I've never thought much of William Golding's writing: he may have received a Booker Prize, and a Nobel Prize for Literature to boot, but that doesn't make him an attractive author in my eyes. It's not his bleakness or the Gothic undertones—I can do bleak, or at least E. Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy can, for me—or his apparent misanthropy—Martin Amis plays the misanthrope, but at least he makes you laugh: it's the unmodulated pessimism that's hard to take. Of course, my assessment is hardly helped by the fact that
Lord of the Flies was a set book in my prep school, when I was just a little older than Sean: in that school, the critical challenge was not so much to understand the allegory, which was obvious to even the least engaged pupil, but to figure out exactly how William Golding knew so much about my classmates twenty years before they were born, and why he bothered to change their names. (I have the same question about Francesca Simon, who has evidently used my children as models for Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter.) Within the first week, we knew precisely who Jack, Ralph, Simon and Piggy were, and unfortunately, so did they...
Now, I understand from
a brief bio. piece that Golding was profoundly changed by his experiences in the Second World War...
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."
... but equally, a lot of people came through that war with greater faith in the rest of humanity, and a sense of humour. In the end, through
The Spire, Free Fall, and much of the rest, one can't escape the feeling that this was a man who could have benefited from therapy, or at least a few of those 'free hugs' that it was the fashion to dispense on campus when I was a graduate student at USC (and which came to Sheffield more recently).
The reason this came to mind is very trivial, really. Waking up this morning, I pulled on my clothes, coat and boots, then spent 40 minutes shovelling snow on our 150m long driveway up to the main road. We had to get Julian and Justin, and Yumi, down the hill, and to do that we somehow had to get out of the driveway. But the snow had drifted higher in the night, and even with chains, and the adults walking, we barely made it up the slope. On a bleaker, more miserable morning, we might have been trapped in our house all day. Hardly Pincher Martin's rock, but cut off nevertheless, and, we imagined, miles from any help. The irony, though, is that it was just our driveway that is an island of winter: when we finally got the car out, the main road had been cleared, and all we had to face were a few patches of slush, vainly holding out against grit and sunshine. And it reminded me of the end of
Pincher Martin—not the
real ending, but the one I misremembered all these years—that though he thought he was on a isolated piece of rock, help was just around the corner. Grit and sunshine, that's what we all need...
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