by Jonathan W. Doering

AS an aspiring Ph.D. student in 1998, I asked myself which writers I had read extensively, which I had always enjoyed and in whose works I had always found something new when I returned to them. From a dwindling list, William Golding emerged. I had read his Lord of the Flies twice in a matter of weeks whilst studying it for secondary school English, heralding a deep fascination with the man and his work. As I re-read the books and prepared my thesis application, it struck me with renewed vigour that I had chosen wisely: each text is a departure for the reader; to me, what makes Golding great is his refusal to follow any party line, to present a powerful story which, although moving, does not move the reader into a certain perspective. You must always make up your own mind.

During the time since then, trawling through the critical work on Golding, I have become aware of the nagging truth that the key to what makes him such a great writer contributed during his career to a fluctuation in the reception his work received on publication. He was in some sense one of the awkward squad', and his perceived awkwardness led to miscomprehension and condemnation in some quarters. In a historical sense, this refusal to conform to any particular paradigm has ensured Golding a place in the pantheon of writers who will be remembered long beyond their own times. Yet, I cannot rid myself of the notion that we are tremendously lucky to have Golding at all. In its 25 March 2001 edition, The Independent on Sunday ran a dispiriting article, announcing that many major publishing houses were reducing or doing away with their system of readers entirely. The reasons offered included the expense, and the relatively few successes discovered with this method. As such literary forces as Roddy Doyle, J. K. Ro wling, and William Golding (to name only a few) climbed out of the publishing slush pile, I would beg to differ. Add to this Linda Grant's recent comments in The Guardian about a trend towards publishing younger, more photogenic authors, and the success of the Nobel Laureate winner, Golding, starts to appear near miraculous.

As these manuscripts were returned repeatedly without a flicker of interest, Golding began to write less with an eye to popular publication, a process that would bring him publication, celebrity, condemnation, and literary greatness. His work ranges over a wide variety of subjects: desert islands; the dawn of humanity; the Second World War, both at land and at sea; the medieval English Church; early twentieth century English country life; the Ancient World (Egypt, Rome, Africa); a nineteenth century ship of the line; a meditation on good and evil in modern Britain; a contemporary novelist's headlong fleeing from academic mummification; and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. His style and structure varies as well: often seen as a dark and pessimistic writer, his tone can also by turns be light-hearted as well as serious-minded. He also employs various narrative techniques: first-person, third person, third-person indirect, omnipotent, diary, and epistolary forms, to achieve his desired effects.

Perhaps this shifting, smoky aesthetic informs how the books are seen by the other media. Apart from radio adaptations, the only major adaptations of Golding's writing are two film versions of Lord of the Flies: an edgy docu-drama by Peter Brook, which documents the growing insanity of a group of boys on an island, and a Hollywood movie that peoples its landscape with military cadets rather than public school boys. Golding's comments on the two films at the 1992 University of East Anglia Festival of Literature shed a little more light on this perceived awkwardness. He explained that he signed away the film rights during a period of financial difficulty. The Brook version was 'as good as could have been expected'; he stated that he had no plans to watch the Hollywood version. For a man with an obvious love of theatre and performance (he worked as a spearcarrier in London and Bristol after coming down from Oxford) Golding seems to have regarded his own novels principally in scribal terms. Nigel William's stage version met with Golding's greater approval, although performances do not appear to be frequent (I managed to fit in a performance last year, during a family visit to Canada). They are written stories, which his audience is expected to approach as readers. Those with an interest in his work must take the time and trouble to sit and read it, and then reflect on its significance to their lives.

However, this intransigence in his writing did not instantly provoke resentment: the tone of critical reaction is generally positive for The Inheritors and Pincher Martin; there are murmurs of doubt over the apparently misfiring denouement to Free Fall. These murmurs rise to howls of disapproval on the appearance of The Spire. One radio reviewer suggested that it be viewed as a companion piece to the work of the Bronte sisters, under a new title -- 'Wuthering Depths'. The New Yorker vouchsafed ten lines in which to dismiss it; another kindly critic pointed out that, as we all know that Salisbury Cathedral spire is still standing, there is little suspense to the story; The Evening Standard wondered aloud if Mr. Golding was aware of the phallic significance of the spire (he joked with one interviewer that he had considered submitting the manuscript under the title An Erection at Barchester!)

Of course, the reactions were not uniformly bad. David Lodge declared The Spire to be a fine achievement; Frank Kermode argued in the New York Review of Books that the centring of the narrative voice within Jocelin forces the reader to think far more carefully about what to believe: he talks of viewing the action 'out of the corners of our eyes'. In a South Bank Show interview in the 1980s, Golding explained that he had set aside factual research for his novel, and instead relied on his naval experience in visualising the task of building a church spire: 'I asked myself what the builders would have done if they had been sailors'. He mischievously declared himself satisfied with his sleight of hand: 'people seem to believe it'. The fact that Golding waived his forty-five minutes of study in Harvard University Library in favour of his own imagination underscores the fact that the reader is not intended to take his books at face value, that Golding might not be telling the strict factual truth about events, that the reader must make up his or her own mind.

It is from this point in time that Golding entered a period of critical eclipse, which lasted for the rest of the 1960s, and much of the 1970s. The next book to appear, a collection of non-fiction, The Hot Gates, received lukewarm reviews. The Pyramid, a tragic-comic triptych of rites of passage in a small country town, was criticised by some for being three short stories stitched together, rather than a 'real' novel; further, two of the sequences had previously appeared in magazines, and so the material was not 'original'. Similar complaints greeted The Scorpion God, three discrete stories of the ancient world, two of which had been previously published. Faber and Faber was perhaps seeking to ward off some criticism by including the sub-heading 'Three Short Novels', but again, some critics asked why Golding, a novelist, was writing short stories at all.

In these days when it is almost de rigeur for accomplished writers to publish in more than their main field of endeavour, these comments may seem a little rigid and severe, but they emphasise the point that Golding was seen by some as an irksome figure, because he seemed almost deliberately to avoid doing what was expected of him. At least one scholarly journal ran a summary bibliography of Golding's oeuvre during this time: some voices seemed to be whispering that, not only was Golding erratic, but that he had already produced his life's work.

Were the gathering critical clouds of concern to him? Robert McCrum, Literary Editor of The Observer, thinks not: 'He was quite self-sufficient, he wasn't sitting at home drumming his fingers on the table, and anyway, for much of the Seventies he was working on Darkness Visible'. His daughter, Judy Carver, seems to be of a similar opinion: 'He felt, not that it [critical opinion] didn't matter, but that it wasn't his job', 'He saw himself principally as a storyteller'. He often took care to be out of Britain when a new novel appeared and he was in Brittany when The Scorpion God was meeting with some derision. Moreover, he knew that he had not finished writing; ironically, the next novel he was to publish would re-establish him at the pinnacle of his profession.

When Darkness Visible appeared in 1979, it was heralded as a triumphant return to form, although Golding had arguably never been off form, and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A grim, Manichean examination of the nature of good and evil, it echoed, and in some respects even surpassed, the dark tone of Lord of the Flies. Matty, a sweet-natured, enigmatic boy, apparently simple and burnt horribly during a Blitz fire, becomes the only agent of protection for a boy targeted for kidnapping by an amoral gang, all of them moving through a London alive with a mosaic of cultures in the immediate post-Empire period, also cast in the shadow of the Northern Irish conflict. Golding refused to ever discuss the novel publicly, another instance of his refusal to obey instructions, as interest was naturally high in the book that had garnered him levels of attention equal to that of his early work.

At one book signing, Golding commented that he hoped that his next novel, one that he had been working on in tandem with Darkness Visible, would counteract any depression caused. That book was Rites of Passage, which won the 1981 Booker Prize against stiff competition from Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. Rites of Passage is a delight to read: at times extremely witty, it presents a convincing portrait of life at sea in the early 1800s, whilst meditating on philosophy, morality, social ritual, and the cruelty of the mob. It seems exemplary of Golding that he would hope that this book would act as light relief for his readers, a book he had conceived to explain to himself 'how a man might will himself to death', after reading of a real life episode on a ship under the command of the Duke of Wellington, where a young priest had behaved in a similar way to the unfortunate Parson Colley, with fatal consequences.

Two years after this came universal acclamation: Golding received the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature, the last British writer in the twentieth century to do so. In a press release, the Swedish Academy touched on the multiplicity within Golding's work: 'William Golding's novels and stories are . . . not only sombre moralities and dark myths about evil and treacherous destructive forces . . . they are also colourful tales of adventure which can be read as such, full of narrative joy, inventiveness, and excitement . . . His fabled world is tragic and pathetic, yet not overwhelming and depressing. There is a life which is mightier than life's conditions'.

Golding's reception of the Prize was not without its critics, however: this time, adverse comments centred on the fact that Graham Greene had been unfairly ignored by the Academy. This is perhaps another example of commentators with their own agendas attempting to co-opt Golding. Judy Carver comments, 'He felt there was a lot of luck involved, whose name came up when. He read a lot of Greene. Of course Greene was older and had published a lot more. He was . . . pleased to win ... But he didn't feel that he had been canonized, or that Greene hadn't. It was a different process'. The Academy itself sought to dissipate some of the tension around this debate by stating that they were not making the award to Golding solely due to the success of Rites of Passage, but they had first seen his potential in Darkness Visible.

The flow of books increased during the rest of the 1980s: a travelogue, An Egyptian Journal, which told as much of the frustrations of sailing down the Nile as it did of the wonder of Egypt; the aptly-named A Moving Target, another collection of occasional pieces, which was greeted with significantly more approval than The Hot Gates (which was then more successfully reissued); a serio-comic critique of obsessive academic quarrying by Professor Rick L. Tucker of the novelist, Wilfred Barclay, The Paper Men; the two concluding episodes of the 'Mariner' Trilogy begun with Rites of Passage: Close Quarters and Fire Down Below. Golding explained his decision to write the sequels at the UEA Festival by pointing out that the first novel left its hero, Edmund Talbot, in the middle of the ocean, so he had felt obliged to get him back to land.

Following Golding's sudden death of a heart attack in 1993, came his final novel, The Double Tongue, a first-person account by a woman called Arieka, of life as a prophetess at Delphi. The choice of subject matter may not have been surprising, in view of Golding's essays and The Scorpion God, but this is a story told from a woman's perspective, and whilst light-hearted, tells of the twilight of the Greek city-state. Furthermore, Golding's sense of challenging play had not left him: is Arieka a genuine oracle, or is she merely mouthing gibberish in order to relieve the gullible worshippers at Delphi of their money? The novel never tells us directly; it is a further underscoring of Golding's purposeful parablepsis that even the title of his final work was only one taken from a list of possible titles found on the manuscript after his death. We are left with a vast array of meanings and possibilities. The Independent declared Arieka to be 'A wonderful central character', whilst saying of the story that it, 'str etches out as clean and dry and clear as the beach in Lord of the Flies'. This comparison was an astute move by a critic keen to add a tone of completion to the body of Golding's work, but is perhaps only apt insofar as the text is rigorously created: the central thrust of Golding's artistic drive was to attempt fresh challenges and to produce new art and, although there are certain links, Golding's first and last books are also signally different.

What we have, then, is a career that appeared to become arrested in mid-flow, which subsequently recovered in a blaze of congratulation. Perhaps Golding is more respected than loved at the moment, a few years after his passing. Robert McCrum sees little cause for concern: 'He was a good writer, plus he's taught in schools. He'll be remembered as one of the great writers of the mid- to late twentieth century, due to the power and imagination of his work, the luminousness of the prose. It's unflashy, but extremely effective'. We are now, I hope, exiting a period of critical cooling-off: at least one major academic study of Golding is being planned; Judy Carver herself is editing her father's journals, kept from the early 1970s until his death. A fragment of autobiography appeared in the arts periodical, Arete, last year. There is also talk of a film adaptation of some of the later work.

Jonathan W Doering, born in 1975, was educated at Universities in East Anglia, Dublin and Sheffield. He now lives and works near Oxford.