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Editorial Review Book Description
Auric Goldfinger, the most phenomenal criminal Bond has ever faced, is an evil genius who likes his cash in gold bars and his women dressed only in gold paint. After smuggling tons of gold out of Britain into secret vaults in Switzerland, this powerful villain is planning the biggest and most daring heist in history-robbing all the gold in Fort Knox. That is, unless Secret Agent 007 can foil his plan. In one of Ian Fleming's most popular adventures, James Bond tracks this most dangerous foe across two continents and takes on two of the most memorable villains ever created-a human weapon named Oddjob and a luscious female crime boss named Pussy Galore. REVIEW; A superlative thriller from our foremost literary magician. (The New York Herald Tribune)
Auric Goldfinger, the most phenomenal criminal Bond has ever faced, is an evil genius who likes his cash in gold bars and his women dressed only in gold paint. After smuggling tons of gold out of Britain into secret vaults in Switzerland, this powerful villain is planning the biggest and most daring heist in history-robbing all the gold in Fort Knox. That is, unless Secret Agent 007 can foil his plan. In one of Ian Fleming's most popular adventures, James Bond tracks this most dangerous foe across two continents and takes on two of the most memorable villains ever created-a human weapon named Oddjob and a luscious female crime boss named Pussy Galore. REVIEW; A superlative thriller from our foremost literary magician. (The New York Herald Tribune) ... Read more Customer Reviews (26) 
Bond and the Man of Gold
Of the fourteen James Bond books written by Ian Fleming, Goldfinger is the seventh, and when I finished it, I'd reached the halfway point in the series.With the previous book, Dr. No, we got the first true Bond villain, the man with truly megalomaniacal plans that is typical of most of the movies.In Goldfinger, we get another such villain, plus a new first:the first villain's sidekick.These sidekicks are usually the supertough hired muscle, and few are more intimidating than Goldfinger's servant, Oddjob.
Goldfinger actually begins similarly to Moonraker.In the earlier novel, Bond is initially introduced to the villain Hugo Drax when trying to catch him cheating at bridge.In this book, the game is canasta, but Bond still catches Goldfinger in the act.Auric Goldfinger is an extremely wealthy man with an obsession for gold and a mysterious past.With little in the way of scruples and possible ties to SMERSH, Bond's chance encounter develops into an assignment to derail Goldfinger's smuggling operations.
A second "chance" encounter will lead to a golf game between the two, with Goldfinger trying again to cheat to victory.Later, Bond will begin to get the goods on his foe, but will eventually wind up in Goldfinger's clutches.Like all Bond villains, Goldfinger is interested in explanatory monologues and elaborate schemes, in this case, one involving the theft of all the gold in Fort Knox.
Although it has some of the stuff that would later become cliches, this novel is still Fleming at his peak, maybe just slightly less good than From Russia With Love and Dr. No.If you're a Bond fan, this will definitely not disappoint.
Super Reader
More dodgy card players. This book was fun reading, being a canasta player at the time. Bond busts Goldfinger using a spotter to cheat, and makes him pay back what he owes to people.
Not knowing who he is, when Bond is back with MI6 resources available, he checks him out, and finds out he is a gold smuggler, and even worse, is working for those SMERSH super villain types.
Goldfinger has an audacious plan to bust into Fort Knox with some serious weaponry, and using nerve gas. Leiter and Bond work to oppose him, but Goldfinger has some seriously talented help. Pussy Galore and her Catwoman crew of acrobatic purloiners, and Oddjob, the asian anti-John Steed.
Luckily, during this book, Bond has more Q-Branch toys.
James Bond #7: Lustre Bluster
You won't find perhaps the most quoted lines from "Goldfinger" in the novel that were heard in the film:
Bond: "Do you expect me to talk?"
Goldfinger: "No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die."
That's because the filmmakers, in this case anyway, wisely decided to rewrite the entire story for their script.
I've been rereading all of the 007 novels and have just finished reading Andrew Lycett's insightful biography of Ian Fleming, so I've been pretty immersed in the whole James Bond experience (why not?It is, after all, 2007).I bought the new special edition DVD collections and can't wait for "Casino Royale" to hit DVD this spring as seeing it several times in the theatres.
Of the first seven novels, I'm standing by "Casino Royale" and "From Russia, With Love" as the best.I liked them 20 years ago and I like them now.
But I would probably put "Goldfinger" with "Moonraker": worth reading but not as good as the others.
The ambitious plot to rob Fort Knox just doesn't come off.Bond himself even sums up the absurdity of it in the film version ("...now you've only got a few hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines show up to make you put it all back").In the novel, Goldfinger proposes to use a small atomic device to blast the safes of Fort Knox--a explosion that would probably require some serious excavating to get the irradiated gold loaded up and out of there.In the film, he wants to blast the US gold supply with a dirty bomb to increase the value of his own stockpile.
Goldfinger's plan and Lex Luthor's San Andreas land scheme from the first Superman movie are the two great evil plots of hero movies, as far as I'm concerned.
As Bond concedes in the film, "My apologies, Goldfinger, it's an inspired plan."
Although she has the most infamous name of all the Bond girls, Pussy Galore shows up as an afterthought, an undeveloped character whose sexuality is gossiped about and then chucked aside for the obligatory final coupling with 007.Fleming devotes far more time to Bond's golf game with Goldfinger than he does Pussy's character.The movie spends more time fleshing her character out!
Some scenes were actually funny, such as when Oddjob demonstrates his karate by splintering Goldfinger's staircase and fireplace before dinner as Goldfinger admits that he doesn't really care for his house.It was also funny and somewhat racist for Goldfinger to hand over his pet cat to feed Oddjob when kitty got blamed for something.There were actually two foul swipes in this novel: the insistence that Koreans love eating cats and that American Southerners rape their sisters (Pussy Galore asks Bond at one point, "What do you call a little girl in the South who can outrun her brother?A virgin.")
The novel was more interesting this time when I pictured new 007 Daniel Craig in the scenes.The "blunt instrument" Bond makes more sense in this one.
But here's something I've almost never said about any adaption: the movie was better.
A solid James Bond novel with a few quirks
First of all, let me disclose that I really like all of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and I particularly like and admire Fleming's lean, understated style of prose.Fleming is underrated as a writer, and James Bond is more than a comic book cutout character.
Goldfinger as a novel has some appealing attributes.The scene in which Bond plays a game of golf with Auric Goldfinger (with the stakes higher than they seem) is a masterpiece.Goldfinger the villain is an ingenious character.The reason I deprived this novel of two stars is first of all that the ending is tacked on almost as an afterthought.Sorry, it just didn't work, and it almost seemed like Fleming reached his page limit, and realized that he needed to wrap up the novel in the next twenty or so pages.Secondly, "Operation Grand Slam" involving a hodgpodge of criminals, seemed highly underdeveloped, and SMERSH would not have dared have a Soviet vessel upload the goal and hightail it to Russia.Nor would it have involved the sweepings of the US underworld in such a plan.It just did not work.Now mind, the idea of robbing Fort Knox is brilliant, and Fleming could have made it work.But here, in my opinion, it did not.
All these criticisms aside, I enjoyed "Goldfinger" the novel, and I recommend it, along with all of the other Bond novels, to anyone who enjoys good writing, a suspension of one's critical facilities for an afternoon, and, of course, James Bond.
Goldfinger: The best film, but FAR from the best novel
Very rarely does a film improve upon the source novel. I wrote a review of one, King's Ransom, which was made into a vastly superior film by Akira Kurosawa called High and Low. Goldfinger, the film, is one of the classic Bonds -- my favorite, to be sure. The novel, in contrast, is too long, is illogical in some parts, offensive in others and makes the reader realize what a superb job screenwriter Richard Maibaum did in adapting it for the film. These weaknesses stand out in particular:
First, the behavior of villain Auric Goldfinger is completely illogical during the torture scene. You might remember the terrific laser beam scene in the film where Goldfinger, played by Gert Frobe, threatens to slice James Bond, played by the great Sean Connery, in half. In the film, Bond gets out of the mess by bluffing, making Goldfinger believe that he knows all about Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger's plan to blow up Fort Knox. Goldfinger reasons that he can keep the CIA and the British Secret Service at bay by keeping Bond alive and making them think that Bond is his guest, not his prisoner.
The novel, in contrast, has Goldfinger threaten Bond with a saw. Bond doesn't mention Operation Grand Slam and has been a constant thorn in Goldfinger's side. Goldfinger has Bond dead to rights and, unlike in the laser beam scene in the film, has no logical reason to spare his life. However, just before Bond is about to be sawed in half, Goldfinger inexplicably spares him and forces Bond to pose as his secretary. There's a running joke that Bond villains seal their own fate by devising elaborate ways to kill him that allow Bond to escape. However, Goldfinger's action in this scene in the novel completely defy logic and cripple the story's credibility. Bond novels are an escape from reality -- an adult comic book -- but this plot development makes absolutely no sense.
In the novel, Goldfinger's plan is to rob Fort Knox of its gold supply. Fleming, unlike Richard Maibaum, apparently never realized how logistically impossible this is. Connery rightfully points out in the film that to rob Fort Knox would require a whole fleet of trucks and several days to complete. Maibaum's plan, while still fantastic, makes more sense -- detonating a nuclear weapon in Fort Knox to irradiate the U.S. gold supply and drive the value of his own supply up ten times over.
In the novel, Pussy Galore begins as a hardened lesbian who has no interest in Bond whatsoever. Of course, by the end of the novel, Bond has "heterosexualized" and overwhelmed her with his masculine charms. It's a very 1950's view of homosexualtiy -- that is, that a homosexual could be "cured" of his/her sexual desires like it was a disease. The attitude seems very backward and ignorant by today's standards.
The film strongly suggests Pussy's lesbianism, but it also shows Pussy, played by Honor Blackman, flirting suggestively with Bond. Blackman's Pussy may have lesbian tendencies, but she clearly also has a strong attraction to the opposite sex. When she falls for Bond, it makes sense, unlike in the novel. Bond still converts her, but the conversion stressed is more along the lines of Pussy joining the good guys rather than going from staunch lesbianism to being a Bond girl.
The film has a lot of Asian villains. Harold Sakata is terrific as Goldfinger's superpowered Korean henchman Oddjob, Burt Kwouk (Kato in the Pink Panther films) is Mr. Ling, a Chinese nuclear scientist who supplies Goldfinger with the bomb and most of Goldfinger's henchmen are Korean. However, the film, for the most part, avoids extreme racial stereotyping. Many of the villains are Asian, but there's no suggestion that simply being Asian is a source of evil. Asians would later play a prominent heroic role in You Only Live Twice.
The novel, in contrast, is vicously racist in nature. The nadir of this being Bond's statement that Koreans "are lower than apes." It's hard to believe that even in the pre-civil rights era of the 1950's, this statement could slip by without triggering a major protest from an Asian rights group. Today, it seems so ugly and hateful that I immediately lost a lot of respect for Ian Fleming. This is his hero who believes these vile things, so clearly what Bond believes, Fleming believes -- there's no way to separate the two. One wonders which other racial groups Fleming was bigoted against. It's a disgraceful moment in the Bond saga and a shameful comment on Fleming's view of the world.
Novels like Casino Royale, From Russia With Love, Dr. No, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice are classics and rank among my favorite novels. Goldfinger, however, falls way short of that standard. When I finished Goldfinger, I was left wishing that I had not read it and instead had left my impression of the story to the vastly superior film. The novel not only disappointed me, it made me think much less of Ian Fleming as a person.
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