officer lands on the beach, amazed at the mud-covered, dirty boys before him. Allegorically it might be thought that as this world ends in fire, a final divine intervention will come. Ironically, however, the adult world that the officer represents is also destroying itself as effectively, in a nuclear war. Salvation remains problematic and ambiguous.

What lifts Lord of the Flies away from simple allegory is not only the ambiguities but also the dense poetic texture of its language. The description of Simon’s death is often quoted as brilliantly heightened prose—the beauty of the imagery standing in stark contrast to the brutality of his slaying—but almost any passage in the novel yields its own metaphorical textures and suggestive symbolism. Golding’s rich narrative descriptions serve to point up the poverty of the boys’ language, which can only dwell on basics—food, defecation, fears and night terrors, killings. Golding’s depiction of the children is immediately convincing. The adult intervention (the dead airman, the naval officer) is perhaps not quite so, being too clearly fabular. In general, however, the power of the novel derives from the tensions set up between the book’s novelistic realism and its fabular and allegorical qualities. The theological dialectic of humanity’s fallenness (not only the boys’) and the paper-thin veneer of civilization emerges inexorably out of this genre tension.

The Inheritors

The thinness of civilization forms the central thesis of Golding’s second novel, The Inheritors. The immediate literary dialectic is set up with H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920), which propounds the typical social evolutionism common from the 1850’s onward. At a more general level, Golding’s novel might also be seen as an evolutionary version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): Satan’s temptation to Eve is a temptation to progress; the result is the Fall. Just as Adam and Eve degrade themselves with drunken behavior, so do Golding’s Neanderthalprotagonists, Lok and Fa, when they stumble over the remains of the cannibalistic “festivities” of Homo sapiens.

Golding subverts the Wellsian thesis that Neanderthals were totally inferior by depicting them as innocent, gentle, intuitive, playful, and loving. They stand in ironic contrast to the group of Homo sapiens who eventually annihilate them, except for a small baby whom they kidnap (again reversing a short story by Wells, in which it is Neanderthals who kidnap a human baby). The humans experience terror, lust, rage, drunkenness, and murder, and their religion is propitiatory only. By contrast, the Neanderthals have a taboo against killing anything, and their reverence for Oa, the earth mother, is gentle and numinous in quality.

As in Lord of the Flies, the conclusion is formed by an ironic reversal—the reader suddenly sees from the humans’ perspective. The last line reads, “He could not see if the line of darkness had an ending.” It is a question Golding is posing: Has the darkness of the human heart an end?

Golding’s technique in The Inheritors is remarkable: He succeeds in convincing the reader that primitive consciousness could have looked like this. He creates language that conveys that consciousness, yet is articulate enough to engage one imaginatively so that one respects the Neanderthals. He explores the transition from intuition and pictorial thinking to analogous and metaphoric thought. The ironic treatment of Homo sapiens is done also through the limits of Neanderthal perceptions and consciousness. Unfortunately, humans, as fallen creatures, can supply all too easily the language for the evil that the Neanderthals lack.

Pincher Martin

Golding’s third novel, Pincher Martin (first published in the United States as The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin), returns to the desert-island tradition. The immediate dialectic is perhaps with Robinson Crusoe, the sailor who single-handedly carves out an island home by the strength of his will aided by his faith. Pincher Martin is here the faithless antihero, although this is not immediately apparent. He, like Crusoe, appears to survive a wreck (Martin’s destroyer is torpedoed during the war); he kicks off seaboots and swims to a lonely island-rock in the Atlantic. With tremendous strength of will, he appears to survive by eating raw shellfish, making rescue signals, forcing an enema into himself, and keeping sane and purposeful.

In the end, however, his sanity appears to disintegrate. Almost to the end it is quite possible to believe that Christopher Martin finally succumbs to madness and death only after a heroic, indeed Promethean, struggle against Fate and the elements. The last chapter, however, presents an even greater reversal than those in the first two novels, dispelling all of this as a false reading: Martin’s drowned body is found washed up on a Scottish island; his seaboots are still on his feet. In other words, the episode on the rock never actually took place. The reading of Pincher Martin thus becomes deliberately problematic in a theological sense. The rock must be an illusion, an effort of the will indeed, but an effort after physical death. It is not that all of one’s life flashes before one’s eyes while one drowns, though that does happen with Martin’s sordid memories of his lust, greed, and terror; it is more that the text is formed by Martin’s ongoing dialectic with, or rather against, his destiny, which he sees as annihilation. An unnameable god is identified with the terror and darkness of the cellar of his childhood memories. His will, in its Promethean pride, is creating its own alternative. Theologically, this alternative can only be Purgatory or Hell, since it is clearly not heaven. Satan in Paradise Lost says, “Myself am Hell”: Strictly, this is Martin’s position, since he refuses the purgatorial possibilities in the final revelation of God, with his mouthless cry of “I shit on your heaven!” God, in his compassion, strikes Martin into annihilation with his “black lightning.”

Free Fall

Golding’s first three novels hardly suggested that he was writing from within any central tradition of the British novel. All three are highly original in plot, for all of their dialectic with existing texts, and in style and technique. In his next novel, Free Fall, Golding writes much more recognizably within the tradition of both the bildungsroman (the novel of character formation) and the Künstlerroman (the novel of artistic development). Sammy Mountjoy, a famous artist, is investigating his past life, but with the question in mind, “When did I lose my freedom?” The question is not in itself necessarily theological, but Sammy’s search is conducted in specifically theological categories.

It has been suggested that the literary dialectic is with Albert Camus’s La Chute (1956; The Fall, 1957), a novella published some three years earlier. Camus’s existentialism sees no possibility of redemption or regeneration once the question has been answered; his protagonist uses the question, in fact, to gain power over others by exploiting their guilt, so the whole search would seem inauthentic. Golding sees such a search as vital: His position seems to be that no person is born in sin, or fallen, but inevitably at some stage, each person chooses knowingly to sin. At that moment the individual falls and loses the freedom to choose. The only possibility of redemption is to recognize that moment, to turn from it, and to cry out, “Help me!”

This is Sammy’s cry when he is locked in a German prisoner-of-war camp and interrogated. His physical release from his cell is also a spiritual release, a moment of revelation described in Pentecostal terms of renewal and a new artistic vision. His moment of fall, which he discovers only near the end of the book (which is here culmination rather than reversal), was when he chose to seduce Beatrice (the name of Dante’s beloved inspiration also), whatever the cost and despite a warning that “sooner or later the sacrifice is always regretted.”

Other theological perspectives are introduced. Two of Sammy’s teachers form an opposition: the rational, humanistic, likable Nick Shales and the religious, intense, but arrogant Miss Pringle. Sammy is caught in the middle, wanting to affirm the spiritual but drawn to the materialist. The dilemma goes back in the English novel to George Eliot. Though Golding cannot accept Eliot’s moral agnosticism, he has to accept her inexorable moral law of cause and effect: Sammy’s seduction of Beatrice has left her witless and insane. The scene in the prison cell is balanced by the scene in the mental institution. Redemption costs; the past remains. The fall may be arrested and even reversed, but only through self-knowledge and full confession.

The Spire

In Free Fall, Golding chose for the first time to use first-person narrative. Before that he had adopted a third-person narrative technique that stayed very close to the consciousness of the protagonists. In The Spire, Golding could be said to have perfected this latter technique. Events are seen not only through the eyes of Dean Jocelin but also in his language and thought processes. As in Henrik Ibsen’s play Bygmester Solness (pb. 1892; The Master Builder, 1893), Golding’s protagonist has an obsessive drive to construct a church tower, or rather a spire on a tower, for his cathedral lacks both. (Inevitably one takes the cathedral to be Salisbury, whose medieval history is almost identical, although it is not named.) Ibsen’s play deals with the motivation for such an obsession, the price to be paid, and the spiritual conflicts. Golding, however, is not so much in a dialectic situation with the Ibsen play as using it as his base, agreeing with Ibsen when the latter talks of “the power of ideals to kill.” At the end of the novel, the spire has been built in the face of tremendous technical difficulties, but Jocelin lies dying, the caretaker and his wife have been killed, the master builder, Roger, is a broken man, and the whole life of the cathedral has been disrupted.

Thus Golding raises the question of cost again: What is the cost of progress? Is it progress? The power of the book is that these questions can be answered in many different ways, and each way searches out new richness from the text. The patterning of moral and theological structures allows for almost endless combinations. The novel can also be read in terms of the cost of art—the permanence of art witnessing to humanity’s spirituality and vision, as against the Freudian view of art as sublimation and neurotic outlet, the price of civilization.

By staying very close to Jocelin’s consciousness, the reader perceives only slowly, as he does, that much of his motivation and drive is not quite as visionary and spiritual as he first thinks. Freudian symbolism and imagery increasingly suggest sexual sublimation, especially centered on Goody Pangall, whom he calls “his daughter in God.” In fact, much later one learns that he received his appointment only because his aunt was the king’s mistress for a while. Jocelin manipulates people more and more consciously to get the building done and chooses, perhaps unconsciously at first, to ignore the damage to people, especially the four people he regards as his “pillars” to the spire. Ironically, he too is a pillar, and he damages himself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually (he is almost unable to pray by the end, and has no confessor). Despite all the false motives, however, the novel suggests powerfully that there really has been a true vision that has been effected, even if marred by humanity’s fallenness and “total depravity,” every part affected by the fall.

The language of The Spire is the most poetic that Golding attempted. The density of imagery, recurring motifs, and symbolism both psychological and theological blend into marvelous rhythms of ecstasy and horror. The interweaving of inner monologue, dialogue, and narrative dissolves the traditional tight bounds of time and space of the novel form, to create an impassioned intensity where the theological dialectic takes place, not with another text, but within the levels of the moral, spiritual, and metaphoric consciousness of the text itself.

The Pyramid

After the verbal pyrotechnics of The Spire, Golding’s next novel, The Pyramid, seems very flat, despite its title. It returns to Free Fall in its use of first-person narrative, to a modified form of its structure (flashbacks and memories to provide a personal pattern), and to contemporary social comedy, strongly echoing Anthony Trollope. The language is spare and unadorned, as perhaps befits the protagonist, Olly, who, unlike Sammy Mountjoy, has turned away from art and spirit to become un homme moyen sensual. His life has become a defense against love, but as a petit bourgeois he has been protected against Sammy’s traumatic upbringing, and so one feels little sympathy for him. Theological and moral dialectic is muted, and the social commentary and comedy have been better done by other novelists, although a few critics have made out a case for a rather more complex structuring than is at first evident.

Darkness Visible

Perhaps the flatness of The Pyramid suggests that Golding had for the time being run out of impetus. He published only two novellas in the next twelve years, and then, quite unexpectedly, Darkness Visible appeared. In some ways this work echoes Charles Williams, the writer of a number of religious allegorical novels in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The reality of spiritual realms of light and darkness is made by Golding as explicitly as by Williams, especially in Matty, the “holy fool.” Golding never quite steps into allegory, however, any more than he did in his first novel. His awareness of good and evil takes on a concreteness that owes much toJoseph Conrad. Much of the feel of the novel is Dickensian, if not its structure: The grotesque serves to demonstrate the “foolishness of the wise,” as with Charles Dickens.

The book divides into three parts centering on Matty, orphaned and hideously burned in the bombing of London during the war. At times he keeps a journal and thus moves the narrative into the first person. The second part, by contrast, focuses on Sophy, the sophisticated twin daughter of a professional chess player (the rationalist), and overwhelmingly exposes the rootlessness and anomie of both contemporary youth culture and the post-1960’s bourgeoisie (the children of Olly’s generation). The third part concerns a bizarre kidnapping plot in which Matty and Sophy nearly meet as adversaries; this is the “darkness visible” (the title coming from the hell of Paradise Lost). The end remains ambiguous. Golding attempts a reversal again: The kidnap has been partially successful. Matty has not been able to protect the victims, nor Sophy to complete her scheme, but still children are kidnapped.

Central themes emerge: childhood and innocence corrupted; singleness of purpose, which can be either for good or for evil (contrast also Milton’s single and double darkness in Comus, 1634); and the foolishness of the world’s wisdom. “Entropy” is a key word, and Golding, much more strongly than hitherto, comments on the decline of Great Britain. Above all, however, Golding’s role as a novelist of transcendence is reemphasized: Moments of revelation are the significant moments of knowledge. Unfortunately, revelation can come from dark powers as well as from those of the light. Ultimately, Golding’s vision is Miltonic, as has been suggested. The theological dialectic is revealed as that between the children of light and the children of darkness.

A Sea Trilogy

When Rites of Passage followed Darkness Visible one year later, Golding had no intention of writing a trilogy (now generally called A Sea Trilogy). It was only later he realized that he had “left all those poor sods in the middle of the sea and needed to get them to Australia.” The trilogy was well received, perhaps because the plot and themes are relatively straightforward and unambiguous, and the social comedy is more obvious than the theological dialectic. The trilogy fits well into the bildungsroman tradition of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861, serial; 1861, book) in that it follows the education of a snob, Edmund Talbot, who, under the patronage of an aristocratic and influential godfather, is embarking on a political career by taking up an appointment in the new colony of New South Wales, Australia, in 1810. It is also enlivened by Golding’s wide knowledge of sailing ships and life at sea; the trilogy is the fullest literary expression of this interest he allowed himself.

The narrative proceeds in a leisurely fashion in the first person as Edmund decides to keep a diary. In Rites of Passage, the plot focuses on the death of one of the passengers, a ridiculous young clergyman, the Reverend Robert James Colley. He is made the butt of everyone’s fun, including that of the ordinary sailors. As the result of the shame of a joke, where he is made drunk and then engages in homosexual sex, he more or less wills himself to die. Captain Anderson covers up the incident—at which Edmund, for the first time, feels moral outrage and vows to expose the captain to his godfather when he can. The moral protest is vitiated, however, by Edmund’s use of power and privilege.

In Close Quarters, Edmund’s education continues. As conditions aboard ship deteriorate, he increases in stature, losing his aristocratic bearing and becoming willing to mix socially. His relationship with Summers, the most morally aware of the ship’s lieutenants, is good for him in particular. He also shows himself sensitive: He weeps at a woman’s song, he falls in love (as opposed to the lust in Rites of Passage), and he admires Colley’s written style (Colley, too, has left behind a journal). He suffers physically and shows courage. His falling in love is delightfully described, quite unselfconsciously. He learns, too, the limits of his power: The elements control everything. The speed of the ship runs down as weeds grow on its underside, reintroducing the entropy motif of Darkness Visible. He cannot prevent suicide or death. As the novel proceeds, the “ship of fools” motif of late medieval literature becomes very strong. Edmund is no more and no less a fool than the others.

Fire Down Below closes the trilogy as the ship docks in Sidney Cove, and Edmund is reunited happily with the young lady he met. The ending seems to be social comedy, until one realizes that Summers’s fear, that a fire lit belowdecks to forge a metal band around a broken mast is still smoldering, is proved true. The anchored ship bursts into flame, and Summers is killed, having just been given promotion, partly through Edmund’s efforts. Despite this tragedy, the ending is Dickensian, for the voyage has turned into a quest for love for Edmund, and love has helped mark his way with moral landmarks. Edmund has learned much, although at the end he has still far to go. The ending is perhaps the most mellow of all Golding’s endings: If Australia is not “the new Jerusalem,” it is not hell either, and if Edmund lacks spirituality, he is yet more than un homme moyen sensual.

The Paper Men

The Paper Men is, like Free Fall, a Künstlerroman. The style is much more akin to that of twentieth century American confessional literature, especially Saul Bellow’s. Golding’s Wilfred Barclay could easily be a Henderson or a Herzog, with the same energetic, somewhat zany style, and with the themes of flight and pursuit in a frantic search for identity. Unusually for Golding, the novel seems to be repeating themes and structures, if not style, and perhaps for that reason has not made the same impact as his other novels. Wilfred’s revelation of the transcendent in an ambiguous spiritual experience of Christ (or Pluto) marks the high point of the novel.

The Double Tongue

Golding’s final novel, The Double Tongue, was still in its third draft at the time of his death. For the first time he uses a female first-person voice; also for the first time, he employs a classical Greek setting. Arieka is the prophetess, or “Pythia,” of the renowned Delphic oracle, but during a period of its decline after the Roman occupation. She tells of her own calling, her first experience of the prophetic, and of the continuing marginalization of the oracle. The male presence is represented by Ionides, the high priest of Zeus and master in charge of the sacred complex of Delphi and its wider network. The only other full character is the slave-librarian, Perseus.

The style of the novel is sparer and more relaxed than that of Golding’s earlier novels, with few characters and minimal plot. Its interest lies, as in The Paper Men, with the nature of epiphany and with whether the experience of transcendence actualizes anything of significance in an increasingly secular world. The political genius of Rome, and even the literary legacy of the Ancient Greek writers, seem much more powerful influences. The sacred is reduced almost to superstition: The questions posed to the oracle become more and more trivial.

Ionides, while institutionally having to acknowledge the sacred, behaves as if the human spirit is the ultimate source of the prophetic. Arieka, having been seized, or “raped,” by Dionysos, the god of prophecy, knows the truth to be otherwise, but even she increasingly feels that her prophetic gift has ceased to be supernatural and has become a natural expression of her human wisdom. In a way, this concern with the prophetic can be traced back to Simon in The Lord of the Flies, and then to the form of the Künstlerroman. Unlike the latter, however, the context here is specifically sacred, and it would be a mistake to deconstruct the novel in terms of the nature of artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, the problematic nature of inspiration, whether divine or poetic, is as real to Golding in his last novel as in, say, The Spire.

The setting of a declining Greece continues the concern with entropy so powerfully expressed in Darkness Visible. Signs of cultural entropy include the growth of “copying” manuscripts rather than creating texts, the marginalization of the transcendent, and the trahison des clercs—Ionides is found to be plotting a pathetic revolt against Roman hegemony. Politics has undermined any integrity he had.

There would not appear to be a specific subtext with which Golding is arguing in The Double Tongue. The novel bears remarkable similarities to C. S. Lewis’s final, and most literary, novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), also set in classical Greek times. In both, a female consciousness aware of its own physical ugliness yet possessing real power undergoes a spiritual journey with multifarious symbolic levels. Lewis’s novel, however, ends with epiphany as closure; Golding’s begins with it, and the rest of the novel seeks ambiguously to give it meaning. Golding’s epiphany here is the god’s laughter, at least that laughter of which Arieka is aware.

Although each Golding novel, with a few exceptions, is a new “raid on the inarticulate,” certain thematic and technical features remain constant over the years. Golding’s moral and didactic concerns consistently sought theological grounding out of which to construct a critique of the lostness and fallenness of humankind, and specifically of contemporary Western civilization, with its spiritual bankruptcy. In this quest there is a line of continuity back to George Eliot and Charles Dickens in the English novel tradition. In his affirmation of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, Golding echoes not only them but also, in different ways, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. In his vision of the darkness of the human soul, unenlightened by any transcendent revelation, he follows Joseph Conrad.

Golding also sought, as did E. M. Forster and Lawrence, to find a style that would escape the materiality of prose and attain the revelatory transcendence of poetry. The result was usually dramatic, incarnational metaphors and motifs. The mode of Golding’s novels is usually confessional, almost Augustinian at times, coming from a single consciousness, though often with a sudden reversal at the end to sustain an ambiguous dialectic.

There is in Golding no articulated framework of beliefs: Transcendence lies ultimately beyond the articulate. God is there, and revelation is not only possible but also necessary and salvific. The revelation remains ambiguous, fleeting, and numinous, however, rather than normative. In the end, this often means that Golding’s social critique, of the moral entropy of Britain in particular, comes over more powerfully than the darkness that is the refusal of the terror of believing in God.