I am reading, and rationing, the Bond novels as a way to slow down and possibly even switch gears between more serious books. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy them; I enjoy them tremendously. They are taught, exciting, and paradoxically both spartan and decadent at the same time. As they go on, though, Fleming includes more and more non-Caucasians (and now, in Goldfinger, a lesbian as well) in his roster of villains and henchman, and he is very much a product of his time in that his racism is both casual and startlingly complete. Certain passages about Goldfinger’s Korean henchmen are downright uncomfortable—or should be—for any modern reader.
This, the seventh of the 007 books, was also a bit less compelling than many of its predecessors because, like Dr. No, it begins very reasonably but slips into an almost film-like parody of itself. Goldfinger’s schemes are unreasonably grand for a book that begins so modestly, and though the plan for his attack on Fort Knox is much more plausible here than in the film (one of the best Bond films, for the record), it’s simply too much for the hard-boiled world of Bond to sustain. Bond the character is better developed in this novel, however. Much of the first two chapters is devoted to his musings on how killing affects him, whether it’s proper or even healthy for him to view it as a necessary evil rather than abhorrent to his humanity, whether the sacrifices he made to do his job and be a killer are greater than he had earlier realized (he even wants to simply get drunk and forget, a surprising turn, particularly since the amount of alcohol in his system already at that point is more than enough to signal him as an alcoholic). Later, when he sees the inhabitants of Fort Knox playing dead (he thinks they really are dead) he can’t help but imagine sixty-thousand more souls racked up against his own, and though it gives him renewed vigor for his fight against Goldfinger and SMERSH, it also reinforces the existential crisis of the earlier chapters.
For my next book, I’ve got a first (English) edition of Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave.
