FREE FALL - WILLIAM GOLDING
My problem with William Golding is that he wrote Lord Of The Flies, that I can remember reading at school not out of choice but in the course of our English lessons. So too George Orwell's Animal Farm I can remember having to read, both books serving in the end to not teach anything of use in regard to English but to near-inoculate me against ever having to read another book again. They were part of the school curriculum at that time and though we were made to read them, in hindsight we were never offered an explanation as to what they were actually about. We read them straight, without any understanding of nuance, metaphor, representation, or analogy. Can you imagine?
So with trepidation I pull up my breeches and set out on reading Golding's fourth novel, Free Fall, first published in 1959 and nowadays to be found gathering dust in second-hand bookshops throughout the land. Unnervingly, there's very little indication of what it's actually about apart from a bit on the back cover blurb saying something about losing the faculty of freewill.
Now there's a thing. Have any of us ever possessed freewill to begin with, I wonder? Have any of us ever been truly free? Quite possibly not although it depends ultimately, of course, on your perception. An idea of freedom is certainly something I've pursued my whole life and there have been times where I caught glimpses and even times where I've thought I touched it. Moments, essentially. Fleeting ones at that. Naked in the sun on a foreign beach. At the height of a full-scale riot. Deep in woods alone but for nature. On hard drugs. When writing, oddly enough - freedom in writing.
This is what I think Free Fall is all about. It's Golding navel gazing, contemplating himself whilst writing, watching the watcher and thinking about the thinker. He tells us early on in the book where he's coming from, in fact: 'We are dumb and blind yet we must see and speak. To communicate is our passion and our despair. My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. And who are you anyway? Perhaps you found this book on a stall fifty years hence which is another now. The star's light reaches us millions of years after the star is gone, or so they say, and perhaps it's true?'
You see what he's doing here? It's like how Jean Cocteau once described an opium hit when he wrote of how the smoker has a bird's eye view of himself: 'Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing towards death.' Cocteau wrote 'To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving'. Golding is stepping out of his book whilst still writing it. It's very clever. Near on to being a very early example, in fact, of breaking the fourth wall.
But what of freewill? Are we really our own masters or merely victims of circumstance? What exactly do we mean by freedom? Did we ever really have it and if so, when did we lose it? When did we become so pre-occupied that even when able to freely roam we're still trapped within our thoughts as if we are our own prisons? Locked up within our self-imposed cells.
Golding, through the main character in his book wonders if freedom might be found (or lost) in childhood, in love, in art or in politics but he finds no answers. Might it have been lost (or found) somewhere in the dark, where as a child he was told to never put the lamp on at night? Or in the darkness of solitary confinement in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany? At some point he had stopped taking the world for granted and somewhere, some time, he had made a choice in freedom and lost his freedom. But when? Where? It's like ransacking the world in search of the holy grail - or for a cure for cancer.
It turns out that Free Fall is a genuinely fascinating read that folds in and out of itself like origami but that ends up as an ingeniously created work of art. It turns out in the end that for Golding freedom and the losing of it is a process, like a snowball gaining in size as it rolls down a hill. Or to turn it on its head, like the rock getting heavier and heavier as Sisyphus pushes it up the mountain. It's the accumulating effect of experience and influence. Freedom is an infinite tug-of-war between it being lost and found, with freewill in the middle. The pendulum swings and it never stops. The faculty of freewill is the pendulum. Freedom, both the losing and finding of it isn't one swing of the pendulum or the other, it is the pendulum.
Whilst locked in pitch darkness in the cell of a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, the depths of terror and despair are plunged. In that cell there is not an iota of freedom and no end in sight. On being released from the cell, the world is suddenly cast in shattering light and seen in a way it's never been seen before. As if the veil has been lifted. Like a state of transcendence and a higher state of consciousness.
'I'll tell you something which may be of value,' says the teacher of the main character on his last day at school. 'I believe it to be true and powerful - therefore dangerous. If you want something enough, you can always get it provided you are willing to make the appropriate sacrifice. Something, anything. But what you get is never quite what you thought; and sooner or later the sacrifice is always regretted.'
Swings and roundabouts. A whirring hall of mirrors reflecting and refracting. A dizzying madness. From A to Z and back again. Freedom. No freedom. No freedom. Freedom. One step forward, one step back. The flight of Icarus. Icarus descending.
Such is life.
John Serpico
