Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
The Case for William Golding
By Frank Kermode
The Spire
by William Golding
Harcourt, Brace and World, 215 pp., $3.95
William Golding's Lord of the Flies has sold over a million copies in the American paperback edition alone. It has, by all accounts, succeeded The Catcher in the Rye as the livre de chevet of educated American youth. I doubt if anybody is really qualified to say why this should be so: books make their way inexplicably. This one was published in 1954, and certainly it was noticed; E. M. Forster commended it and 'everybody' talked about it, but with a sense that it was caviar rather than chowder—a book to tempt an intellectual into believing he had discovered a classic at its birth, but hardly a best seller. In the years that followed Golding did much to confirm this belief, but very little towards making himself a popular novelist. The Inheritors is a technically uncompromising, fiercely odd, even old-fashioned book about the overthrow of Neanderthal man, wonderfully distinguished but inconceivable as a big seller; Pincher Martin is as difficult as it is masterly; and Free Fall is complex, original, and in many ways reader-repellent. Golding's fifth and latest novel, coming five years after Free Fall, is unsurprising in one way at least: it is fire-new, magnificently written in what, despite its novelty, we can identify as a style bearing the impress of Golding's peculiar presence; but difficult, inviting only slow and submissive readers.
Review, 3248 words
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