Anthony Burgess Picks Goldfinger for 99 Novels: The Best since 1939

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.