At the end of his thorough and considered life of William Golding, John Carey remarks that ‘nowadays mention of Lord of the Flies sparks recognition in a way that Golding’s own name does not, or so my admittedly limited market research has indicated.’ Can this really be true? Has Golding’s immense reputation diminished, in the 16 years since his death, to the authorship of that first novel?
Carey refers elsewhere to a book signing in Oxford in 1984. In the wake of the Nobel Prize and the celebrated Booker of 1980, when Golding was thought to have won over Anthony Burgess’s magnificent Earthly Powers with Rites of Passage, the queue ‘coiled out of Blackwell’s and back down the Broad past the White Horse, and an American tourist, impressed by the crow, mistook Golding for George Bernard Shaw.’ I was in that queue, and still have one of many extant signed copies of The Paper Men. (I wish it were Darkness Visible, though). On the other hand, that same year, I also got a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Sebastian, and not many people seem to stick up for him nowadays. If Golding’s reputation has sunk to the level that Carey suggests, what can be rescued from the tremendous wreck?
Lord of the Flies was forever a burden round Golding’s neck, and there is no mistaking his long irritation with its pre-eminence. Most of us have been tempted to feel the same way, having had to study it and write essays about intrinsic evil afterwards. Forever afterwards, Golding and his publisher Charles Monteith had to put up with letters from know-it-all schoolboys about Piggy’s glasses. (Since Piggy was myopic, it seemed unlikely that his glasses could be used to light a fire, as the novel suggests).
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