Book review: The World Of GoldenEye by Nicolás Suszczyk

By: Brian Smith

Published:
2019-11-21

There was a huge void in James Bond fandom prior to the release of GoldenEye in 1995. For kids it was not just the six and a half years from the previous film, but from the film before that. Any children not old enough when The Living Daylights (1987) came out were certainly too young for Licence to Kill’s (1989) prohibitive classification.

The result was that by the time GoldenEye came out virtually a whole generation had either never heard of Bond or, if it was mentioned in the media, as Suszczyk points out, there were ‘millions of teens who were asking their parents “who that James Bond guy was”.’

Nicolás Suszczyk is one of so-called ‘GoldenEye Generation’ – whose first brush with James Bond came in his native Argentina when he was intrigued by a street advertisement for the GoldenEye television premiere in January 1998. Suszczyk writes very movingly about his father who sadly passed away in 2016. His father explained to him who Bond was, they watched GoldenEye together, the subsequent films on the big screen and was instrumental in the formative years of his ‘Bond education’. But of course for this generation GoldenEye was much more than a film, it was also the bestselling Nintendo video game.

The World of GoldenEye is an affectionate look at the seventeenth James Bond film - a scholarly study of the film’s themes, its place at the end of the cold war and within popular culture. Suszczyk makes some insightful observations. While acknowledging the film is not based on any Ian Fleming book, he notes the similarities which may have influenced the film’s script. Bond’s disabling of Spang’s train in the 1956 novel Diamonds are Forever is similar to Bond stopping the villain’s armoured train, and Fleming’s disfigured villain Sir Hugo Drax from 1955’s Moonraker may have influenced the similarly scarred Alec Trevelyan. It is pleasing to know that this author knows his Fleming.

Suszczyk points out that English is not his mother tongue. He says he thinks in Spanish but writes in English but, by jove, I think the cunning linguist has succeeded! This book is written with bags of enthusiasm. If you love the film, I think you’ll love this book.

Review by Brian James Smith. Copyright © 2019 From Sweden with Love. All rights reserved.

>Order the paperback edition from Amazon UK
>Order the Kindle edition from Amazon.com

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Book review: The World Of GoldenEye by Nicolás Suszczyk

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