He’s conflicted, torn by the knowledge that he’s good at his job but that it’s doing his humanity no favors. At the beginning of Goldfinger, we meet him at an airport in Mexico, just after a contract killing. That said, he’s not a bad one, either his Bond is reflective (up to a point), self-aware (ditto), and possessed of the kind of mordant wit familiar from Dashiell Hammett-type noir. There are lots of good reasons to make fun of Ian Fleming, one of which is that he’s not a brilliant prose stylist. It became clear fairly quickly that my cousin had had a point.

So when I spotted that my workplace had an old copy of Goldfinger hanging about, I picked it up like a shot. The closest I had come was listening to my brilliant actor cousin reading aloud the first chapter of Casino Royale in a tone of such pointed mockery that I fell off our porch swing laughing. Strangely, though, I’d never read any of the books until a few months ago. There tends to be a lot of argument about this.) My younger brother’s English project this year is to write and present a TED talk he has chosen to talk on James Bond. Personally, I think Timothy Dalton is by far the most convincingly cast, and his films– The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill–are both genuinely good (at least as far as Bond goes. We all have our preferred Bond, of course. The films are staples of our Christmas holidays we have all-time favorites and all-time worsts we rank them by quality of title credit song, by number of explosions, by ludicrousness of plot, by backstory of babes. In my family, James Bond has assumed an importance that verges on the religious. Read: September 2014, scuffing through leaves on Marston Ferry Road as I walked to and from work. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming