Pincher Martin - William Golding

 PINCHER MARTIN - WILLIAM GOLDING

Have you ever been a castaway and stranded on a rock in the middle of a vast inconceivable ocean? Of course you have. You're here on Earth, aren't you?

William Golding's first published novel was Lord Of The Flies in which he depicted the effect upon a party of boys on being abandoned on a coral island somewhere in the Pacific. Pincher Martin is almost a continuation of this same theme but boiled down to its most base level and then some. The whole of the first chapter describes a man drowning. That's not just a few paragraphs but a whole chapter describing everything going on in what is probably in actuality just a few moments.

As you read it becomes clear that the drowning man is a sailor whose ship has been torpedoed by a German U-boat and whilst all number of thoughts race through his mind, the prevailing one is that he must survive - that he must not die. Survive he does and he finds himself washed up onto a rock projecting through the vastness of the ocean. 'Where the hell am I?' he asks, and how many miles from dry land? It is here at this point that the story really begins or rather, it is here that it ends and the descent into madness begins.

Even though every detail of the rock is described meticulously it's still hard to gauge the actual size of it but then you come to realise it's not something that actually matters. It is instead the fact that the rock is barren though by some miracle it does hold a small amount of rain water trapped in a crevice and there is food albeit only in the form of mussels and limpets. What matters above all, however, is that the man is alone and that his one and only end desire is that he be rescued. To this end the bare minimum is that he keep his body going and that the thread of life remains unbroken.

His only weapon to aid him in this is his intelligence and so he knows that at all times he must be visible and to only sleep at night and never in the day so he might spot any passing ship and vice versa. He knows too that he must maintain to the best of his ability his health though being exposed to the elements he fully anticipates himself falling sick. And just as importantly he knows that he has to watch his mind and not let madness creep up on him. He expects to hallucinate but he knows he must not succumb to hallucinations though in the end it is on this where the real battle is to be fought. 

The apparent reality of the present collides with and weaves in and out of memories of the past; fear and anguish entangle with jealousy and guilt, whilst faith in the divine duels with spiritual apathy. The man is both Prometheus chained to the rock and Atlas holding up the sky but at the same time he's a Bedlamite, a poor mad creature clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea, bearing witness to black lightning.

Pincher Martin is a tale of terror and in this respect is an existential nightmare that if read with earnest attention has the power to disturb. How long the man is on the rock for is central to the whole story as there is no way to discern if it's for just one day, a week or months - or even if he is there at all?

Before he took up writing, William Golding served in the Navy where he saw action against submarines, aircraft and even the Bismark. He was also present at the D-Day landings so he was obviously an authority on what it is for a man to drown and no amateur when it came to facing death. For all that, you can but wonder if when writing Pincher Martin did Golding have the whole thing plotted out in his head in advance or did he simply follow where the writing took him? I'd hazard a guess that the story developed as he wrote it and that he bore down on the intensity of it with each agonizing sentence wrought from his pen.

Whatever the process, the end result resonated with Arthur Koestler - a writer who himself was no stranger to the subject of solitary confinement having been imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War - who selected Pincher Martin as the Novel of the Year, that year being 1956.

Pincher Martin isn't a masterpiece but its power to disturb the reader is something that many books have attempted but with very few succeeding. It is this power to disturb that makes Pincher Martin stand out - above and beyond.

John Serpico

Free Fall - William Golding

 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