you have to take it with a grain of salt in this day and age. Goldfinger should have killed Bond the first time they encountered each other. The golf match and everything that happens after shouldn't have come about at all.

I think the ones I liked best were From Russia With Love and Thunderball. I think those had the best plots in my opinion. Though by the later books the characterization had improved a bit. Which is why Bond's marriage in On Her Majesty's Secret Service rings true in the book and is a travesty in the movie version.

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

Last time my grandmother visited she read, and left behind, an old Ellery Queen book. The King is Dead, if I'm remembering right. It was hideously compelling in similar ways.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm very fond of Ellery Queen, although I'm not going to leap to their (Lee and Dannay's) defense. They're dated, just as Fleming is dated.

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

I think I find books that are dated or very foreign to be in some ways easier to read for enjoyment. In part because I feel like they've outlived any need to be defended. They are what they are. I don't mind unless the indefensible ranting is -really- bad, and even then it's interesting.

It's not my culture to live in or try to change.

I read Moby Dick recently. Though it's dripping with racism by modern standards, I had the impression it was scandalously liberal for its time -- much like Twain's Huckleberry Finn -- and the antique racist fight aginst racism was really fun.

I didn't have the same distance from that Ellery Queen book, but only because it was my grandmothers. She was/is a superhero fighter for equality and justice, and of course lived right in the middle of times when the opinions in these books were the norm.

She picked it up as an action-packed airplane book, but I ended up fasinated on many more levels than were intended.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

As I recall, the James Bond of the books was a much colder, less suave fellow than the movie Bond. Book-Bond is actually a more realistic post-WWII operative, pretty much heartless and detached, wtihout the little quirks and glib retorts that made him popular in the movies. Casino Royale I found to be the worst, actually, so it surprises me that they're rebooting with that one. They're good books, don't get me wrong. But Fleming wasn't writing a hero. It was the movies that made him into one.

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

Right. Timothy Dalton apparently tried to draw the filmic Bond closer to the original character in the books - he's a splendid actor, and thought that book-Bond was a more interesting character. That didn't go down well at all, of course.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

I read several of the Bond books when I was a teenager, and while I liked them well enough at the time, I remember being struck by the...mis...mys...the attitude toward women (sorry, my spelling skillz have deserted me this morning; it's not a good day). I'm not sure I'd want to read them again, twenty years later.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I read all the James Bond books when I was in middle school. My parents never paid attention to what I was reading.

I did somehow survive. I remember at the time being more mocking of the dated elements than anything else.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I have no argument with your desription of all the obnoxious things about Bond, his worldview and his environs, but I always read this as parody rather than seriously.

Have you read any of Peter Fleming's travel writing ? I would recommend it to you, particularly Travels in Tartary, which is both excellent in and of itself and has something of the suggestion, from a seventy-years-later perspective, that Peter Fleming was doing intelligence work between the lines. It's tempting to read Bond as Ian Fleming doing nasty-minded caricature of his globe-trotting big brother.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I would like to believe it's intended as parody. But.

Pussy Galore and Tilly Masterton behave exactly as Bond's worldview expects them to. Goldfinger's description of Koreans fits Oddjob to a T. If it was parody, there would be some undercutting somewhere. (Bond observing Oddjob letting the cat out the back door, for example.) But the narrative takes cars and guns and golf games just as seriously as Bond does, as far as I can tell.

otoh, M and Bond's spat over Bond's Beretta at the beginning of Doctor No could be parody. I can't tell, and am waiting to see if there's payoff later in the book.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yay! for Peter, Ian Fleming's smarter brother; I second that recommendation of his travel writing. Tho' I hadn't heard of him as a model for Bond, that honour goes to Fitzroy Maclean in my own rumour mill (http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/60654.html).

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

I think the only one I ever read was Casino Royale (not 100% sure that was the title, but I think that was it) because it was set in my home town. Apparently, in the time period in which Fleming was writing, Troy, NY, was a hotbed of Mafia activity.

And now I live just down the road from Apalachin, location of the infamous Mafia bust that captured so many of the high-level players of the east coast.

There may be some thematic correlation there. Or it may just be a weird coincidence.

[carbonel]

I devoured all the books when I was in high school, though I rolled my eyes a great deal (even then) at most of the sex stuff. It was other things that stuck with me, like Felix Leiter's disquisition on how to double the number of martinis from one bottle of gin, and (once I learned to play bridge) the rigged hand in (IIRC) Moonraker.

The only one I really disliked was The Spy Who Loved Me, which is told in first person from the viewpoint of the female character -- and the first half or so of the book is about her sorry love life.

[luna-the-cat.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but I always got the impression that Fleming really was that misogynistic. That it wasn't just a put-on attitude for the book.

I couldn't actually finish reading the one Bond book I picked up. The writing was very, very good, but there were too many things in it that made me queasy.