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Anthony Burgess Picks Goldfinger--The 99 Best Novels since 1939


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#1 Revelator

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 12:06 AM

In 1984 Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939. Subtitled A Personal Choice, the idiosyncratic selection (listed here) includes the following entry:

 

Goldfinger
Ian Fleming [1959]

Guardians of the good name of the novel (some of them, anyway) may be shocked at this inclusion. But Fleming raised the standard of the popular story of espionage through good writing—a heightened journalistic style—and the creation of a government agent—James Bond, 007—who is sufficiently complicated to compel our interest over a whole series of adventures. A patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind, he is pitted against impossible villains, enemies of democracy, megalomaniacs. Auric Goldfinger is the most extravagant of these. He plans to rob Fort Knox of its fifteen billion dollars worth of gold, modestly calling the enterprise Operation Grand Slam, proposing to poison the Fort Knox water supply with “the most powerful of the Trilone group of nerve poisons”, then—with the aid of the six main American criminal groups (one of which is lesbian and headed by Pussy Galore)—to smash the vault doors with a stolen Corporal tactical nuclear missile, load the gold on to a Russian cruiser waiting off the coast of Virginia, and, presumably, concoct further villainies in opulent seclusion. Meanwhile the American forces of law and order are supposed to let all this happen. James Bond foils Goldfinger, delesbianizes Pussy Galore, and regards his impossible success as a mere job of work to be laconically approved, with reservations, by M, the head of his department. All this is, in some measure, a great joke, but Fleming's passion for plausibility, his own naval intelligence background, and a kind of sincere Manicheism, allied to journalistic efficiency in the management of his récit, make his work rather impressive. The James Bond films, after From Russia With Love, stress the fantastic and are inferior entertainment to the books. It is unwise to disparage the well-made popular. There was a time when Conan Doyle was ignored by the literary annalists, even though Sherlock Holmes was evidently one of the great characters of fiction. We must beware of snobbishness.

 

 



#2 Turn

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 01:27 PM

I guess the "A Personal Choice" accounts for a lot. Most fans and non-fans alike seem to look at Goldfinger's coincidences and numerous implausible scenes as part of why it  usually ranks mid-pack. If the movie wasn't so popular it may be even less well received.

 

I do like it a lot, it's got atmosphere and the villains are great. Still, I put FRWL, OHMSS and YOLT way above it for Fleming's best writing.



#3 Odd Jobbies

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 02:59 PM

...I put FRWL, OHMSS and YOLT way above it for Fleming's best writing.

I'd agree with that.

 

The first is Fleming's highly ambitious and thoroughly successful attempt to reinvent his approach to the narrative.

 

The latter two really do finally get under Bond's skin and show a truly fallible human inside. Plus the finale of the YOLT epilogue is masterful and just as jaw dropping as the very end of FRWL and CR, making for a nail biting entrance in TMWTGG - something i can't believe the movie franchise has not used - cowards that they are ;-)


Edited by Odd Jobbies, 27 March 2014 - 03:02 PM.


#4 Dustin

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 04:57 PM

It baffles that - of all the good Fleming that is available - Burgess' choice should be Fleming's thinly veiled self-parody. Not only is it one of the weaker entries in Fleming's oeuvre as a novel; at closer look nearly all of it's characters act downright impossibly stupid to the point of incompetency. So Goldfinger, a jeweler with access to melting equipment, is suspected of smuggling gold across the border and is known to visit the continent on a regular basis with his Rolls? Every customs officer in his first year would simply take down the car into parts until the gold surfaces, and the supposed armour plating is the very first thing to take a look at. Nor is there any make of vehicle - be that Bond's Aston or your neighbour's Mini - that has the kind of concealed space to offer that would fox any customs men, be they British, French or from Ulan Bator. If customs decides to search a vehicle they find whatever it contains, so the most you can smuggle successfully across a border would be fingerprints.

 

It's one of Fleming's running gags to involve smuggling in his books, but he rarely gives the one reason why such things are possible in the first place: the enormous amount of traffic, of goods and people crossing borders in the millions each day. Had the authorities been pointed in the right direction they would have found the smuggled goods, in Goldfinger's case and no doubt also in Mr Big's and Kristatos'. If there is something to find you just look hard enough and it will be found. But I digress.

 

The entire series of coincidences in this book - Bond of course is close enough to spot the drop of the gold bar under the bridge to name just one, even though he is too far away to even tell if Goldfinger and Odd Job are still travelling in the Rolls themselves during nearly the entire chase; wouldn't it have been much more likely that drop had happened while Bond was dining on choucroute, enzian and Loewenbrau, unaware of the secret operation? - that make it such a strange example of Fleming's talent has already been mentioned. 

 

That said I must admit GOLDFINGER is very strong on the elements. We get to see the first glimpse of Bond, the human since CASINO ROYALE. A character who is fallible, weary and fed up with his own company at times, as we learn from the first chapter. Telling also that Bond, sure he's been tortured to death at Goldfinger's factory in Coppet, considers himself en route to heaven, not hell (or purgatory, as would perhaps be an alternative for him). And once more we get a glimpse of Bond's softer side as he hasn't forgotten about Vesper and wonders, how to explain to her the company of Tilly. Not only does he assume Vesper at the same place he is destined for, he also assumes she will still be on conversational terms with him. If you think about it it's a touchingly naive side this brief passage reveals. In a character who is able to deflect a knife attack and kill the attacker with two decisive strikes in the middle of the night after drinks at the Copacabana.

 

There is more of this, revealing snippets and glimpses that altogether help making Bond a more rounded, more human character, the modest attempt at publishing a compilation of the most effective self-defence manuals from secret and police forces the Service's archives could offer. The night duty at HQ which details excite Bond almost as much as they do the reader. Bond's musings behind the steering wheel or his memories of the golf career he might have had. Had things gone a different route. All that is not just readable, it's entertaining, even amusing at times. So much so these elements can make you forget the self-parody, the ludicrous coincidences and names, the caricatures that people this book.

 

Or look at them with a milder eye than they deserve. But for one of the 99 best offerings since 1939 I would have gone with another Fleming.           



#5 Revelator

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 05:47 PM


And once more we get a glimpse of Bond's softer side as he hasn't forgotten about Vesper and wonders, how to explain to her the company of Tilly. Not only does he assume Vesper at the same place he is destined for, he also assumes she will still be on conversational terms with him. If you think about it it's a touchingly naive side this brief passage reveals.

    

 

It's also surprising that Bond thinks about speaking to her in the first place. She was dead to him--figuratively, not just literally--at the end of Casino Royale, and Bond had not thought of her since. Why now? Probably because Fleming had reread his own books and decided to draw on the past. That also explains why Goldfinger can read like a self-parody. Perhaps that's what Burgess liked about it.  As a self-parody it is the most "Bondian" of the books. FRWL is influenced by Ambler, DN by Rohmer, and CR by the hardboiled detective school, but Goldfinger is 100% Fleming--it recycles and encapsulates the most characteristic elements honed in the previous books. It is the biggest and splashiest of the Bond stories, the most larger-than-life, and that undoubtedly attracted Burgess.
Many of us are predisposed to knock the book because we were first exposed to the film, one of the few which unmistakably improves on its source. Reading the book makes us doubly conscious of all the implausibilities that were ironed out by the movie. But Burgess undoubtedly read the book first, and it's interesting that his cut-off point for the Bond films is FRWL--right before the film of Goldfinger.



#6 Dustin

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Posted 27 March 2014 - 08:30 PM

It seems Burgess' tastes in Bond in general run toward the satirical approach. His draft for a TSWLM script seems to have been closer to an early action/splatter version of Austin Powers than anything Fleming ever published under the Bond monicker. As such this suggests he did not take the character - or the entire subject - too seriously, preferring to emphasise the absurdity of it all over the drama. Vacuum cleaner plans over tactical missile bases if you will.

And yet it's not as if Burgess didn't show a certain understanding for Fleming. After all it was Fleming himself who took one step away from his creation and couldn't help but chuckle about it, a reaction that obviously appealed to Burgess.

#7 Revelator

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Posted 28 March 2014 - 12:01 AM

Burgess's language also stresses that what he values about Goldfinger is its extravagance. Goldfinger is described as "the most extravagant of" Fleming's "impossible villains, enemies of democracy, megalomaniacs" and Burgess glories in the plan to rob Fort Knox, complete with nerve poison, lesbian gangsters, nuclear missiles and Soviet cruisers. So far then, Burgess seems to value the book as merely "a great joke", but he believes it is far more, due to its expression via "good writing—a heightened journalistic style", Fleming's eye for detail and espionage experience, and "a kind of sincere Manicheism." By contrast, the later Bond films--in his opinion--express only the joke. They miss the other half of the equation.

"Sincere Manicheism," by the way, is a wonderful phrase--it captures Fleming's attitude toward villainy. In Casino Royale Bond expresses doubt and moral relativism regarding the East/West struggle, but Mathis tells him "now that you have seen a truly evil man, you will know how evil they can be and you will go after them to destroy them in order to protect yourself and the people you love...You may want to be certain that the target really is black, but there are plenty of really black targets around." Bond eventually sees the worth of those words and tells himself "The business of espionage could be left to the white-collar boys. They could spy and catch the spies. He would go after the threat behind the spies." Fleming thus addresses and sidesteps the moral ambiguities of Greene and LeCarre--white-collar boys like George Smiley can go play at espionage, Bond will go after the really black targets and engage in the Manichean struggle of Bondian good versus monstrous evil. Goldfinger is surely the most flamboyant example of "the black target"--a black target that glitters.