Once dubbed “Lord of the Campus” by Time magazine, Nobel Prize-winning British novelist William Golding spent an entire writing career living down his first novel, Lord of the Flies. A relative of Robinson Crusoe, Golding’s dystopian tale of juvenile survival and tyranny made its author’s fame and became part of the campus canon on both sides of the Atlantic. Interweaving an allegory of Original Sin with descriptions of human primitivism, Lord of the Flies is ranked with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ninety Eighty-four as a novel that invites–even demands–analysis. Golding produced other fables in his long writing career: both The Inheritors and Pincher Martin are takes on the limits of so-called rational man. Later in life, he also dabbled in social comedy with The Pyramid and The Paper Men, while with his eighteenth-century sea trilogy–Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below–Golding turned a ship into a metaphor of the British Empire.
Golding has been described as pessimistic, mythical, spiritual–an allegorist who used his novels as a canvas to paint portraits of man’s constant struggle between his civilized self and his hidden, darker nature. With the appearance of Lord of the Flies, the author began his career as both a campus cult favorite and one of the late twentieth century’s distinctive–and much debated–literary talents. Golding’s appeal was summarized by the Nobel Prize committee, which issued this statement when awarding him the prestigious literature prize in 1983: “[His] books are very entertaining and exciting. They can be read with pleasure and profit without the need to make much effort with learning or acumen. But they have also aroused an unusually great interest in professional literary critics [who find] deep strata of ambiguity and complication in Golding’s work, . . . in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow.”
An “Idyllic” Childhood
Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Bernard Oldsey called Golding’s childhood “rather idyllic and isolated.” Born on September 19, 1911, in St. Columb Minor, in Cornwall, William Gerald Golding came into a family that expected much of its progeny. His father, Alec Golding, was a distinguished educator who served as senior assistant master at the Marlborough School his son would eventually attend. Descended from a long line of schoolmasters, Alec Golding had also written textbooks on botany, chemistry, zoology, physics, and geography, and was an accomplished musician, playing the violin, cello, viola, flute, and piano. Golding’s mother, Mildred, was an early suffragette and feminist. Thus, on the one side, Golding was influenced by his polymath father, and on the other by his activist mother. In the end, it was the former that stuck.
Many writers have noted that, less than a year after Golding’s birth, the Titanic sank. At its time, this event proved symbolic: the greatest creation of man was not safe from the forces of Nature. As Golding once commented in the Spectator, his mother confided to him that the sinking of the world-famous passenger liner confirmed in her the belief that the world is an “exhilarating but risky place.” Some critics credit this awakening in his mother–which was passed along to her son–as being responsible for what Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Joyce T. Forbes called “the critique of single-minded rationalism that runs throughout [Golding’s] novels and essays.”
Until he reached school age, Golding’s acquaintances were limited to family, and he remembered little from those years save walks with his parents or his nurse, Lily, and the long Cornish vacations by the seaside. During these early years he developed a love for books and a passion for words, but little affinity for math. As a child, Golding was also fascinated by the “terror and darkness of his family’s fourteenth-century home in Marlborough and the nearby graveyard,” according to Forbes. He took to reading the classics, including Homer’s Odyssey, as well as books closer to his era, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the novels of Alfred Henty, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. From copying word lists obsessively when he was seven, Golding decided to tackle a novel by age twelve. Influenced by his reading, young Golding intended to incorporate the rise of trade unionism in the projected twelve-volume opus. In the event, only the beginning sentence of the cycle remains, as quoted by Oldsey: “I was born in the Duchy of Cornwall on the eleventh of October, 1792, of rich but honest parents.” The use of the conjunction is particularly telling.
Golding attended Marlborough School for his secondary education, and then, after brushing up on his Latin, entered Brasenose College, Oxford, planning to study science. It took Golding two years to see the error of his ways, at which time he changed his area of concentration to literature. Still, his tastes veered away from the ordinary and the contemporary, leading him to focus on Anglo-Saxon studies. “This fascination with primitive subjects and ancient means of expressions remains apparent in much of his writing,” noted Oldsey. During his Oxford years, Golding began writing poetry, at first as a palliative to his science studies. Loaned a typewriter by a friend, Golding began putting down his reflections “on nature, unrequited love, the call of the sea, and the seduction of rationalism,” according to Bernard F. Dick in his critical study, William Golding. One of Golding’s friends gathered these fragmentary reflections together and secretly submitted them to Macmillan Publishers, who were in the process of establishing a series imprint for young poets. To Golding’s surprise, a check for five pounds showed up in the mail one day, his first indication that he was now a published poet. In 1934, one year before his graduation, Golding’s Poems appeared. Oldsey remarked that “these pieces are undistinguished enough for their author to wish they might be lost sight of,” while Dick maintained that as “literature they have no great value; but as documents illustrating the young Golding’s concerns, they indicate that he was preoccupied with two themes that later became dominant motifs in his fiction: the divided society and single-minded rationalism.” Poems contains, among others, “Non-Philosopher’s Song,” a sonnet distinguishing between head and heart, as well as the anti-rationalist “Mr. Pope.” Sold for a shilling in 1934, a copy of Poems eventually sold for thousands of dollars once its author became a famous author. However, all this was in the future; publication of his next book would not come for two more decades.
A Good War
After graduating from Oxford, Golding worked for a time as a social worker at a London settlement house. He also devoted himself to more creative activities as writer, actor, and producer at a small theater. He married in 1939, to Ann Brookfield, an analytical chemist, and then–true to family tradition–became a teacher himself. Moving with his new wife to Salisbury, Wiltshire, he took a position teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School. Here he settled down to married and professional life, and had two children. Like many others, his world changed on September 1, 1939, the date of the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II.
Golding served in the Royal Navy most of the war years, engaged in active sea duty, and had what the British term a “good war.” Though he afterward made light of his experiences, he was “present when the Bismarck was sunk,” according to Oldsey. “He saw action against battleships, submarines, and aircraft, and took his . . . ship to France on D-day.” His war experiences “shattered his Candide-like optimism,” according to Dick. Golding himself later reported to Douglas A. Davis in the New Republic, “When I was young, before the war, I did have some airy-fairy views about man. . . . But I went through the war and that changed me. The war taught me different and a lot of others like me.”
Back in civilian life in 1945, Golding once more took up teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School and now turned his reading attention to Greek literature. “If I really had to adopt literary parentage . . . I should name thunderous great names like Euripides, and Sophocles, and perhaps even Herodotus,” Golding reported to James Baker in his William Golding, A Critical Study. “And I might go so far as to say that I have a profound admiration . . . for Homer.” It was during these early postwar years, also, that Golding returned to his love of writing. At first his literary efforts were unsuccessful. His few publications during this period were reviews and magazine articles; several novels failed to gain publication and are now lost. Golding later said that these efforts were doomed to failure because they were written to please publishers rather than himself. With sufficient wartime experience, one could imagine him producing a book based on those adventures–either memoir or novel. Instead, Golding took up a fable-like story of a group of young schoolboys marooned on an island during some unnamed future war.
Lord of the Flies
The novel that established Golding’s reputation, Lord of the Flies, was rejected by twenty-one publishers before Faber & Faber accepted the forty-three-year-old schoolmaster’s book. While the story has been compared to such works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, Golding’s novel is actually the author’s “answer” to nineteenth-century writer R. M. Ballantyne’s children’s classic The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean. These two books share the same basic plot line and even some of the same character names (two of the lead characters are named Ralph and Jack in both books). The similarity, however, ends there. Ballantyne’s story about a trio of boys stranded on an otherwise uninhabited island shows how, by pluck and resourcefulness, the young castaways survive with their morals strengthened and their wits sharpened. Lord of the Flies, on the other hand, is “an allegory on human society today, the novel’s primary implication being that what we have come to call civilization is, at best, not more than skin-deep,” James Stern explained in the New York Times Book Review.
Initially, the tale of a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during their escape from atomic war received mixed reviews and sold only modestly in its hardcover edition. But when the paperback edition was published in 1959, thus making the book more accessible to students, the novel began to sell briskly. Teachers, aware of student interest and impressed by the strong theme and stark symbolism in the work, assigned Lord of the Flies to literature classes. As the novel’s reputation grew, critics reacted by drawing scholarly theses out of what was previously dismissed as just another adventure story.
In his study The Tragic Past, David Anderson finds Biblical implications in Golding’s novel. “Lord of the Flies,” wrote Anderson, “is a complex version of the story of Cain–the man whose smoke-signal failed and who murdered his brother. Above all, it is a refutation of optimistic theologies which believed that God had created a world in which man’s moral development had advanced pari passu with his biological evolution and would continue so to advance until the all-justifying End was reached.” Lord of the Flies presents moral regression rather than achievement, Anderson argued. “And there is no all-justifying End,” the critic continued, “the rescue-party which takes the boys off their island comes from a world in which regression has occurred on a gigantic scale–the scale of atomic war. The human plight is presented in terms which are unqualified and unrelieved. Cain is not merely our remote ancestor: he is contemporary man, and his murderous impulses are equipped with unlimited destructive power.”
The work has also been called Golding’s response to the popular artistic notion a postwar society primed for such manifestations as “flower children” and the “Beats” that young people were basically innocent victims of adult society. In 1960, C. B. Cox deemed Lord of the Flies “probably the most important novel to be published . . . in the 1950s.” Cox, writing in Critical Quarterly, continued: “[To] succeed, a good story needs more than sudden deaths, a terrifying chase and an unexpected conclusion. Lord of the Flies includes all these ingredients, but their exceptional force derives from Golding’s faith that every detail of human life has a religious significance. This is one reason why he is unique among new writers in the `50s. . . . Golding’s intense conviction [is] that every particular of human life has a profound importance. His children are not juvenile delinquents, but human beings realising for themselves the beauty and horror of life.”
The Dissector of Human Society
Golding stayed on at his teaching post until 1960, continuing to write in the free time he could steal. And with his second novel, The Inheritors, he took his theme of tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature a step further. The Inheritors is set at the beginning of human existence itself, during the prehistoric age. A tribe of Neanderthals, as seen through the characters of Lok and Fa, live a peaceful, primitive life. Their happy world, however, is doomed: evolution brings in its wake the new race, Homo sapiens, who demonstrate their acquired skills with weapons by killing the Neanderthals. The book, which Golding has called his favorite, is also a favorite with several critics. Inevitably, comparisons were made between The Inheritors and Lord of the Flies.
To Peter Green, in A Review of English Literature, “it is clear that there is a close thematic connection between [the two novels]: Mr. Golding has simply set up a different working model to illustrate the eternal human verities from a new angle. Again it is humanity, and humanity alone, that generates evil; and when the new men triumph, Lok, the Neanderthaler, weeps as Ralph wept for the corruption and end of innocence [in Lord of the Flies].” Oldsey, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, saw the comparison in religious terms: “[The Homo sapiens] represent the Descent of Man, not simply in the Darwinian sense, but in the Biblical sense of the Fall. Peculiarly enough, the boys [in Lord of the Flies] slide backward, through their own bedevilment, toward perdition; and Lok’s Neanderthal tribe hunches forward, given a push by their Homo sapiens antagonists, toward the same perdition. In Golding’s view, there is precious little room for evolutionary slippage: progression in The Inheritors and retrogression in Lord of the Flies have the same results.”
Just as Lord of the Flies is Golding’s rewriting, in his own terms, of The Coral Island, Golding claimed that he wrote The Inheritors to refute H. G. Wells’s controversial sociological study Outline of History. “[One] can see that between the two writers there is a certain filial relation, though strained,” commented a Times Literary Supplement critic. “They share the same fascination with past and future, the extraordinary capacity to move imaginatively to remote points in time, the fabulizing impulse, the need to moralize. There are even similarities in style. And surely now, when Wells’s reputation as a great writer is beginning to take form, it will be understood as high praise of Golding if one says that he is our Wells, as good in his own individual way as Wells was in his.” Taken together, the author’s first two novels are, according to Lawrence R. Ries in Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Fiction, “studies in human nature, exposing the kinds of violence that man uses against his fellow man. It is understandable why these first novels have been said to comprise [Golding’s] `primitive period.'”
Golding’s “primitive period” ended with the publication of his third novel, Pincher Martin (published in the United States as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin, out of the publishers’ concern for American readers who would not know that “pincher” is British slang for “petty thief”). Stylistically similar to Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Pincher Martin is about a naval officer who, after his ship is torpedoed in the Atlantic, drifts aimlessly before latching on to a barren rock. Here he clings for days, eating sea anemones and trying his best to retain consciousness. Delirium overtakes him, though, and through his rambling thoughts he relives his past. The discovery of the sailor’s corpse at the end of the story in part constitutes what has been called a “gimmick” ending, and gives the book a metaphysical turn–the reader learns that Pincher Martin has been dead from the beginning of the narrative.
The author’s use of flashbacks throughout the narrative of Pincher Martin was discussed by Avril Henry in Southern Review: “On the merely narrative level [the device] is the natural result of Martin’s isolation and illness, and is the process by which he is gradually brought to his ghastly self-knowledge.” In fact, said Henry, the flashbacks “function in several ways. First the flashbacks relate to each other and to the varied forms in which they themselves are repeated throughout the book; second, they relate also to the details of Martin’s `survival’ on [the rock]. . . . Third, they relate to the six-day structure of the whole experience: the structure which is superficially a temporal check for us and Martin in the otherwise timeless and distorted events on the rock and in the mind, and at a deeper level is a horrible parody of the six days of Creation. What we watch is an unmaking process, in which man attempts to create himself his own God, and the process accelerates daily.”
While acknowledging the influences present in the themes of Pincher Martin–from Homer’s Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe again–Stephen Medcalf in William Golding suggests that the novel is Golding’s most autobiographical work to date. The author, said Medcalf, “gave [to] Martin more of the external conditions of his own life than to any other of his characters, from [his education at] Oxford . . . through a period of acting and theatre life to a commission in the wartime Navy.” Golding adds still another dimension from his own past, noted Medcalf: “His childhood fear of the darkness of the cellar and the coffin ends crushed in the walls from the graveyard outside [his childhood home]. The darkness universalizes him. It becomes increasingly but always properly laden with symbolism: the darkness of the thing that cannot examine itself, the observing ego: the darkness of the unconscious, the darkness of sleep, of death and, beyond death, heaven.”
Experiments in Fiction
To follow Pincher Martin, Golding “said that he next wanted to show the patternlessness of life before we impose our patterns on it,” according to Green. However, the resulting book, Free Fall, Green noted, “avoids the amoebic paradox suggested by his own prophecy, and falls into a more normal pattern of development: normal, that is, for Golding.” Not unlike Pincher Martin, Free Fall depicts through flashbacks the life of its protagonist, artist Sammy Mountjoy. Imprisoned in a darkened cell in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Mountjoy, who has been told that his execution is imminent, has only time to reflect on his past.
Despite the similarity in circumstance to Pincher Martin, Oldsey found one important difference between that novel and Free Fall. In Free Fall, a scene showing Sammy Mountjoy’s tortured reaction on (symbolically) reliving his own downfall indicates a move toward atonement. “It is at this point in Golding’s tangled tale that the reader begins to understand the difference between Sammy Mountjoy and Pincher Martin,” Oldsey said. “Sammy escapes the machinations of the camp psychiatrist, Dr. Halde, by making use of man’s last resource, prayer. It is all concentrated in his cry of `Help me! Help me!’–a cry which Pincher Martin refuses to utter. In this moment of desperate prayer, Sammy spiritually bursts open the door of his own selfishness.”
Medcalf saw the story as Dantéesque in nature (Mountjoy’s romantic interest is even named Beatrice) and remarked: “Dante, like Sammy, came to himself in the middle of his life, in a dark wood [the cell, in Sammy’s case], unable to remember how he came there. . . . His only way out is to see the whole world, and himself in its light. Hell, purgatory and heaven are revealed to him directly, himself and this world of sense in glimpses from the standpoint of divine justice and eternity.” In Free Fall Golding’s intent “is to show this world directly, in other hints and guesses. He is involved therefore in showing directly the moment of fall at which Dante only hints. He has a hero without reference points, who lives in the vertigo of free fall, therefore, reproachful of an age in which those who have a morality or a system softly refuse to insist on them: a hero for whom no system he has will do, but who is looking for his own unity in the world–and that, the real world, is `like nothing, because it is everything.’ Golding, however, has the advantage of being able to bring Dante’s world in by allusion: and he does so with a Paradise hill on which Beatrice is met.”
In Golding’s fifth novel, The Spire, “the interest is all in the opacity of the man and in a further exploration of man’s all-sacrificing will,” according to Medcalf. Fourteenth-century clergyman Dean Jocelin “is obsessed with the belief that it is his divine mission to raise a 400-foot tower and spire above his church,” Oldsey related. “His colleagues protest vainly that the project is too expensive and the edifice unsuited for such a shaft. His master builder (obviously named Roger Mason) calculates that the foundation and pillars of the church are inadequate to support the added weight, and fruitlessly suggests compromises to limit the shaft to a lesser height. The townspeople–amoral, skeptical, and often literally pagan–are derisive about `Jocelin’s Folly.'” Dean Jocelin, nonetheless, strives on. The churchman, in fact, “neglects all his spiritual duties to be up in the tower overseeing the workmen himself, all the while choosing not to see within and without himself what might interrupt the spire’s dizzying climb,” Oldsey continued. The weight of the tower causes the church’s foundations to shudder; the townspeople increasingly come to see Jocelin as a man dangerously driven.
The Spire “is a book about vision and its cost,” observed New York Review of Books critic Frank Kermode. “It has to do with the motives of art and prayer, the phallus turned spire; with the deceit, as painful to man as to God, involved in structures which are human but have to be divine, such as churches and spires. But because the whole work is a dance of figurative language such an account of it can only be misleading.” As with all Golding’s work, The Spire can be read on two levels, as either an engrossing story or a biting analysis of human nature. As Nigel Dennis commented in the New York Times Book Review, Golding “has always written on these two levels. But The Spire will be of particular interest to his admirers because it can also be read as an exact description of his own artistic method. This consists basically of trying to rise to the heights while keeping himself glued to the ground. Mr. Golding’s aspirations climb by clinging to solid objects and working up them like a vine. This is particularly pronounced in [The Spire], where every piece of building stone, every stage of scaffolding, every joint and ledge, are used by the author to draw himself up into the blue.”
The Later Period
By 1965 Golding found himself gaining both increasing critical acclaim and popular acceptance; “then matters changed abruptly,” Oldsey related. The writer’s output dropped dramatically and for the next fifteen years he produced no novels and only a handful of novellas, short stories, and occasional pieces. Of this period, The Pyramid, a collection of three related novellas–considered a novel proper by some critics–is generally regarded as among Golding’s weaker efforts. The episodic story of a man’s existence in the suspiciously named English town of Stilbourne, The Pyramid proved a shock to “even Golding’s most faithful adherents [who] wondered if the book was indeed a novel or if it contributed anything to the author’s reputation. To some it seemed merely three weak stories jammed together to produce a salable book,” said Oldsey. The Pyramid, however, did have its admirers. To a Times Literary Supplement critic the book “will astonish by what it is not. It is not a fable, it does not contain evident allegory, it is not set in a simplified or remote world. It belongs to another, more commonplace tradition of English fiction; it is a low-keyed, realistic novel of growing up in a small town–the sort of book H. G. Wells might have written if he had been more attentive to his style.”
The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels, another collection of novellas, was somewhat better received. One Times Literary Supplement reviewer, while calling the work “not major Golding,” nevertheless found the book “a pure example of Golding’s gift. . . . The title story is from Golding’s Egyptological side and is set in ancient Egypt. . . . By treating the unfamiliar with familiarity, explaining nothing, he teases the reader into the strange world of the story. It is as brilliant a tour de force as The Inheritors, if on a smaller scale.”
Golding’s reintroduction to the literary world was acknowledged in 1979 with the publication of Darkness Visible. Despite some fifteen years’ absence from novel writing, the author “returns unchanged,” Samuel Hynes observed in a Washington Post Book World article. “[He is] still a moralist, still a maker of parables. To be a moralist you must believe in good and evil, and Golding does; indeed, you might say that the nature of good and evil is his only theme. To be a parable-maker you must believe that moral meaning can be expressed in the very fabric of the story itself, and perhaps that some meanings can only be expressed in this way; and this, too, has always been Golding’s way.”
The title of Darkness Visible derives from Milton’s description of Hell in Paradise Lost, and from the first scenes of the book Golding confronts the reader with images of fire, mutilation, and pain–which he presents in Biblical terms. For instance, noted Commonweal reviewer Bernard McCabe, the novel’s opening describes a small child, “horribly burned, horribly disfigured, [who walks] out of the flames at the height of the London blitz. . . . The shattered building he emerges from . . . is called `a burning bush,’ the firemen stare into `two pillars of lighted smoke,’ the child walks with a `ritual gait,’ and he appears to have been `born from the sheer agony of a burning city.'” The rescued youth, dubbed Matty, the left side of whose face has been left permanently mutilated, grows up to be a religious visionary.
“If Matty is a force for light, he is opposed by a pair of beautiful twins, Toni and Sophy Stanhope,” continued Susan Fromberg Schaeffer in her Chicago Tribune Book World review. “These girls, once symbols of innocence in their town, discover the seductive attractions of darkness. Once, say the spirits who visit Matty, the girls were called before them, but they refused to come. Instead, obsessed by the darkness loose in the world, they abandon morality, choosing instead a demonic hedonism that allows them to justify anything, even mass murder.”
Some of the ideas explored in Golding’s next book trace back to Lord of the Flies “and to the view [the author] held then of man as a fallen being capable of a `vileness beyond words,'” in the opinion of New Statesman reviewer Blake Morrison. Set in the early nineteenth century, Rites of Passage tells of a voyage from England to Australia as recounted through the shipboard diary of young aristocrat Edmund Talbot. “He sets down a vivid record of the ship and its characters,” explained Morrison. They include “the irascible Captain Anderson . . . , the `wind-machine Mr. Brockleband,’ the whorish `painted Magdalene’ called Zenobia, and the meek and ridiculous `parson,’ Mr. Colley, who is satirised as mercilessly as the clerics in [Henry] Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.” This last character is the one through which much of the dramatic action in Rites of Passage takes place. For Colley, this “country curate . . . this hedge priest,” as Golding’s Talbot describes him, “is the perfect victim–self-deluding, unworldly, sentimentally devout, priggish, and terrified. Above all he is ignorant of the powerful homosexual streak in his nature that impels him toward the crew and especially toward one stalwart sailor, Billy Rogers,” explained Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. Driven by passion yet torn by doubt, ridiculed and shunned by the other passengers on the ship, Colley literally dies of shame during the voyage. Rites of Passage won the Booker McConnell Prize for 1981 and began a trilogy that would be finally completed in 1989.
Winning the Nobel Prize in 1983, the author faced his harshest criticism to date with the publication of The Paper Men the following year. A farce-drama about an aging, successful novelist’s conflicts with his pushy, overbearing biographer, The Paper Men “tells us that biography is the trade of the con man, a fatuous accomplishment, and the height of impertinence in both meanings of the word,” according to London Times critic Michael Ratcliff. Unfortunately for Golding, many critics found The Paper Men to be sorely lacking in the qualities that distinguish the author’s best work. As Michiko Kakutani observed in the New York Times: “Judging from the tired, petulant tone of [the novel], Mr. Golding would seem to have more in common with his creation than mere appearance–a `scraggy yellow-white beard, yellow-white thatch and broken-toothed grin.’ He, too, seems to have allowed his pessimistic vision of man to curdle his view of the world and to sour his enjoyment of craft.” As the novelist David Lodge noted in a New Republic review of The Paper Men, “Anything a writer does after winning the Nobel Prize is apt to seem an anti-climax. William Golding’s new novel . . . is no exception to the rule.”
Completion of the Sea Trilogy
Golding saw the publication of two more novels before his death in 1993. Close Quarters, published in 1987, and Fire down Below, published in 1989, complete the trilogy begun with Rites of Passage. Close Quarters, according to Bernard F. Dick in World Literature Today, “portrayed a voyage to Australia on a ship that symbolized class-conscious Britain (circa 1810) facing the rise of the middle class. . . . Close Quarters continues the voyage, but this time the ship, which is again a symbol of Britain, is near collapse.” The story is told through the journal entries of Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, “a well-meaning, somewhat uncertain, slightly pompous officer and gentleman enroute to Sydney and a career in His Majesty’s service,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer observed. When an inexperienced sailor’s error destroys the ship’s masts, the crew and passengers are left to ponder their mortality. “As with most of Golding’s fiction,” David Nokes asserted in the Times Literary Supplement, “it is impossible to escape a brooding, restless intensity which turns even the most trivial incident or observation into a metaphysical conceit.” As the ship founders and its captives become increasingly agitated, it seems to become a living thing itself, with twigs sprouting from its timbers and discernable creeping movements in its deck planks underfoot. “As a story-teller [Golding’s] touch never falters,” Nokes concluded. “His attention to details of idiom and setting show a reverence for his craft that would do credit to a master-shipwright. It is in the dark undertow of his metaphors and in the literary ostentation of his allusions that a feeling of strain and contrivance appears. As he steers us through the calms and storms, we are never quite sure whether we are in the safe hands of a master-mariner or under the dangerous spell of an Old Man of the Sea.”
New York Times Book Review contributor Robert M. Adams had high hopes for the final book of the trilogy based on his reading of Close Quarters. He asserted that the second volume “will not stand up by itself as an independent fiction the way Rites of Passage did. . . . But this is the wrong time to pass final judgment on a project, the full dimensions of which can at this point only be guessed. In one sense, the very absence from this novel of strong scenes and sharply defined ironies confirms one’s sense of a novelist who is still outward bound, firmly in control of his story, and preparing his strongest effects for the resolutions and revolutions to come.” Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Richard Hough also found Close Quarters unable to stand alone: “This reviewer confesses to being totally mystified by Golding’s sequel to Rites of Passage. It is neither an allegory, nor a fantasy, nor an adventure, nor even a complete novel, as it has a beginning, a middle (of sorts) but an ending only at some unspecified future date when Golding chooses to complete it, if he does.”
The final volume of the trilogy, Fire down Below, appeared in 1989. The title refers to a plan for repairing the ship’s masts that entails creating iron bands to pull together the split in the wood that is preventing the masts from bearing the weight of the sails, but which also incurs the danger of fire in the hold during the blacksmithing process. Quill and Quire reviewer Paul Stuewe described Fire down Below as an “ambitious and satisfying novel” and “a rousing finale to an entertaining exercise in historical pastiche.” While asserting that neither Fire down Below nor Close Quarters “works as powerfully and coherently as Rites of Passage with its strongly structured story of a parson who literally died of shame,” New Statesman & Society contributor W. L. Webb observed that “what keeps one attending still, as to the other ancient mariner’s tales of ice mast-high, are [Golding’s] magic sea pictures: faces on the quarter-deck masked in moonlight, the eerie `shadow’ that falls behind solid bodies in mist and spray, storm-light and a droning wind, and the sailors swarming out like bees as the wounded ship yaws close to the ice cliffs. There’s nothing quite like it in our literature.”
Four years after publishing Fire down Below, the eighty-one-year-old Golding died of a heart attack near Falmouth, England. He remains one of the most debated “great” writers of the twentieth century, some critics even disputing the appellation of “great” despite the fact that Golding won the Nobel Prize for literature. Stanley Kaufmann, for one, referred in the New Republic to the “murmur of amused surprise” from the literary world that greeted the announcement that Golding had won the Nobel. Nor do all agree that his most famous creation, Lord of the Flies, is a true masterpiece. Again, Kaufmann noted that it “isn’t a novel, it’s a mechanism.” Writing in the Atlantic, Jonathan Raban called Golding “in his way, a famous preacher,” adding: “His books owe at least as much to the tradition of the sermon as they do to the tradition of the novel. Golding is not good at creating the illusion of reality in his work; fiction events occur in it the way they do in parables. His prose style lacks melody and often seems clumsy.” For Raban, the true strength of Golding’s prose can be found “in its knottiness, its sinewy way of worrying at large moral issues and making slow, insistent sense of them.” Yet many others have found power in Golding both as sermonizer and storyteller. “As a novelist, William Golding had the gift of terror,” Joseph J. Feeney wrote in an obituary of the novelist for America. “It is not the terror of a quick scare–a ghost, a scream, a slash that catches the breath–but a primal, fearsome sense of human evil and human mystery. . . . William Golding was, with Graham Greene, the finest British novelist of our half-century. His fellow novelist Malcolm Bradbury memorialized him as `a writer who was both impishly difficult, and wonderfully monumental,’ and a teller of `primal stories–about the birth of speech, the dawn of evil, the strange sources of art.'”
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born September 19, 1911, in St. Columb Minor, Cornwall, England; died of a heart attack, June 19, 1993, in Perranarworthal, near Falmouth, England; son of Alex A. (a schoolmaster) and Mildred A. Golding; married Ann Brookfield, 1939; children: David, Judith. Education: Brasenose College, Oxford, B.A., 1935, M.A., 1960. Hobbies and other interests: Sailing, archaeology, and playing the piano, violin, viola, cello, and oboe.
AWARDS
Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1965; D.Litt., University of Sussex, 1970, University of Kent, 1974, University of Warwick, 1981, Oxford University, 1983, and University of Sorbonne, 1983; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1980, for Darkness Visible; Booker McConnell Prize, 1981, for Rites of Passage; Nobel Prize for literature, 1983, for body of work; LL.D., University of Bristol, 1984; knighted, 1988.
CAREER
Writer. Worked in a settlement house after graduating from Oxford University; taught English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, 1939-40, 1945-61; wrote, produced, and acted on London stage, 1934-40, 1945-54. Writer-in-residence, Hollins College, 1961-62; honorary fellow, Brasenose College, Oxford University, 1966. Military service: Royal Navy, 1940-45; became rocket ship commander.
“William Golding.” Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 44. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007, 5/11/2009, http://www.edupaperback.org/showauth.cfm?authid=92 –