What Bond book/movie they are talking about in Goldeneye Novelization?
Bworms1980
Posts: 3MI6 Agent
I recently read the novelization of Goldeye and came across a paragraph that is frustrating me. I've seen all the movies and read all the books but I don't understand who they are referring too in the passage below. Doesn't help that I can't figure out what island they are on at that point. But what woman is he talking about? I've racked my brain over the few (very few) women in his life who survived but can't remember any who was crippled.
Presently, she asked him if he knew this island well. "Why?" "Oh, I just had a feeling that you knew where you were going when we were out driving this afternoon. He lay, silent for a moment. "I know it,' he said softly. "In some ways I have reason to hate it, but now there is a new reason for me to love it." "Something sad happened to you here?" "Something I shouldn't talk about, I'm afraid." Once more a long pause. "There was a woman, she said, bluntly. "It's OK, James. I'm not jealous about what happened before we met." "Yes,' he heard the tiny kink in the back of his throat. "Yes, there was a woman. She's alive, but she may never walk again. We were dealing with a very bad man.
Comments
It's a reference to Bond's love interest Flicka von Grusse who featured in John Gardner's previous two actual Bond novels Never Send Flowers (1993) and SeaFire (1994) and later Bond novel Cold (1996). By rights you need to read those to know what is going on here. Suffice to say Flicka was beaten up very badly at the end of SeaFire and Sir Max Tarn is the "very bad man" referred to. He's also compared to being as bad as General Ourumov. It is confusing as it wasn't until Cold that Bond was going to see the new female M but it is meant to be set in 1990 and 1994 and so it comes before GoldenEye, even though it wasn't published until the year after the GoldenEye novelisation - 1996. Hope that goes some way to explaining it as the resident Gardnerologist!
By the way, the island they are on is Costa Rica, which also featured in SeaFire, hence the reference back to it.
Yes, me too. I agree it is rather confusing, but that is the danger of bringing your own novel series into a novelisation! By rights, the novelisation is at the end after Cold, but that doesn't make sense either as Flicka is dead by the end of Cold too!
I had meant to write an article on this at some point, but it's difficult to explain. I've seen the question come up as a thread a few times on different Bond forums (CBn and MI6 Community) so maybe I should do a write-up on it for my blog soon. This thread could be the spur!
No, very compelling internal evidence points to the fact that it could not and that is part of the problem as the female M does not actually feature there. We are only told at the end of Cold that Bond was going to see the new female M after the Old Man finally retired. So, with M already introduced in the novelisation of GoldenEye as the Head of the British Secret Service/MI6 and Bond having worked with her for a while the novel Cold can only come before GoldenEye and not afterwards or even be near-simultaneous. As I said in my post above the second half of Cold is set in 1994, a full year before GoldenEye would have occurred (obvious internal evidence confirms this too: nine years later than 1986). I think 1995 as a year is also referenced in the Gardner novelisation and possibly even in the film itself. So you can see the kind of quandary this leaves us in!
Basically, Gardner would have been better off not mentioning it at all as it comes across as a goof however you look at it. It just goes to show how film Bond and novel Bond should not be mixed too much in a film novelisation like GoldenEye. It's a phenomenon of these books that happened to Gardner in the novelisation of Licence to Kill (1989) and later also Raymond Benson with his novelisation of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).
I am writing the article up now in fact. I've had the idea since about 2008 but noticed it a lot earlier than that I think, probably when I first read it back in December 1998 as I had been reading SeaFire and Cold just before that and had read Never Send Flowers earlier in the year too. Probably why I noticed it in fact, as it could just as easily go by unnoticed or be dismissed as another reference to an unreported mission that pop up in most of the Bond novels from time to time. When I get the article published on my blog (link in my signature if you're interested in reading further on Gardner and other Bond topics) I'll post a link here. How's that sound?
P.S. Here are those links I was referring to to when this topic has surfaced on both CBn [in 2004] and MI6 Community [in 2014]. I even contributed to the MI6 one as my alter-ego Dragonpol:
http://debrief.commanderbond.net/topic/14124-woman-who-will-never-walk-again/
https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/9815/gardners-goldeneye-novel-bonds-past-in-cuba