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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl (1977)

And what marvellous exciting fun it was!
(Lucky Break)

This 1977 collection of Roald Dahl short stories is, as one of his schoolboys might say, a bit of a swizz because, out of the seven texts in this collection only four of are actually short stories – the last two are autobiographical sketches about the war and ‘The Mildenhall Treasure’ is a factual article from way back in 1946, all three of which had been previously published elsewhere.

  1. The Boy Who Talked With Animals (story)
  2. The Hitch-Hiker (story)
  3. The Mildenhall Treasure (article)
  4. The Swan (story)
  5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (story)
  6. Lucky Break (memoir)
  7. A Piece of Cake (memoir)

They’re all children’s stories, even the war memoirs – not for small children, exactly; probably for younger teens. It’s indicative that the edition I read was published by Puffin, Penguin’s imprint for children. One of aspects of the children-y approach is the gleeful hyperbole found throughout the pieces:

  • As a matter of fact, he told himself he was now almost certainly able to make money faster than any other man in the entire world. (page 144)
  • ‘You will be the richest man on earth.’ (p.156)

Another minor verbal tic which indicates their target audience is the liberal use of Dahl’s favourite words, ‘marvellous’ and ‘fantastic’, both of which, of course, appear in the titles of two of his most popular children’s books.

And now, very quickly, there began to come to him the great and marvellous idea that was to change everything. (Henry Sugar, page 153)

The Boy Who Talked with Animals (23 pages)

A strange and eerie story told by a narrator who’s gone on holiday to Jamaica. The taxi driver taking him to the hotel spooks him with stories of weird voodoo stuff which still goes on in the mountains. Then when he arrives at the hotel it’s perfectly pleasant and yet it gives him a bad vibe. And then the maid tells him all about a guest, a Mr Wasserman who was taking a photo of the sunset from the beach when a huge coconut fell on his head and knocked him dead. Although all this is quite serious it has a comic-book simplicity about it.

Anyway, the main action kicks off when the narrator, idling sitting on his balcony one day, hears a great hubbub from a crown of guests assembling on the beach.

This is a first-person fiction piece of medium-length writing. The narrator, on advice from friends, decides to vacation in Jamaica. One night, a sea turtle, ancient and huge, is caught by a group of fishermen. Rich people want to buy it, while the manager of a nearby hotel wants to make turtle soup out of it, but both plans are foiled when a little boy appears and shames the crowd for their cruelty. His parents explain that he has a deep affinity for animals, and even talks to them. The boy’s father pays off the fisherfolk and hotel manager, and the turtle is set free. The next day, the boy is missing, and the fisherfolk reveal that they have seen the child riding on the back of the sea turtle into the distance.

A turtle has landed on a resort beach in Jamaica and everyone wants to kill it for the meat and its shell. A small boy David becomes hysterical and tries to save the turtle. His parents explain that he is very sensitive to animals and they volunteer to buy the turtle from the resort owner. While they are haggling over the price, David talks to the turtle and tells it to swim away. During the night the boy himself disappears and next day two local fishermen come back with a crazy story – they have seen David riding the turtle out in the middle of the ocean!

The Hitch-Hiker (15 pages)

That rare thing, a Roald Dahl story with a happy ending, no revenge or poisoning or murder in sight.

The narrator is driving up to London in his brand new BMW 3.3 Li when he spots a hitchhiker. As the man gets in the narrator observes his rat-like features and long white hands, his drab grey coat which makes him look even more rattish. They talk about the model of car the narrator’s driving and when the narrator boasts that its top speed is 129 mph, the hitch-hiker encourages him to put the manufacturer’s claims to the test. So the narrator puts his foot down, 80, 90, 100, 105, 110, 115 miles an hour. Just as they get into the 120s they both hear a police siren go off and realise a police motor cycle is after them.

The traffic cop is strict, unbending and sarcastic. He takes his time and is rude and officious to both of them before writing out a ticket and hinting that breaking the limit by such a whopping margin will definitely result in a big fine and maybe even a prison sentence. With that threat he motors off leaving the narrator to resume his journey at a sensible law abiding speed.

The narrator frets over the doom awaiting him and so the hitchhiker sets about cheering him up. He challenges the narrator to guess his true profession. As a clue he starts to reveal various items from the narrator’s person starting off, improbably enough, with his belt, before going on to reveal the narrator’s wallet, watch and even shoelace.

Gobsmacked, the narrator calls the hitchhiker a pickpocket but the latter is a bit miffed and insists on being called a ‘fingersmith’ – just as a goldsmith has mastered gold, so he has mastered the adept use of his long and silky fingers, which he refers to as his ‘fantastic fingers’.

After his initial amazement at his friend’s abilities the narrator relapses back into gloom at the prospect of being charged, fined and maybe even imprisoned for his moment of madness. At which point, in a dazzling conclusion to the story, the hitchhiker reveals that he has stolen both of the police officer’s notebooks, which contain the cop’s copies of the tickets he gave them and the details of their offence.

Delighted, the narrator pulls over and he and the hitchhiker gleefully make a little bonfire of the policeman’s notebooks. A rare example of a Dahl story with a joyful ending.

The Mildenhall Treasure (1946: 27 pages)

Not a short story at all, but a factual article.

A modern preface explains that Dahl was unmarried and living with his mother when he read about the discovery of the Mildenhall treasure. He motored over to interview the hero of the story, Gordon Butcher, a humble ploughman, and this 27-page text is a kind of dramatisation of events.

Put simply, in January 1942 the owner of some farmland in Suffolk contracted one Sydney Ford to plough his fields for him and Ford sub-contracted the job to Gordon Butcher. Butcher was ploughing away when his plough struck something. When he investigated he found the edge of a big metal disc. Not sure what to do he went to see Ford who accompanied him back to the field and the pair dug out over thirty pieces of obviously man-made metal objects. As they did it snow began to fall and eventually the hole was covered in snow and Butcher’s extremities had gone numb with cold so he was happy enough when Ford told him to go home to his wife and a roaring fire and forgot all about it.

Meanwhile Ford took the treasure home in a sack and, over the following weeks and months, used domestic metal cleaner to clean off the tarnish and reveals the objects for what they were, the most impressive hoard of buried Roman treasure ever found in Britain.

Now all this took place during wartime, and from Ford’s house he could hear Allied bombers taking off to pound German cities and many of the norms and conventions of civilian life had been suspended. On the face of it, according to law, Butcher and Ford should have reported the find; it would have been claimed in its entirety by His Majesty’s government but Butcher, as the first finder, would have been eligible for the full market value of the trove, which Dahl gives as over half a million pounds.

But neither man reported it, in breach of English law. The digging in the increasingly heavy snowfall is the first significant or dramatic scene. The next one comes when Dahl describes the mounting excitement of Ford as he uses ordinary domestic cleaner to slowly work off the centuries of grime and reveal the sparkling silver underneath.

The third one comes when Ford has an unexpected visitor, Dr Hugh Alderson Fawcett, a keen and expert archaeologist who used, before the war, to visit Ford once a year to assess whatever finds Ford had made for, as the text explains, old arrowheads and minor historical debris often crop up in the fields of Suffolk which were, in the Dark Ages, the most inhabited part of Britain.

Anyway, by some oversight Ford kept most of the treasure under lock and key but had left out two beautiful silver spoons, which each had the name of a Roman child on them and so were probably Roman Christening spoons. The most dramatic moment in the story comes when Ford welcomes Fawcett into his living room but then realises the spoons are on the mantlepiece, in full sight. He tries to distract the doctor’s attention but eventually Fawcett sees them, asks what they are, and, upon examining them, almost has a heart attack as he realises their cultural importance and immense value.

Ford reluctantly confesses to when he found them and even more reluctantly admits there are more. When he unlocks his cupboard and shows the hoard to Fawcett the latter nearly expires with excitement.

In a way the most interesting moment comes when Dahl, showing the insight of a storyteller, admits that the most interesting part of the tale, all the dramatic bits, are over. Now it’s just the bureaucracy and administration. The hoard is reported to the police and packed off to the British Museum. In July 1946 a hearing is held under the jurisdiction of a coroner but it’s a jury which decides to award both Ford and Butcher £1,000, a lot of money but nowhere near the half million Butcher might have got if Ford had told him to report the find immediately.

You can read up-to-date information about the treasure on the Mildenhall Treasure Wikipedia page, including a reference to what Wikipedia calls Dahl’s ‘partly fictional account’.

The Swan (25 pages)

His lazy truck driver Dad buys thick, loutish Ernie, a .22 rifle for his 15th birthday. He and his mate Raymond go straight out on this fine May morning and start taking potshots at songbirds, stringing their bodies up from a stick Ernie carries over his shoulder. Then they come across school swot, weedy bespectacled 13-year-old Peter Watson.

At which point commences the main body of the story in which these two thugs really seriously bully Peter. First of all they march him to the nearby train line where they truss him hand and foot and then tie him to the sleepers. It is genuinely tense as Peter lies there trying to work out how low a train’s undercarriage is, and systematically moving his head and feet back and forth to try and dig deeper into the gravel. Dahl gives a tremendously vivid description of the express train suddenly appearing like a rocket, and roaring over Peter’s head till he feels like he’s been swallowed by a screaming giant.

But he survives, dazed and in shock. The bullies have watched from the nearby verge and now stroll down and untie Peter but keep his hands trussed. They push him ahead of them as they set off for the lake. Here they spot a duck and, despite Peter’s heartfelt please, shoot it. At which Ernie has the bright idea of treating Peter as their retriever, forcing him to wade into the water and bring back the corpse of the duck.

Next they spot a swan, a beautiful swan sitting regally atop a nest in the reeds. Peter begs them, tells them it’s illegal, tells them that swans are the most protected birds in the country, they’ll be arrested etc, but these guys are idiots as well as hooligans and Ernie raises his gun and shoots the swan dead. Then they threaten to kick and beat Peter unless he wades into the reeds and fetches the body.

It’s at this stage that things start to take a turn for the macabre or gruesome or possibly surreal. Peter loses all restraint and accuses Ernie of being a sadist and a brute at which point Ernie has another of his brainwaves and asks if Peter would like to see the swan come back to life, flying happily over the lake?

Peter asks what the devil he’s talking about, but then Ernie asks Ray for his pocket knife and sets about sawing off one of the swan’s wings. He then cuts six sections from the ball of string he always carries in his jacket and then…tells Peter to stretch out his arm. While Peter says he’s mental, Ernie proceeds to tie the swan’s wing tightly to Peter’s arm. Then he cuts off the other wing and ties it to Peter’s other arm. Now Peter has two swan’s arms attached to his arms.

So far so weird, but now the story moves towards a line or threshold, for Ernie now insists that Peter climbs a weeping willow growing by the lakeside, climbs right to the top and then ‘flies’. Peter seizes the opportunity of escaping from the bullies and makes the best of struggling up through a willow tree while encumbered with two whopping great swan wings, but eventually reaches the highest branch capable of bearing his weight, some 50 feet above the ground.

If he thought he could escape the bullies he was mistaken for they have stepped back to have clear sight of him, and Ernie proceeds to shout at him, telling him to fly. What madness, Peter thinks and doesn’t budge. At which point Ernie tells him he must fly or he will shoot. Peter doesn’t budge. Then Ernie says he’ll count to ten. He gets to ten and fires, deliberately shooting wide, in order to scare Peter who still doesn’t budge. Then, getting cross, Ernie shoots him in the thigh.

Now, at this pivotal moment, Dahl interjects a bit of editorialising. he tells us that there are two kinds of people, people who crumble and collapse under stress, pressure and danger or the smaller number of people who abruptly flourish and triumph. This, we take it, is experience garnered during his service in the war. But it also serves to paper over the crack, the red line, where the narrative crosses over from weird but plausible into wholly new realm of magical realism.

For, transformed by rage and frustration, Peter spreads his swan’s wings and…flies! The bullet in his leg knocked both his feet from under him but instead of plummeting to earth he sees a great white light shining over the lake, beckoning him on, and spreads the great swan wings and goes soaring up into the sky.

The narrative cuts to the eye witnesses in the village who see a boy with swan wings flying overhead and then cuts to Peter’s mother, doing the washing up in the kitchen sink when she sees something big and white and feathered land in her garden and rushes out to find her beloved little boy, to cut him free from the wings and start to tend the wound in his leg.

The transcendence of this, the tying on of wings and a boy’s transformation into a bird, remind me of the several J.G. Ballard short stories which depict men obsessed with flying like birds, in particular the powerful 1966 story Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (71 pages)

By far the longest of Dahl’s short stories, this tale is more accurately described as a novella, whose length justifies the compilation and naming of the book around it. Having just finished it I can see that it could possibly have been a book in its own right, padded out with illustrations to book length. Instead the publishers padded it out to book length by adding a couple of other stories and some already-published war memoirs.

It’s an odd production, firstly in that it contains lengthy stories nested within each other, as you’ll see. We start with an extended introduction to the character of Henry Sugar who is painted as a thoroughly despicable person. He has inherited great wealth, is lazy and idle and spends most of his time, like many of his class, gambling on anything that moves.

Sugar goes to stay with a posh lord (Sir William Wyndham at his house near Guildford) and when his friends set up a game of canasta he draws the short straw and is the odd man out, so he wanders disconsolately into the library and mooches around till he finds an old exercise book in which is written the second story, the story-within-a-story.

For the exercise book turns out to be an account written by a British doctor in India in 1934. It is titled ‘A Report on an Interview with Imhrat Khan, The Man Who Could See Without Eyes, by Dr John Cartwright, Bombay, India, December 1934’.

This is a long, detailed account in its own right. This Cartwright is sitting with others in the Doctors Rest Room in Bombay Hospital when an Indian comes in. He calmly explains that he can see without using his eyes. After their initial mockery the doctors test him by putting a temporary sealant on his eyes, covering them with bread dough, then cotton wool, then bandaging them thoroughly. But, to their astonishment, the man heads out into the corridor, avoids other people, manages the stairs just fine, walks out the building, gets onto a bicycle and cycles out into the roaring traffic all without the use of his eyes.

It turns out that this fellow makes his living as part of a travelling circus where he’s one among many gifted performers such as a prodigious juggler, a snake charmer and a sword swallower. Dr Cartwright finds this out when he goes to see the circus that evening (at the Royal Palace Hall, Acacia Street). He then goes backstage to Khan’s dressing room and asks if he can interview him about his amazing powers. He will write up the account and try to get it published in something like the British Medical Journal. Khan agrees so Cartwright takes him to a restaurant and over curry Khan tells him his story.

So this is the third account, a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, which switches to a first-person narrative. Khan explains that he had a lifelong fascination with magic. When he was 13 a conjurer came to his school. He was so entranced that he followed him to Lahore where he became his assistant. but is disillusioned when he discovers it is all trickery and not real magic. He learns about the yogi, holy men who develop special skills. While looking for one he joins a travelling theatre company to make a living. Then he learns that the greatest yogi in India is Mr Banerjee, so he sets off to find him. He tracks him down to the jungle outside Rishikesh where he hides and witnesses the great man praying and levitating. When he steps forward to introduce himself Banerjee is furious at being spied on and chases Khan away. But the boy returns day after day and his persistence wears Banerjee down. Eventually he agrees to talk, says he never takes disciples, but recommends a colleague, Mr Hardwar.

Hardwar takes him on and thus begins a series of challenging physical and mental exercises, for three years. Eventually he needs to earn a living and rejoins a travelling show where he performs conjuring tricks. In Dacca he comes across a crowd watching a man walk on fiery coals and, when volunteers are requested, he goes forward and walks on burning coals himself.

He has heard tell that the ultimate test of a yogi’s powers is to see without using your eyes and so sets his heart on achieving this skill. (p.123). Slowly he realises that our senses have two aspects, the outer obvious one, and the inner version of that sense. He cultivates his inner sense of sight and the narrative form allows Dahl to convince us that Khan slowly slowly acquires the ability to see objects with his eyes closed.

By 1933 when he is 28 he can read a book with his eyes closed. He explains to Cartwright that the seeing is now done by any part of his body and demonstrates it by placing himself behind a door except for his hand which he sticks round the door. Then he proceeds to read the first book Cartwright takes off the shelf with his hand. Cartwright is staggered.

It is now late and time for Khan to go to bed. Cartwright thanks him and drives him home, then goes back to his own place but can’t sleep. Surely this is one of the greatest discoveries ever made! If this skill can be taught then the blind could be made to see and the deaf to hear! Cartwright gets a clean notebook and writes down every detail of what Khan has told him.

Next morning Cartwright tells all to a fellow doctor and they agree to go to the performance that evening and afterwards take Khan away from the tacky world of travelling performers and set him up somewhere safe where scientists can study him.

But when they get to the Royal Palace Hall something is wrong, there is no crowd and someone has written ‘Performance cancelled’ across the poster. When Cartwright asks he is told that ‘The man who can see without eyes’ died peacefully in his sleep. At one point in his long narration, Khan had made a point of telling him that a good yogi is sworn to secrecy and is punished for divulging his secrets. Well, this is the handy narrative contrivance Dahl has used to eliminate his wonder-worker. He told his secrets, he died.

Cartwright is devastated, finishes writing up his account with this sad coda, signs it and…40 or so years later, this is the old exercise book which Henry Sugar has just randomly picked up and read in the library of Sir William Wyndham!

Sugar has read it alright but the only thing he took from it was one throwaway remark by Khan that he could read the value of playing cards from behind because he could see through playing cards. As an inveterate gambler Sugar is dazzled by the possibilities of this power. He steals the notebook and sets about copying the exercises detailed in it. Months pass and he thinks he’s beginning to acquire the ability to empty his mind and visualise.

At the end of one year of hard training to focus and visualise Sugar tests himself and discovers that he can see through the back of a playing card to see its value, although it takes about four minutes to do so. A month later he can do it in 90 seconds, six months later he’s got it down to 20 seconds. But thereafter it gets harder, and it takes another eight months before he gets it down to 10 seconds. By now he has developed phenomenal powers of concentration but getting his reading time down to his target of four seconds takes another whole year, making three years and three months in total.

Then commences the real core of the story. In a sense all the preliminary matter about the Indian yogi is so much guff; conceivably it could have been a scientific inventor coming up with the discovery or any other kind of pretext or excuse which gets the protagonist to this point, namely, Being able to see the value of concealed cards at a casino.

For on the evening of the day when he finally visualises a card in 4 seconds, Henry puts on a dinner jacket and catches a cab to one of the most exclusive casinos in London, Lord’s House. Here he discovers he can predict which number is going to come up at roulette, bets £100 and wins at odds of 36 to 1. (I was surprised at this because all the effort of the preceding narrative has been about seeing what’s there with his eyes shut whereas this, his first trick in a casino, is entirely about predicting the future, which is a completely different ability altogether.)

What makes these children’s stories, but very effective children’s stories, is their vivid exaggeration. Everyone and everything is always the best in the world:

[The cashier] had arithmetic in his fingers. But he had more than that. He had arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus and algebra and Euclidean geometry in every nerve of his body. He was a human calculating-machine with a hundred thousand electric wires in his brain. (p.145)

Also the simplicity of the thoughts, and of the layout which emphasises that simplicity. The following should be a paragraph but isn’t, it is laid out like this because it is catering to children:

And what of the future?
What was the next move going to be?
He could make a million in a month.
He could make more if he wanted to.
There was no limit to what he could make.

Anyway, the surprising thing is that Henry is not thrilled by his staggering winnings. A few years earlier such a win would have knocked his socks off and he would have gone somewhere and splashed the cash on champagne and partying. Not now. To his surprise Henry feels gloomy. He is realising the great truth, that ‘nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want’ (p.148).

Bored and a bit depressed Henry stands at the window of his Mayfair flat and, out of boredom, lets one of the £20 notes of his winnings be taken away by the breeze. An old man picks it up. He lets another go and a young couple get it. A crowd begins to form under his window. Eventually Henry throws his entire winnings of thousands of pounds into the street which, predictably, causes a small riot and blocks the traffic.

A few minutes later a very angry policeman knocks on his apartment door and tells him not to be such a blithering idiot. Where did he get the money from etc and Henry gives details of the casino, but what strikes home is the copper says if you want to chuck money away, why not give it to somewhere useful like an orphanage.

This gives Henry a brainwave. After thinking it through a bit he decides he will devote his life to charity. he will move from city to city, fleecing the casinos for huge sums before moving on to the next. And he will use all the money he makes to set up orphanages in each country.

He’ll need someone to handle the money side so he goes to see his accountant, a cautious man named John Winston. Winston doesn’t believe him so Henry a) tells him the values of cards laid face down on his table b) wins a fortune in matchsticks from a little game of blackjack they have in his office c) takes him to a casino that evening (not the Lord’s House) where he wins £17,500.

Winston agrees to be his partner but points out that the kind of revenue he’s suggesting will all be taken by the taxman. He suggests they set up the business in Switzerland so Henry gives him the £17,500 to organise the move, set up a new office, move his wife and children out there.

A year later Henry has sent the company they’ve set up £8 million and John has used it to set up orphanages. Over the next seven years he wins £50 million. Eventually, as in all good stories, things go wrong and trigger the climax. Henry is foolish enough to win $100,000 at three Las Vegas casinos owned by the same mob. Next morning the bellhop arrives to tell him some dodgy men are waiting in the foyer. The bellhop explains that, for a price, he’ll let Henry use his uniform to get away. But he must tie the bellhop up to make it look kosher. This he does, tucks a grand under the carpet as payment, and makes his escape dressed as a bellhop.

He catches a plane to Los Angeles because the use of a disguise has given him an idea. He goes to see the best makeup artist in Hollywood, Max Engelman. He explains his special powers and asks if he wants to earn $100,000 a year. Max joins him and together they travel the casinos of the world appearing at each one in disguise. The story has now become a full-on children’s story, revelling in the sheer pleasure of dressing up in ever-more preposterous identities, using faked passports and id cards.

Eventually the story ends when Henry Sugar dies. The narrator tots up the figures. Henry died aged 63. He had visited 371 major casinos in 21 different countries or islands. During that period he made £144 million which was used to set up 21 well-run orphanages around the world, one in each country he visited.

In the last few pages Dahl gives a children’s style version of how he came to write the book, namely John Winston rang him up, invited him to come and meet him and Max, showed him Cartwright’s notebook, and commissioned him to write a full account. Which is what he’s just done. No matter how absurd and fantastical the story, it is treated with Dahl’s trademark clear, frank limpidity.

Lucky Break

This is a non-fictional account of how Dahl became a writer, condensing material from his two autobiographical books, ‘Boy and ‘Going Solo’. It highlights key events from his childhood, school days and early manhood up to the publication of his first story.

A Piece of Cake (1946)

From Wikipedia:

An autobiographical account of Dahl’s time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. It describes how Dahl was injured and eventually forced to leave the Mediterranean arena. The original version of the story was written for C. S. Forester so that he could get the gist of Dahl’s story and rewrite it in his own words. Forester was so impressed by the story (Dahl at the time did not believe himself a capable writer) that he sent it without modification to his agent, who had it published (as ‘Shot Down Over Libya’) in The Saturday Evening Post, thereby initiating Dahl’s writing career. It appeared in Dahl’s first short story collection ‘Over to You’, published in 1946.

Credit

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1977. References are to the 2001 Puffin paperback edition.

Related links

Roald Dahl reviews

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Posted by Simon on May 22, 2024

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Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1959)

Murder in Mexico

Bond dislikes killing and it gives him a bad conscience. He tries to persuade himself it’s just part of the job, he does it then moves on, but in reality he broods and worries. Thus Goldfinger opens with Bond in the departure lounge of Miami airport, obsessively going over his most recent job in Mexico. Fleming gives a brief description of how an informal heroin smuggling circle was set up by a posh, amateur Brit which led from poppy fields in Mexico via a courier to Victoria Coach Station and then distribution via Soho. Bond tracks the pipeline to its source and blows up the heroin warehouse, but then is approached in the street that night by an assassin hired by the gang, and after a brief intense fight, kills him. But Bond broods.

What an extraordinary difference there was between a body full of person and a body that was empty! Now there is someone, now there is no one. This had been a Mexican with a name and an address, an employment card and perhaps a driving license. Then something had gone out of him, out of the envelope of flesh and cheap clothes, and had left him an empty paper bag waiting for a dustcart. And the difference, the thing that had gone out of the stinking Mexican bandit, was greater than all Mexico. (p.7)

This passage, especially its portentous final phrase, reminded me of Fleming’s contemporary, Graham Greene (b.1904). (This brooding over the mystery of death, the extinguishing of life, also reminds of the shock Bond feels at the death of Darko Kerim, the one-man life force, in From Russia with Love, p.277.) At the end of the novel Bond will feel the same way about the broken rag-doll body of Tilly Masterton.

Bond stood and looked down at the little empty tangle of limbs and clothes. He saw the bright, proud girl with the spotted handkerchief round her hair in the flying TR3. Now she had gone. (p.205)

Death is the great mystery, the real puzzle, at the heart of these books.

Goldfinger exposed

As he sits worrying, Bond hears the announcement that his flight to New York has been cancelled, and then is approached by a middle-aged American. He introduces himself as Junius Du Pont, one of the couple who were sitting next to Bond during his climactic card game which forms the centrepiece of Casino Royale. Briefly, he is a millionaire but has a problem: he’s been playing canasta with a fellow millionaire, strange guy called Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger, and has consistently lost, far more than the odds would predict, losing some $25,000. Having seen Bond in action and knowing him for an expert, he invites Bond to stay over in Miami a night, all expenses paid, then pose as a businessman come to visit Du Pont and in reality figure out how Goldfinger is cheating.

Excellent! This is just the kind of relaxing, easy, no pressure break Bond needs to take his mind off death and destruction. He goes with Du Pont in his chauffeur-driven car to a luxury hotel and has the best meal of his life: crab in melted butter with toast, washed down by pint mugs of pink champagne.

So Bond goes along next day to the poolside table where Du Pont plays and meets Goldfinger. As with all the Bond villains he is distinctively misshapen and ugly, really a kind of cartoon. Goldfinger is just five foot tall, tubby, with no neck and an enormous round moon-shaped head, topped by a crew cut of bright red hair. He is very rich and very cool. Bond is introduced and sits idly reading his paper and half watching the game. He watches Goldfinger win hand after hand of canasta, fleecing Du Pont, and eliminates all the usual card sharping tricks. When Goldfinger says he never moves from his chair because he doesn’t like the view over the sea, it gives him agoraphobia, Bond gets a clue. He realises Du Pont is sitting with his back to the hotel so someone in an apartment could, in theory, look over his shoulder and see his cards.

He gets a camera from his apartment and the well-connected Du Pont gets a pass key from the hotel manager. Then, during the afternoon game, while Goldfinger is fleecing Du Pont again, Bond sneaks into Goldfinger’s room to discover a beautiful posh English woman wearing only bra and panties (p.34, and is first seen from the back, just like Tiffany Case in Diamonds). She is looking through binoculars down at Du Pont’s hand and giving Goldfinger detailed instructions. This is how he wins so consistently.

Bond startles the girl by taking a flashlight photo of the set-up, then chatting to the (obviously) alarmed and scared woman, who gives her name as Jill Masterton (p.39). She is Goldfinger’s private secretary. As they chat, and Bond explains he’s working for Du Pont and simply wanted to discover the scam, she relaxes and even begins to warm to Bond. Having not told him the winning cards for quite a few moments, Goldfinger has begun to lose. Now Bond decides to put the finishing touches: he takes the radio microphone from Jill, and dictates his terms to Goldfinger: he will send the photo and full details of his scam to the police and FBI unless Goldfinger a) admits to Du Pont he’s been cheating b) writes and gives him a check for $50,000, including all the money he’s won off him as well as a tidy fee for Bond. And then, to rub it in, Bond insists Goldfinger pays for a luxury train sleeper compartment for him and Jill to New York. Reluctantly, Goldfinger agrees and does these things.

Bond gets effusive thanks from Du Pont, then takes the sleeper to New York (all told in retrospect) where he makes passionate love to Masterton, five times, apparently (p.43 – almost as soon as they met, she was looking at him with a look of submissiveness and longing, and later says she will do anything if Bond doesn’t hurt Goldfinger: ie she is much more quickly submissive than either the feisty Tiffany Case or distant Gala Brand, falling more into the ‘immediately seduced’ category of Solitaire, who fancied him straight off). But when they get to New York, Jill insists on going back to Goldfinger, despite both their misgivings about how he might react to having been so systematically humiliated…

Back in London

Cut to Bond back in the Secret Service building overlooking Regent’s Park, where he has been assigned night duty and is logging calls from stations round the world. Fleming has just explained how much he actually enjoys being up through the night, when he is called in for a breakfast meeting with M. Surprise surprise, it concerns the man he just happens to have met on Miami, one Auric Goldfinger who, M tells him, is the richest man in England. (It has rather the same effect as the way Sir Hugo Drax is introduced in Moonraker as the most popular man in England.)

The Bank of England

His name is mentioned as M describes having dinner with the Governor of the Bank of England the previous night and listening to his concerns about the drain of gold from England. A certain Colonel Smithers is Head of the Bank’s research department and an expert on the subject. ‘Go and meet him 007.’ So off Bond goes and submits to a long, detailed history of gold, its use, importance and why the Bank is concerned it is being drained out of the country. Smithers gives us the backstory to Goldfinger: refugee from Riga before the war, set up a chain of pawn shops which now operates round the country, paying cash for small gold trinkets; these are melted down in his smelting works / factory near Reculver in Kent, which also deals in fertiliser and other chemical works. Goldfinger had been exporting fertiliser to India for years but when one of his ships was wrecked off Goodwin Sands, scientists found traces of gold in a chemically treated form had soaked into the hold. Smithers deduced Goldfinger has been converting the gold into a brown powder which passes customs as fertiliser, then having it restored to gold and selling at a big profit in India.

Bond reports back to M at 6 that evening, where M has more to tell him. They know Goldfinger marks his ingots (out of vanity) with a tiny incised ‘Z’. The most recent ingots the Service has come across thus marked have all been recovered from SMERSH operatives! Yes! From being some cheating millionaire, Goldfinger has suddenly been revealed as SMERSH’s banker! Bond is ordered to find him, confirm his activities and stop him, so he motors down to Kent in a work DB III, along the way filling in Goldfinger’s backstory, mainly from speculation: trained and briefed by SMERSH, despatched to Britain in 1937, told to lie low and set up a network of pawnbrokers as a front; while all the time he was given greater and greater responsibility as SMERSH’s overseas banker. Who knows how many deaths, assassinations and terror attacks he has helped organise and fund (pp.62-64).

As Umberto Eco points out, unlike Sherlock Holmes, Bond rarely has to detect anything and certainly never discovers a baddie behind a criminal activity: the baddies are always identified early on in the text, Le Chiffre, Mr Big, the Spangled Mob etc, the only interest is what form the confrontation and final struggle will take. (In this respect, From Russia With Love is an exception, since Bond is unaware of the conspiracy to entrap him and doesn’t know who his opponents are – Klebb and Grant – until very near the end: maybe it’s this element of genuine puzzlement and revelation (for Bond) which explains why many people think Russia is the best Bond book.)

A game of golf

In Miami, during the open social chitter chatter, Goldfinger and Bond had both admitted a fondness for golf, and even promised to play each other one day. Now Bond drives down to Goldfinger’s house in Kent and on to the famous golf course of Royal St Marks. Says hello to his old caddie and trainer, Blacking, and we learn that the teenage Bond was a golf prodigy who his trainer thought could have gone professional. While they’re chatting Goldfinger’s immense canary-yellow car comes rolling up the gravel drive, driven by the striking figure of a bowler-hatted Korean chauffeur. Bond makes like them bumping into each other is a happy accident and after some banter, Goldfinger challenges him to a round, with the stakes being the $10,000 he took off him in Miami.

Chapters eight and nine contain a very detailed description of each of the eighteen holes the two men play during the ensuing game of golf. Goldfinger has a good game so that it is very close, plus he cheats by a) putting Bond off his stroke b) tamping down the ground around his ball to make his shots easier. Eventually Bond and his caddy decide to cheat back and swap Goldfinger’s ball for a different make on the last hole. Thus at the moment that Goldfinger wins the round, Bond is able to reveal it is with the wrong ball thus, technically, losing the match. Goldfinger sputters with fury, almost declares Bond guilty of cheating, then contains his anger, and invites Bond to dinner at his house that evening.

Dinner at the Grange

1. Goldfinger welcomes Bond, but says he unfortunately just has to pop out to sort out some trouble one of his servants has got to in Thanet; back in 30 minutes. Bond sees this as a transparent invitation to go snooping round Goldfinger’s house. A doorway takes him into the overseer’s office of the factory, from where he looks down into a workshop and sees men fiddling with the door of Goldfinger’s Rolls. Back in the house he pokes around in the upper floors, coming across a male bedroom, all the way followed by a friendly ginger cat. Everything in the bedroom is pure and clean until he follows a whining sound to discover cine-camera film from three concealed cameras whirring round their spools in a concealed closet: obviously turned on when Goldfinger left, to monitor Bond’s movements. Bond deliberately exposes the film strips all to the light, then puts the cat into the container where the film had been spooled, as a feeble attempt to explain his sabotage.

2. Goldfinger returns and treats Bond to a quality dinner: curried shrimp and rice, with a Moselle, the Piesporter Goldtröpfchen ’53; roast duckling with Mouton Rothschild 1947; cheese soufflé and coffee.

3. Throughout the book there has been mention of Goldfinger’s Korean servants: he employs five of them. Now he gets his personal servant, Oddjob, to demonstrate his skills, and Oddjob proceeds to: slice through the wooden banister on the stairs with his bare hand; create a divot in the mantelpiece with a flying kick; destroy a wall fixture with his steel-rimmed bowler hat, thrown as a weapon.

Goldfinger explains that all five are Karate experts, Oddjob being one of the only three karate black belts in the world. (It is striking that Fleming feels he has to explain from scratch what karate is and give its history.) Goldfinger claims the Koreans are ‘the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world’. The cat which Bond left in the cinefilm basket? Goldfinger hands it to Oddjob and tells him he can eat it for his dinner.

Throughout there is the strong sense of menace and threat, while Bond plays his role of pretending he is fed up with Universal Exports and wants a way out, a way to make easy money. He even retells the story of the heroin business he foiled in the opening chapter, but casting himself as one of its organisers. Goldfinger listens impassively and hints that he may have a role for Bond in his organisation.

Across France

Goldfinger had mentioned that he was flying out of Lydd airport the next day, with his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Bond gets the Service to book him a ticket on the next flight following. He drives up to the airport before Goldfinger is due and tells the Customs people he’s with Scotland Yard. They let him inspect the Silver Shadow after Goldfinger and Oddjob have boarded the plane, giving Bond the opportunity to insert a primitive homing device into it.

Two hours later Bond’s flight carries him and his DB III over to Le Touquet where he picks up the trail of the Silver Ghost. There follows a long knowledgeable tour across northern France, down to the Loire and then East heading towards Switzerland. Fleming knows his French Routes Nationales and shows off his acquaintance with the best hotels and Michelin restaurants along the route. On the first night Goldfinger stops at Orleans where Bond checks into the Station Hotel and enjoys ‘one of his favourite meals’: two oeufs cocotte à la crème, a large seule meunière and an ‘adequate’ Camembert.

Next day Bond tracks Goldfinger south and east along the N73 when he stumbles across the car pulled over for a picnic by a river. Bond just has time to drive off down a cart track and isn’t noticed, but after Goldfinger and Oddjob finish their picnic and drive on, Bond goes to investigate and discovers, under some freshly disturbed turf, a big gold ingot (with the tell-tale ‘Z’ scratched into it). He takes it with him a) causing Goldfinger and SMERSH inconvenience b) maybe saving lives in whatever schemes it would have financed.

Slowly he realises that another car is tailing Goldfinger, a nifty little Triumph driven by a pretty woman wearing a pink head scarf. Now he thinks about it he realises the same car was at Lydd airport. In the busy streets of Mâcon he sees it behind him and deliberately reverses into it, writing off the bonnet and fan belt. He apologises profusely while the pretty woman gets out and is livid, saying she must get to Geneva to play in some golf tournament. Bond discovers her name – Tilly Masterton – aha! she is the sister of Jill Masterton, Goldfinger’s confidential secretary. Bond offers her a lift and so they share the rest of the journey to Geneva.

Bond drops her at a hotel on the outskirts of Geneva, then trails Goldfinger’s Silver Ghost to a large mansion behind high railings, with a sign reading ‘Enterprises Auric A.G.’. He parks in nearby woods and doubles back to a vantage point where he sees technicians come out of a factory-like building and start to disassemble Goldfinger’s car. Then he drives on into Geneva and contacts the Service’s man there. 1. He hands over the gold bar and tells him to send it with a message confirming Goldfinger’s role as SMERSH banker, back to London. 2. The Service man knows about Auric Enterprises: it makes metal-work products, most notably chairs for Mecca Charter Airways planes, a company Goldfinger part owns and which flies to India. Aha.

Everything clicks into place. After his boat was wrecked and investigated off the Kent coast, Goldfinger abandoned gold smuggling by sea: now he fits his ‘armour-plated’ Rolls Royce with gold panels, drives it across France to his factory in Switzerland, where the panels are extracted from the car, and remoulded, with alloy, as airplane seats, installed in planes which are flown to India, there melted back to gold and sold at a terrific profit.

Captured

That night, after checking into a Geneva hotel etc, Bond drives back out to the woods above the Goldfinger mansion. He is creeping towards a good vantage point when he sees a slender figure in black lying by a tree ahead of him: it is Tilly. He jumps her from behind, putting his hand over her mouth, then slowly freeing her once she knows it is him. Furious she tells him her story: Jill Masterton returned to Goldfinger after her train trip of passion with Bond in the early chapters, and Goldfinger killed her, in a typically macabre Fleming way: he had her body painted with gold paint all over so her pores couldn’t breathe, evacuate sweat etc, poisoning her. (Fleming adds the gruesome detail that Goldfinger likes sex once a month with prostitutes who Oddjob paints with gold, but leaving their backs free to ‘breathe’ before the furious animal act. Then Oddjob sluices them down in a chemical shower to retrieve the gold.)

Well, Tilly is Jill’s sister; so she has come here with a rifle to take revenge. While they’re still squabbling about who is getting in whose way a crossbow bolt thwacks into the tree above them. Oddjob and some other Korean guards. Bond tries to make light of it, claiming Tilly is his girlfriend and they’ll call in on Goldfinger tomorrow, but the Koreans shepherd them down through the fence and towards the house, through the front door and into the main room where Goldfinger is waiting. Now Goldfinger knows Bond is an enemy agent and spy, and after a bit of banter, orders him to be taken to ‘the Pressure Room’.

Bond throws himself across the table, head butting Goldfinger in the chest, and gets as far as throttling him with his bare hands, when Oddjob hits him very hard and the lights go out.

Sawn in half

Bond awakes to find himself tied to a large table with a circular saw designed to cut right across it, up between his legs and carve him in half. ‘Talk,’ says Goldfinger, ‘or you’ll be sawn in two; and then the girl will be handed over to the Koreans for their sport.’ Bond swears (he’s taken to swearing four letter words a lot in the last few books, for example ‘You can go **** yourself’, p.149). As if the saw wasn’t enough, Bond is worked over by Oddjob who knows exactly how to hurt him very much. Fleming, as so often, takes us into Bond’s mind as he tries to master the pain, control the pain, rise above his body…

Next thing we know it’s a new chapter and Bond thinks he’s died and gone to heaven, complete with white lights, nice music, warm woozy feelings. Slowly he interprets the succession of lights and faces to mean he’s been doped up and flown somewhere, the American accents suggesting the USA. Eventually he regains consciousness in some kind of sealed accommodation, in a bed in a room with his clothes and case all carefully returned. Goldfinger enters with a handgun and explains: he was on the verge of wiping Bond out when he realised he may actually be of some small use in his next and final crime. Like all Bond villains Goldfinger has to unburden himself of his plans and so tells Bond that he plans to go down in history for pulling the biggest crime ever, and stealing the entire American supply of gold from Fort Knox! —Fleming always thinks with a kind of cartoon, bravura excess, egged on by his uninhibited villains.

The preparation

Briefly, Bond and Tilly have been kept alive to act as secretaries to the organisation of the job. The building they’re in is some kind of warehouse near the river in New York. At Goldfinger’s instruction, Bond types out and copies the agenda for a meeting with the six biggest organised crime gangs in America. When they arrive they are a suitably florid and ugly bunch, but the stand-out member is one Pussy Galore, leader of a lesbian gang in New York.

Goldfinger gives these men and Pussy a detailed explanation of his plan: to slip sleeping powder into the water supply of Fort Knox; to put the word out that there’s been some kind of attack or medical emergency; to organise a special medical emergency train to go into the danger zone, staffed by his own Korean and German guards along with selected members from each gang; to secure the perimeter of the Knox building, then to blow open the stainless steel doors of the vault with a small nuclear device!

Nuclear device!!

At this point Bond realises Goldfinger is a megalomaniac genius, and the reader realises how preposterous the entire scheme is. This warhead has been bought through bribery and corruption from the US Army in Germany, and is – allegedly – one of a new generation of fallout-free weapons. Yes. So the first men in will need radiation suits but will be able to pass the gold safely out to the gangsters waiting in their long lines of lorries to take their share of the gold wherever they want to.

Five of the gangsters sign up for the deal on the spot. The fifth says he’s not interested and leaves. Moments later Goldfinger tells the assembled hoods, the leaver has met with an unfortunate accident, fallen down some stairs and is dead.

After the hoods have gone, Goldfinger reveals that a) it is not going to be sleeping chemicals his men slip into the dam, but a deadly nerve gas which will kill the entire 60,000 population of Fort Knox, b) he is in fact going to take his $5 billion of gold to the coast where it will ship onboard a Russian submarine. The money will be used to fund SMERSH operations for decades. (For some reason, for the first time, the way everything comes back to SMERSH seemed silly to me, and also very small-minded: oh it’s another SMERSH operation.)

Next day Goldfinger, Oddjob, Tilly, Bond and others take a charter jet to fly over Fort Knox and check everything is as per the detailed map he had displayed at the meeting. In fact this is a plot device to allow Bond to scrawl a very long detailed account of the plan, roll it into a tight tube, write a warning message on the outside, that anyone taking this document to Felix Leiter at the Pinkerton Agency in new York will get a reward of $5,000 on the spot, and sellotape it to the underside of the toilet seat.

For the rest of the flight, and then for the next few days, Bond is in an agony of uncertainty, not knowing whether the message will be found at all, whether it will be acted on, or whether it’ll be found by Goldfinger’s people and he can expect a bullet in the neck at any point.

D-Day

In the event, on D-Day, the poison is put into the drinking water, news gets out and Goldfinger and his team man the rescue train into stricken zone posing as medical emergency team. As it enters Fort Knox they see cars which have crashed, people fallen across their lawns and washing lines, prone bodies everywhere, even with pinkish foam at the lips. Bond’s heart sinks. My God he is responsible for the deaths of 60,000 people; he should have murdered Goldfinger before this, even at the cost of his own life, done anything. (Bond is prone to a lot of self-doubt and worry and even guilt, throughout the books.)

The bluff

But it’s an immense con trick. A maroon warning flare is shot into the sky and thousands of people, including a lot of US Army troops spring to their feet and begin a terrific firefight with Goldfinger’s people and the assembled crooks. Bond jumps off the cab of the train which he had been viewing everything from, along with Tilly but they’re immediately pursued by Oddjob who has been tasked with keeping tabs on Bond throughout. Tilly turns to run back to Pussy but is immediately killed by Oddjob using his steel-rimmed bowler hat, and then throws himself into a flying karate kick at Bond, knocking him to the floor. He is moving in for what will no doubt be the kill when the train starts to pull out and Oddjob runs and jumps on to it. At that very moment Bond’s old pal Felix Leiter emerges with half a dozen soldiers and a bazooka which Bond seizes and fires at the escaping train, damaging the rear engine but not the front one and it steams over a river bridge and is gone.

Bond walks back down the track and looks down at the poor, huddled rags of the dead Tilly.

On the plane

Days later, after a full debriefing over the phone to M, then the FBI and then an embarrassing 15 minutes of thanks from the President himself (!), after a lot of joshing and ragging with Leiter, Bond is dropped at the BOAC terminal outside New York, checks in his bag etc but is then told he has to have a vaccination jab (!). No sooner is he injected than he passes out. When he awakes it is tied by the wrists and arms to the seat of an airliner which is airbound and next to the ever-vigilant Oddjob. Goldfinger comes strolling down the aisle: ‘Well, Mr Bond, I underestimated you’ etc.

Bond asks to be served Bourbon and ice to free his hands. To his surprise the coaster the drink arrives on has a message from Pussy reading ‘I’m on your side’. This gives him the courage for a desperate plan. He pretends to drowse and nod of and slowly Oddjob eases his supervision so that, with a sudden lunge, Bond leans across him and stabs the dagger concealed in the heel of his trick shoe, through the perspex window. It shatters and all hell breaks loose, the cabin depressurising, the plane going into a nose dive and Oddjob, sitting next to the window, is very gruesomely sucked into it and then squeezed through it like toothpaste.

When the plane has levelled out Bond undoes his seat belt and encounters Goldfinger in the aisle, for once in his life going into a complete berserker frenzy and strangling him to death in a hard-fought physical battle. He takes Goldfinger’s gun into the cabin of frightened pilots, gets the radio, establishes they don’t have enough fuel to get to any dry land, and contacts a radio ship in the north Atlantic, asking it to put out a flare landing path (?). It does this and an hour later the airliner hits the choppy sea, almost immediately breaks up, Bond and Pussy just having time to escape through an emergency exit with a life raft. The plane, with its cargo of $5 billion, and the crew, breaks up and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.

An hour later, picked up by the crew of the radio ship, Bond and Pussy are clean and in spare clothes. Pussy comes into his cabin wearing only a fisherman’s sweater. Get into bed, he orders, and she is meek and compliant. She explains she was a lesbian all her life because she was raped and abused by an uncle in the Deep South. Bond explains that all she needs is TLC (it is interesting that he has to explain that this stands for Tender Loving Care) and he commences his version of it by slipping his hand up over her flat belly to feel the curve of her breast and its hard nipple, then kissing her hard.

Lesbianism and lameness

Thus the novel ends on the ‘curing’ of Pussy’s lesbianism. Obviously, this is insulting to real life lesbians, then again Pussy is as realistic a character as Goldfinger, ie the entire thing is a preposterous fantasy. Nevertheless, even in its own terms, I think it is a shallow, lame ending.

You could possibly draw a graph showing the number of hours Bond puts into a relationship before he sleeps with a woman, in each of the novels. Thus Casino Royale invests a huge amount of time and energy in the relationship with Vesper Lynd which, unfortunately, ends up so tragically. We are in the company of Solitaire, Gala Brand or Tatiana Romanova for long stretches of their respective novels and we get to know them and share Bond’s thoughts and developing feeling for them over many chapters, before he gets anywhere near taking them to bed.

Goldfinger feels like the first novel which reflects the ‘easy-lay’ philosophy of the movies. Bond’s whirlwind romance with Jill Masterton feels shallow and porny, the way that, just five minutes after Bond bursts into her hotel bedroom to find her wearing only pants and bra, she is looking at him with need in her eyes, and offers to do anything for him – this insults, I think, both the reader and Bond as a character, when he is at his best and most feeling.

But the way a supposedly confirmed, hardened, man-hating lesbian crime leader like Pussy can – over the course of just half a dozen casual bantering exchanges in rooms full of other mobsters or Goldfinger and his gang – abruptly realise that Bond is ‘the first real man’ she’s met in her life, and therefore end up presenting herself on a plate for Bond and the reader’s pleasure, seems to me a forced and superficial ending to this book.

This is the first Bond novel which failed to convince me, even on its own pulp, comic-book level. For me the realistic descriptions of Jamaica, of meals and showers and scenery and settings, the prosaic details of Bond’s day-to-day living, along with a lot of his thought processes, in the earlier books, outweighed the silliness of the plots. This is the first one where the balance shifted and the preposterous, cartoon, wish-fulfilment elements outweighed the interesting and good descriptions.

And the ‘curing’ of Pussy stands as a fitting emblem of this tipping-over into the absurd.

Timeframe

The novel is divided into three distinct sections, taking a supposed saying of Goldfinger’s as an organising principle: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action’ – and so the three parts are named Happenstance, Coincidence and Enemy Action, as Bond encounters Goldfinger three times, with mounting antagonism.

None of this is earth-shattering, but I admire Fleming’s restless drive to vary the format and structure of his fictions: sure, the fundamental narrative arc remains remarkably samey (baddie, girl, fight), but that makes it all the more interesting to note the themes and variations he plays on it.

Food

  • Du Pont treats Bond to the most delicious meal he’s ever eaten (p.22): fresh stone crabs with melted butter and thick toast, washed down with two pints of pink champagne (Pommery 1950) served in silver tankards.
  • Next day for lunch Bond and Du Pont have shrimp cocktail, native snapper with tartare sauce, roast prime ribs of beef au jus, and pineapple surprise. (p.32)

Personification

A new element enters Fleming’s writing in this book, the use of personification ie giving inanimate objects intention and agency. As Colonel Smithers warms up to deliver his lecture about gold,

Bond felt boredom gathering in the corners of the room. (p.50)

In general Fleming’s style is blunt and factual. I think it works best this way though, of course, he has been criticised for this as for just about everything else in the books. For example, back in London after the Mexico trip, Bond is on night duty:

Bond stood at the open window of the seventh-floor office of the tall building in Regent’s Park that is the headquarters of the Secret Service. London lay asleep under a full moon that rode over the town through a shoal of herring-bone clouds. Big Ben sounded three. One of the telephones rang in the dark room. (p.40)

Admittedly this passage personifies London, but in a traditional way most readers don’t register. What counts is the diminuendo towards the short factual sentences, which mimic Bond’s cold, calculating decisive actions, when he is on his mettle. Compared with all that, the half dozen personifications in Goldfinger strike a new, almost Dickensian, note.

Bond got slowly out of the car and stood looking at the house. Its blank, well-washed eyes stared back at him. The house had a background noise, a heavy rhythmic pant like a huge animal with a rather quick pulse… The quiet watchful facade of the house seemed to be waiting for Bond to do something, make some offensive move to which there would be a quick reply… The silence, helped by the slow iron tick of a massively decorated grandfather clock, gathered and crept nearer. (pp.96-97

Bond facts

M wears a stiff white collar and a loosely-tied spotted bow tie (p.46).

The Secret Service employs 2,000 staff (p.54).

For the first time Bond drives a Service Aston Martin DB III. For the first time in the series there are gadgets: the front and back lights can change colour and appearance; reinforced steel bumpers in case of ramming; a long-barreled Colt .45 in a secret compartment; and plenty of concealed space (p.62).

Bond is bored so he is working on a book to be titled Stay Alive! about all the known methods of unarmed combat from around the world (p.42) though, interestingly, he is sickened by some of the things he reads, especially in the Russian manuals.

Credit

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming was published in 1959 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 1961 Pan paperback, 1964 edition (price: 3/6).

Related links

Other thrillers published in 1959

James Bond reviews

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by Simon on May 15, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 15, 2016

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