The plot of the novel Goldfinger is similar to that of the movie, except that Pussy Galore is not Goldfinger's English pilot. Instead, she's the leader of an all-girl gang from New York, one of the American gangs aiding Goldfinger in his attempt to rob Fort Knox. And she's a lesbian. Until she meets Bond, who proves that her lesbianism is really nothing more than fear and hatred of men. In the novel, she really is the ultimate Bond girl: she has an outrageously suggestive name and is totally unattainable to any man except James Bond.
Then we have Goldfinger's deadly Korean bodyguard, Oddjob. Actually, Oddjob is one of many Korean servants Goldfinger employs. Mainly because they are deadly karate experts. And apparently all Koreans hate white people and love nothing more than the chance to defile white women. And don't forget that they eat dogs and cats. Fleming's passages concerning Koreans are probably the most vilely racist things I've ever read in a work of fiction.
A reader can expect and learn to put up with a certain amount of racism and sexism in older books. The Bond books have their share, but out of the five or six that I've read, this is the only one where the inappropriateness got in the way of my enjoyment of the book.
Aside from the aforementioned problems, Goldfinger also suffers from a long lang in the last third, when Bond is restricted to observing Goldfinger's preparations for the Fort Knox robbery. Also, Fleming had a terribly bad ear for American dialogue. He his idea of how American gangsters talked is ridiculous even for the 1950s. Even putting the offensive material aside, this is still probably the weakest Bond novel I've read.
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