A History of English Literature

Drawn slowly into their collective and undifferentiated language, we come to
know the people and see old Mal succeeded as leader by Lok. The people become
aware of some ‘new men’, whom they watch with interest. The narrative viewpoint
then switches to that of the new men; for them, Lok is ‘the red creature’, an animal
to be killed. The language of the new men is a more modern English. Such dramatic
switches of viewpoint, language and morality are structural in Golding’s novels.
The precision, density and ambition of Golding’s imaginings, and his searching
moral sense, make him unusually demanding and potentially rewarding. He can be
tempted by the mimetic fallacy which imagines that the best way of staging madness
is to put a real madman on the stage. He can veer into Gothic, and also into a stiff
playfulness reminiscent of Conrad; his writing also has Conrad’s deliberate beauty.
Perhaps his most successful later novel is Rites of Passage, set on an ex-man-of-war
taking some emigrants to Australia after the Napoleonic wars. The action is
presented via the contrasting journals of young Talbot, jarringly self-important and
with powerful aristocratic connections, and the Reverend Colley, a wretched
Christian minister who plays the holy fool in a very unholy ship, and dies of humil-
iation and shame. If Simon in Lord of the Flies is perhaps too clearly the Christian
innocent, Colley is both genuinely irritating and genuinely abased by a sexual act
which he performs when the sailors get him drunk in the ceremonies of Crossing the
Line. The embarrassing impracticability of the Christian ideal leaves a horrible
conundrum at the heart of this sombre tragedy, which is lit theatrically at times by
moments of surprise and laughter. This strange and impressive achievement, both
very literary (it alludes both to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and to Jane Austen) and
painfully real, begins a trilogy. Although Golding is more in the tradition of
Dostoievsky and Conrad than a social novelist, he is recognizably an English one,
and makes his juniors seem light in comparison.
Greene’s remark that the loss of the religious sense deprives the human act of
importance bears on the form of the novel. As English life further loosens from
Christian ideals which have historically shaped its self-understanding, the social
order – which is the canvas, when it is not the subject, of the realist novel – is less
easily used to convey larger meanings. A novelist with Golding’s need to reach
to wards the heights and the depths has to borrow the symbolic potential of poetic
drama.The price of a more extreme shift of the English novel away from its natu-
ral territory is seen in Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957), a novel
about the fall into alcoholic madness of a British consul in Mexico; its hallucina-
tory quality is compromised by its too evident mythic reinforcement. It is hard to
move the English novel far from its native tradition of social entertainment. The
work of Barbara Pym (1913–1980) and Kingsley Amis (1922–1993) shows how
good at social comedy English novelists can still be. Angus Wilson (1913–91) wrote
in that tradition with more ambition, but his work at its best remains painful and
sophisticated.

Muriel Spark

A lighter writer who shares some of Golding’s concerns (she wrote a dystopian novel
called Robinson) is Muriel Spark(1918–2006).Moura Camberg, half-English, half-
Jewish,was brought up in Edinburgh. She converted to the Catholic Church.
Surviving a marriage to a Mr Spark who went mad with a pistol when they were
living in Rhodesia, she returned to England and London publishing, moving later to

NOVELS GALORE 389

Sir William Golding

(1911–1993), 28 April 1982.

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger

Viollet/Getty Images.

William Golding

(1911–1993) Educated at

Marlborough Grammar School

and Oxford; worked in theatre

and teaching. Novels: Lord of

the Flies(1954), The

Inheritors(1955), Pincher

Martin(1956), Free Fall

(1959), The Spire(1964),

The Pyramid(1967),

Darkness Visible(1979), Rites

of Passage(1980), Close

Quarters(1987), Fire Down

Below(1989), The Paper

Men(1984). Winner of the

Nobel Prize for Literature

(1983).