A bumper crop of Bondage

Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: ‘The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards.’

Over 50 years later (Casino Royale, the first Bond book, was published in 1953, its author born in 1908) what is the verdict? That highly accessoried and fetishistic sex in the novels is rather unpenetrative by comparison with thriller-sex now; it is too ultra-romantic, of course, in the mean-keen/ luxe-location mode. The sadism is beating away in the heart of the novels, not to be minimised but nothing like as sub- cutaneous as what you might now find at the cinema in a film categorised PG. There is no question that the vulgarity of money for its own sake in the world without the fictionalised world of novels has quite outglared anything to be found within their pages.