List Price: $13.00Price: $7.07 You Save: $5.93 (46%)as of 11/22/2009 02:19 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: April 06, 2004
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Related Items:
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A brainwashed James Bond has triedand failedto assassinate M, his boss. Now Bond has to prove he is back on form and can be trusted again. All 007 has to do is kill one of the most deadly freelance hit men in the world: Paco "Pistols" Scaramanga, the Man with the Golden Gun. But despite his license to kill, 007 is no assassin, and on finding Scaramanga in the sultry heat of Jamaica, he decides to infiltrate the killers criminal cooperativeand realizes that he will have to take him out as swiftly as possible. Otherwise 007 might just be the next on a long list of British Secret Service numbers retired by the Man with the Golden Gun...
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
A sad end to a great series, "The Man With The Golden Gun" has James Bond facing off against an assassin with sidelines in eco-terrorism and hotel management in Ian Fleming's last novel.
Published the year after Fleming's death in 1964, it is a matter of debate whether "Gun" was properly finished by Fleming or reworked by other hands. Clearly it lacks the same glossy polish of earlier Bond novels, retreading plot points in routine, humorless fashion. Sent to Jamaica to kill "Pistols" Scaramanga, a hired killer responsible for shooting several fellow agents, Bond blunders his way in no time at all into his target's confidence, despite the fact Scaramunga has been warned an English spy has been sent to kill him.
Hardly one to hide his light under a bushel, Scaramanga introduces himself to Bond as "The Man with the Golden Gun" and shows off his signature weapon by blowing away a couple of tame birds. "Mister, there's something quite extra about the smell of death," Scaramanga tells Bond in the way of a job interview. "Care to try it?"
If Fleming was challenging his readers to make sense of his overdone prose, I wasn't up to it. Another such moment happens when Bond reflects on alcohol: "The best drink of the day is just before the first one."
Adding to general confusion is Scaramanga's purpose in Jamaica. He's got a hotel there languishing amid the bindweed and mortgage rates, and while looking in, decides to see if he can raise some needed capital by laying waste to Jamaica's canefields and bauxite factories in exchange for Soviet and Cuban funding. Several mob guys and spies are on hand to basically listen to Scaramanga do his bad-guy Mickey Spillane thing and stare menacingly but impotently at his new English go-fer.
There is certainly an underbaked quality to "Golden Gun" that begs the question if Fleming completed more than a first draft. Many of the transitions are whiplash-abrupt. The opener gives us a brainwashed Bond attempting to kill M, but just a few pages later he is winging off on M's latest assignment. Bond hardly lands at Kingston Airport before learning of Scaramanga's plans thanks to the first of many improbable coincidences.
Bond makes some boneheaded moves over the course of the story, dithering ridiculously so Fleming or whomever can fill up some more pages. At one point, we learn he is being intentionally rude to Scaramanga and his killer crew in order to trip them up somehow. At another, he shows off his own gun skills by shooting a headdress off a frightened dancer. How this doesn't get him dumped off in a mangrove swamp is never clear, but it fills time.
Regardless, this is more a novella than a novel, and so lamely conceived it seems unlikely any of Fleming's normally diligent editing and revising could have made this anything other than the stinker it is. After taking on Blofeld and SMERSH, what's a gun-happy triggerman for hire?
The worst you can say about this book has already been said by "The JuRK" on this review thread: "The movie was better." Too true. Ian Fleming saved the worst for last.
Rating:  -
Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak took over the James Bond Newspaper Strip in the mid 60's and produced some of the best adaptations of Fleming's work in any medium.
After the bulk of Fleming's books were adapted by Jim McClusky and henry Gammidge, who's work today seems quite dated, Lawrence was left with two novels, The man with the Golden Gun and the Spy who Loved me, as well as a hand full of short stories to adapt, but he takes what he has and makes something memorable. Both stories are far superior to the silly Roger Moore movies they inspired; so much so it's a shame the Brocolli family didn't ask Jim Lawrence to script their movies. We may have been spared some really poor 70's adaptations.
If you are thinking of picking these volumes up, start with the Lawrance and Horak stuff, you will be rewarded.
Rating:  -
Lightweight Bond book easily read in a couple of hours isn't awful, just a passable waste of time.
Rating:  -
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.
Rating:  -
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.
|
