As I read Goldfinger with, I have to say, an increasing sense of dismay, I found myself playing a bizarre game of ‘bigotry bingo’:

Homophobia? As early as page 21 the narrator (from Bond’s perspective) refers to a bar-owner as “a pansified Italian“; later Bond lusts after Pussy Galore (who in the novel is a lesbian) and reflects on “the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men“! (279); of course Bond believes that every lesbian just hasn’t met the right man. He refers to Tilly Masterson as “one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well, and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women… as a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males”. (313)

Inevitably at the end of the novel this happens:

Bond said firmly, “Lock that door Pussy, take off that sweater, and come into bed. You’ll catch cold.”

She did as she was told , like an obedient child. She lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a Lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, “Will you write to me in Sing-Sing?”

… “They told me you only liked women”

She said “I’ve never met a man before”.

Pussy then goes on to explain she was only a lesbian because she was sexually abused as a child: “I come from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case I couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve.” (371)

(I feel bad even quoting this garbage, but in case you ever meet anyone who claims Ian Fleming’s novel’s have any merit whatsoever, remember that quote, making fun of CSA! )

Anti-Semitism? Check. On page 27 Du Pont answers Bond’s question on Goldfinger’s nationality by saying “You won’t believe it but he’s British. Domiciled in Nassau. You’d think he’d be a Jew from the name, but he doesn’t look it. We’re restricted at the Floridian. Wouldn’t have got in if he had been.” In other words Du Pont’s club bars Jewish people from being members.

Misogyny. Well where isn’t there misogyny in Bond? All women are referred to as ‘girls’ and all of them are liable to succumb to his charms. They are disposable and insignificant, suitable only for bringing coffee, typing up memos, and of course servicing his other needs.

Racism. Describing Goldfinger’s gold smuggling operation in the UK, the Bank of England chappie, Colonel Smithers, refers to “half a dozen Korean stevedores he picked up in Liverpool. They didn’t know a word of any civilised language”.(88) Later Bond refers to putting Oddjob and “any other Korean firmly in his place, which in Bond’s estimation was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy“.(257).

Obviously it is wrong to make light of the nasty, outdated attitudes reflected throughout this novel. Bond was a colonial anachronism long before the sun had set on the British Empire, a relic of a time when just being British was enough to guarantee one’s superiority amongst ‘foreigners’. I’ve written at length elsewhere about the difference between novels which simply reflect outdated views which were prevalent at the time the text was written (the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn, for example, or the anti-Semitism in Trollope) and the more active promotion of these views, where they are supported and presented as being right-minded. It’s not only hard to write about slavery without acknowledging the existence of racist views, or the Holocaust without mentioning anti-Semitism, it would also be both wrong and ridiculous. But it is completely possible to write a spy story without the spy being a dinosaur who always wins because he believes himself to be, and is, superior to all the foreigners he meets, and who has all the women he wants because he is simply sufficiently manly. Bond isn’t just a dinosaur in the twenty-first century, he had horrendously out of date attitudes and beliefs in the 1950’s.

The novel’s plot is constructed of a series of set pieces – the card game, the golf round, the car ride across Northern Europe etc which bear the hallmarks of research that Fleming was reluctant to waste. The superfluous detail and technical terminology grates very quickly. The novel also presents some mysteries for the reader to solve which are laughably easy – even for a disengaged reader like me who really wasn’t trying that hard! Just as an example, the novel open with Bond being employed to help find out how Goldfinger is cheating at cards. As soon as we are told he wears a hearing aid and that he insists on playing outdoors, facing the hotel (i.e. with his opponent having his back to the hotel windows) the solution is apparent to even the most casual of reader. Later the reader will have worked out how Goldfinger smuggles his gold long before it finally dawns on Bond.

As super-villains go, Goldfinger is very one-dimensional (in addition to being a deeply anti-Semitic portrait). His gold-smuggling regime is preposterous – it involves buying the gold at UK retail prices, melting it down and remaking it into car parts, melting it down again in Switzerland and remaking it into airplane seats, and then finally re-melting it down back into gold bars in India. As well as being ridiculously complex (and therefore expensive) this process introduces multiple points of failure into the process, when he could just simply bribe a handful of Indian customs officials. The decision to not kill Bond and use him in some kind of bizarre clerical capacity, when he is so obviously a law enforcement officer, is equally nonsensical. The finale, the raid on Fort Knox, is just about as mad as it gets.

Bond lives on through the immense success of the films and novels authorised by the Fleming estate using respected authors such as Anthony Horowitz. But I think this veneration of Fleming’s creation has gone on far too long. There is no need for a modern Bond (especially one who continues to treat women as disposable, as the Daniel Craig version of the character does) when there are better stories to be told. I hated Casino Royale and read Goldfinger with low expectations of any improvement. There was none at all.

Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming, 1959