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GOLDING, William

British novelist (1911-1993)

Golding worked in the theatre and served in the Royal Navy in World War II. He worked as a schoolmaster until Lord of the Flies brought him international fame in 1954. The story of that book (about choirboys reverting to savagery after being marooned on a desert island) is typical of all his work: an exploration of the dark side of human nature. He believed that homo sapiens is corrupt, that we destroy more than we create, that we are devilish without redemption. But instead of baldly stating this philosophy, he dressed it in allegories of the most unusual and fantastical kind. He pictured the devil engulfing not only choirboys on an island, but also (in other novels) a drowning sailor, a tribe of neanderthal people, the dean of a medieval cathedral, a boy growing up in 1960s Britain, and a group of 18th-century people sailing towards Australia. He evoked each of these situations with absolute conviction: few writers were better at suggesting the feel, taste, smell and sound of things, the texture of experience.

THE SPIRE  (1964) Inspired by a vision, medieval Dean Jocelin commissions for his cathedral a 400-foot spire. He intends it as proof of human aspirations towards God; his enemies see it as a symbol of vanity, the devil's work; the master-builder points out that as the cathedral's foundations are inadequate, the tower will bring the whole building crashing down. Jocelin overrides all objections, the work proceeds -- Golding gives fascinating, vertigo-inducing detail of medieval building techniques -- and the higher the spire rises the more people are destroyed. In the end the struggle between God and the devil takes over Jocelin's own self. In truly medieval manner, his brain and body become a battleground, and the issue moves from the tower to questions of his own moral integrity and saintliness.

Golding's novels are Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire, The Pyramid, Darkness Visible, the trilogy (about an ill-assorted cargo of passengers on a voyage to 18th-century Australia) Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, and The Paper Men. The Scorpion God is a collection of three long stories, one based on his stage-comedy The Brass Butterfly, about a crazy inventor trying to interest a decadent Roman ruler of Egypt in steam power.

READ ON

Lord of the Flies (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

The Inheritors (a brilliantly imagined story of the coming of Homo sapiens, seen from the standpoint of the gentle ape-people they exterminate)

To The Spire : John Barth, Giles Goat-boy (a fantasy, partly satirical, about a professor who brings a child up with no company but goats, trying to avoid contamintating him with human original sin) Peter Benson, Odo's Hanging (brilliant novel about the clash between Bishop Odo, commissioning a wall-hanging to commemorate the accession of William the Conqueror, and Tuvold, the genius-craftsman who wants to do things his way) Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldsmund (which parallels both the good/evil theme and the medieval craft-background of The Spire)

To Lord of the Flies : Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

To the Australian trilogy : Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

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