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