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5 comments about The Man with the Golden Gun (Unabridged).

1. Bond, a victim of amnesia has ended up in Russia. Now an easy target he is brainwashed and sent back to England to kill M. M survives, and they successfuly restore Bond to his former self. After an assassination attempt, his status is iffy, and he is keen to get back in the field.
   
   He is sent to get rid of Francisco Scaramanga, a gangster working with the KGB. Bond again ends up in the Carribean, and works with Leiter and also agent Goodnight, who is now working in Jamaica.
   
   Between Bond and Leiter, many gangsters do the shuffling off thing, but both men are badly hurt.
   
   Bond turns down a knighthood.



2. They say that all good things must come to an end. In the case of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, that end is with The Man with the Golden Gun. After this, there would only be a short story collection (Octopussy & The Living Daylights) to wrap up the set. Posthumously released (and supposedly concluded by a ghost writer), this book is generally considered one of the weaker of the Bond books, but I actually found it to be a pretty decent conclusion to the series.
   
   The book opens by resolving issues left open in You Only Live Twice (so if you don't want that book spoiled, read no further). Bond, having suffered a head injury, has lost most of his memory and has wound up in Soviet hands, where he is brainwashed into becoming an assassin. His target is M (whose name is revealed to be Miles Messervy). The plot is quickly foiled and Bond is sent to a clinic to be straightened out.
   
   To determine if Bond is still worthy of his 007 number, M dispatches him to Jamaica to kill Francisco Scaramanga, the title character who wields a special gold plated pistol. Scaramanga is one tough man, a sort of anti-Bond who is probably tougher than his hunter. A la Hamlet, Bond is a reluctant and hesitant killer, deferring his opportunities for finishing Scaramanga to instead infiltrate the Man with the Golden Gun's criminal enterprise. Eventually, like the Shakespearean character, procrastination will have to be replaced by action, leading to a showdown between the two.
   
   This works well as a final Bond novel, with none of the open issues that marked other recent books. Scaramanga is a worthy adversary and there's a decent amount of action. On the other hand, this is a bit shallower of a book than the two previous novels (On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice) which both gave a deeper look into the British superspy. Overall, this is a good but not great book and a reasonably worthy conclusion to the Bond series.



3. While I didn't feel this was the greatest Ian Fleming novel, This book easily holds its own among the others in the series. Book is dated by time but that doesn't affect how much enjoyable these novels are.



4. After James Bond is discovered to be alive, but brainwashed by the KGB (he was presumed dead at the end of "You Only Live Twice"), Bond is "reprogrammed" by the British Secret Service and sent off on a suicide mission to kill Scaramanga, the fastest gunman in the world, in order to prove himself once again.
   
   I presume it was the new-found fame that did it. After writing such marvellous, well plotted books as "Doctor No" and "Goldfinger", it is as if Fleming gave up when writing the later James Bond books. I suppose that by that time, the money was practically guaranteed and even his shopping list would have sold. "The Man with the Golden Gun" is the second last of Fleming's fourteen Bond adventures and like "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "You Only Live Twice", it feels more like an extended short story than a fully developed novel. It's not just that it's shorter than the earlier novels; the level of detail of the earlier novels just isn't there. Furthermore, the villain and the "Bond girl", two of the main drawcards of the Bond series, just aren't up to par either. Although there is technically a "girl" in this book, in the form of Bond's former secretary, Mary Goodnight, she barely plays a part in the story, and although Scaramanga is a passable villain, he pales by comparison to Fleming's mega-villains such as Blofeld and Dr. No.
   
   This is not a terrible novel. I enjoyed reading it. However, it is disappointing when compared to some of the previous novels. Read it, by all means, but not as your first Bond novel.



5. Well, I have finished them all. This was the last book published (posthumously) by Ian Fleming.
   As I have told before in my reviews of the rest of the books, about beginning of the summer I decided to read the Bond novels in order... and I think once done... it was worth the time.
   I agree the novels have to be put/read in context... Great Britain was no longer a major power after WWII and Fleming resented this... and the beatnicks!... when he died The Beatles were still touring. But the general public wasn't so much aware of the fact (not that The Beatles were touring), the slow fall down of the idea of the British Empire...
   
   On the other side the idea of the british gentlemen for Fleming was David Niven (perhaps quite correctly mind...) see YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE... and the idea that James Bond and "M" were still playing in the Major Leagues is of course ludicrous with hindsight but romantic in a way.
   
   Of course the main interest of the outpout is the moral attitude of the time confronted with Bond's and M's for that matter... the sex and violence was "hard" for the times I guess, and "the baddies" are a bit of a caricature but still very imaginative... probably Scaramagna is one of the least credible of them all.
   
   In fact this book is four stars (at best) but I can rate five stars the whole series without problem... and this last volume is perhaps one of the lower moments.
   
   For today's standards James Bond is quite prudish in the books and his conscience bothers him much more than the cool image of the films... he is in turns out of form, depressed, brainwashed and whatever, and is much more HUMAN and lovable in the books (discounting of course the silly British sense of superiority over the rest of the world Fleming distiled).
   
   Quite a literary sensation and a modern classic in it's own right.
   
   RECOMMENDED
   
   ADB

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