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My ongoing project of reading all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books moves glacially along. I have just finished reading GOLDFINGER which is right in the middle of the series. The movie of GOLDFINGER has always been and remains my favorite individual entry in the franchise. The novel of GOLDFINGER does not hold nearly so high a position of regard.
Frankly and honestly, it's kind of a loss. I'm not going to say that it's a terrible book because that's reaching too far. But it's not a good novel. The best that can be said for it is that it supplied the plot and the characters for the movie. But the movie has picked and plucked and contracted and expanded in all the right ways. I know a lot of people opine that Fleming's novels really should be adapted for the movies much more faithfully than they have been. But I don't know. Maybe that's true for some of them. But not for GOLDFINGER. Definitely not for GOLDFINGER.
The plot of the book and the movie are essentially the same. Auric Goldfinger is plotting the big one--robbing Fort Knox--and Bond is assigned to stop him. Essentially that’s it. The rest is just details, which is where, you know, the devil lives.
The golf game is in both book and film. In the film it’s a fun, character-defining few minutes. In the book it fills maybe 10% or nearly of the book’s total page count. It’s too too clear that Fleming is simply describing a golf game. He liked golf, he probably enjoyed writing about it. Every now and then he reminds us that Goldfinger is a dangerous, mysterious man. But the golf episode is pretty much a stroke-by-stroke description of a round of golf. Yeah, okay, we got it, Ian, let’s move along.
The slow speed car “chase” across France is peppered with occasional fun incidents but, like the golf, it’s mostly just a pleasant driving episode.
Then, worst of all, for most of the book’s final third, superspy James Bond is simply Goldfinger’s secretary. And I’m not exaggerating. For a long, boring stretch, Bond takes notes at Goldfinger’s meetings, he types up those notes, he creates a schedule for the big criminal get-together, then he types up, copies, and distributes the schedule ‘cause we wouldn’t want a bad guy to not know what the day’s agenda might be.
The big finale is much deadlier, potentially, and much more vast in the book than in the movie. It’s also considerably more ridiculous and laughingly unlikely.
By the way, how does Bond, while a prisoner of Goldfinger, get word of the master plan to friendly eyes? Why he scribbles a note and hides it in an airplane toilet. He has to merely hope hope hope that someone finds it and that that someone is a nice guy who acts on the note rather than simply flushing it away.
Here we have a book in which the author was not all that interested. So he interpolates a golf game, a driving weekend, and he’s happier. Who knows, maybe he delighted in turning James Bond into a secretarial lackey for his villain.
I do know that Ian Fleming should have kissed the feet of the folks who made the movie. It was the film of GOLDFINGER which turned a modestly successful book and movie series into an international sensation. A sensation which continues to this day (assuming Amazon actually gets something made.) And a sensation which derives from a book which is not…very…good.
