William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies [Paperback]

John Carey's biography of Golding gives a very balanced view of a complex man. Well-loved by his friends, sometimes generous, he was a drunk who let himself down on a variety of occasions,a man with a chip on his shoulder about toffs, which he aspired to be when lobbying for his knighthood.
Carey does not assume that the reader has read all Golding's novels and his summaries, especially of those that are lesser known, are helpful. The literary criticism is far from excessive, but contains some interesting perceptions.

Altogether a fine biography of a great novelist and an interesting and finally likeable man.

You know what to expect in advance from John Carey. With any other author, that would be a bad thing. With Carey, it's part of his integrity. In the introduction to Original Copy, his 1987 selection of reviews and journalism, Carey reminds that us that 'given the nature of subjective nature of literary judgement, the reader has a right to know what sort of person will be laying down the law in the rest of book - what his quirks and prejudices are, and what sort of background has formed him.'

So with this, Carey's long (and eagerly) awaited biography of Golding, you expect the law to cheer on grammar schools, vegetable gardening and divided personalities, and sneer at snobbery, Dons, and magical thinking. Golding's dabbling with anthroposophy, you think, is in for a particular thrashing. And as for Golding's public-schooled contemporaries at Brasenose College....

But that's half the fun, of course. Flaubert said that when you write a friend's biography, you must do it as though you were taking revenge on his behalf. Whether you agree Golding was the abject literary outsider that Carey makes him out to be, you still share his partisan sense of outrage. Take the film critic C.A. Lejeune's response, in chapter fourteen, to Pincher Martin: 'To me it belongs to a class of reading that I deplore, which looks at nothing except what I call the underbelly of the human body, and it sees nothing except what I call the nasty side of it, the horrid side of it.' Behind that you can hear the objection of every person who has ever junked a great book because it's 'too grim', 'depressing' or - this above all - 'doesn't teach me anything'. Carey's response makes gratifying reading; as does his response to Auberon Waugh ('so clearly the voice of a Young Turk eager to make a splash'). Watching him go, you feel that vengeance isn't just being served - it's being accompanied by a string quartet.

But if Carey is deadly on the attack, he is better in defence. That may surprise some people. This may be the compassionate book Carey has written. People expecting him to tear Golding's beliefs to pieces, even by implication, will be disappointed. In a way, he celebrates them. As with Lawrence and Orwell, Carey sees self-contradiction not a blemish, but as a key to greatness. With Golding, it was his constant inner struggle between faith and reason that breathed life into his writing.

Much has been made of Golding's early scientific optimism and belief in progress, influenced heavily by his father Alec, and how World War II turned him towards pessimism and religion. And, of course, original sin ('Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.'). But the division was already in place. There were the supernatural visions or hallucinations that baby Golding saw. (An angelically radiant cockerel appears to him in the cot.) Where Golding's father was a kindly, unassuming man, his mother was an unstable collection of temper tantrums and Celtic superstitions. The tension between the two caused him, Carey suggests, to see reality as the battleground of warring viewpoints. 'Both are real', as Sammy says in Free Fall, but 'there is no bridge'. Golding's fiction and essays will each in their way continue to report on that battlefield.

If Golding had his theme, he still needed a vehicle to express it. By 1953, he had written three books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays, and seen them all repeatedly rejected. The school to which he had returned as a teacher offered nothing but grinding, purposeless routine. If Golding believed he was a third-rate teacher, just as he believed he was 'a monster', he seems unduly hard on himself. (Was he the only teacher who ever rushed off as soon as a lesson was over, who didn't think the world of every last one of his pupils, and who didn't look at a small hill of unmarked books with despair?)

So Golding started another book, which started out as a skit on the bedtime stories he read to his children. Doubtless some insights prompted by his pupils found their way into the novel. (Though Golding, as Carey points out, never taught choristers.) So, for that matter, did the World War II. The work gave him new energy and drive, and made the real world look grey and dull by comparison. He had total faith in it, feeling it to be his truly first original work. In it, following a nuclear war a group of school children would find themselves marooned on a desert island, with only wild boars and a dead parachutist for company. Somewhere a big shell would be involved, and so would a Christ figure, performing miracles and offering himself as a martyr. It would be the Robinson Crusoe for our time; it would be the novel that would make his name. It would be...Strangers from Within.

I'm not going to say what happened next, especially for those who haven't read Charles Monteith's account in Carey's earlier book William Golding: The Man and His Books (and which Ian McEwan mentions in his novel Enduring Love). Carey reworks it into chapter twelve, just as he reworks his account of The Inheritors, from his earlier book Pure Pleasure, into chapter thirteen. You really have to read this one for yourself. It's just too good not to. Suffice to say, if Golding's life had been a film, Charles Monteith, his publisher and model of human patience, tact and reserve, would have more than deserved the Oscar for best supporting actor. It's not for nothing that Carey devotes his last paragraph to him.

Also heartening is Carey's enthusiasm for all Golding's works, published and unpublished. Carey has his opinions, and maybe you'll share them. Maybe not. I never liked Free Fall much (and it seems to be the hardest of Golding's novels to find in the shops), nor The Paper Men and The Pyramid. To me, the most powerful of Golding's novels were his earliest: Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors (which anticipates Craig Raine and the 'Martian' poets) Pincher Martin, and The Spire; The most polished were the three novels that comprised the Sea Trilogy. If you agree with Carey or not, we're still left with a timely and powerful corrective to the rather quaint idea that Golding was a one-hit wonder, or, worse, a 'minority taste'.

Carey once praised Orwell for admitting that most people liked to read about murder. I praise Carey for admitting what most people like to read about a writer: the brute facts of how he produced his work, and how much he made from it. Unlike Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark, Carey doesn't omit the figures: advances, royalties, sales figures, foreign rights, film rights - they're all here. The sources couldn't have been better, the writing more concise, the breadth of insight and intelligence wider. Although I would have liked a reference to the work of Kevin McCarron somewhere in there, especially on Rites of Passage, this is by far the best literary biography I have read this year - and since I have read Patrick French (on V.S. Naipaul), Martin Stannard (on Muriel Spark) and Zachary Leader (on Kingsley Amis), that is the highest praise I can think of.

This takes my vote for book of the year, and is absolutely not to be missed.

Intriguing piece of writing, very revelatory about this author. Very worth reading if you have any interest or curiosity about Golding and how his masrepiece came to be written. Would recommend.