["The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin", US title for "Pincher Martin",] is one of the most remarkable books of recent years—a short novel which, though it has no explicit social reference, profoundly expresses the philosophic pessimism that has affected so many European intellectuals since the Second World War…. All the twinges of [Christopher Martin's] battered body, the flutters of his agonized spirit, the stirrings of his tortured consciousness register in Mr. Golding's craggy yet highly sensitized prose…. This is more than good description; it is a rendering of sensation into language, the articulation of an experience almost beyond the reach of words.

But "The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin" is not a novel about man's struggle to survive. For a while, it looks as though it may turn out to be yet another celebration of the human will to live, and then Mr. Golding unobtrusively begins nudging us toward an awareness of the discrepancy between Christopher Martin's high estimate of his ability to survive and what he actually manages to do…. What is being tested is not his ability to survive but his belief that will and intelligence by themselves define the value of the human species. This belief is found wanting even on the rock, where, since there is no society, there can be no morality; we have gone through Christopher Martin's ordeal moment by moment, and we are not fully moved by his defiant determination; we are not persuaded that it is what we mean when we say that the human is a special category of creature; our sympathies are not engaged to the point where we feel that he is too precious a thing to be lost. Mr. Golding's triumph is that he gives Christopher Martin everything that could possibly arouse our deepest, most primitive compassion (lone man against the elements) and yet forces us to be critical of this compassion. (p. 189)

Mr. William Golding … emerges in his first play, The Brass Butterfly, as a satirist of society and one who brings … a quality of mind to the London stage that is as rare as it is welcome. At first glance his comedy seems based on the fairly simple device of putting an inventor of genius, whose projects include the pressure cooker, the steamship, gunpowder and printing, in the Emperor's villa on the island of Capri in the third century; but, as with all Mr. Golding's work, we keep on sensing hints of something much more profound below the surface. The emperor, the general, the inventor, his sister and the emperor's natural son are a set of characters that enable Mr. Golding to talk a good deal, and often most amusingly, about love and power, invention and romance, peace and war, but without integrating these themes to people who are truly aware of one another.