The fluctuations of William Golding's critical reputation - Critical Essay

Contemporary Review, May, 2002 by Jonathan W. Doering

Were the gathering critical clouds of concern to him? Robert McCrum, Literary Editor of The Observer, thinks not: 'He was quite self-sufficient, he wasn't sitting at home drumming his fingers on the table, and anyway, for much of the Seventies he was working on Darkness Visible'. His daughter, Judy Carver, seems to be of a similar opinion: 'He felt, not that it [critical opinion] didn't matter, but that it wasn't his job', 'He saw himself principally as a storyteller'. He often took care to be out of Britain when a new novel appeared and he was in Brittany when The Scorpion God was meeting with some derision. Moreover, he knew that he had not finished writing; ironically, the next novel he was to publish would re-establish him at the pinnacle of his profession.

When Darkness Visible appeared in 1979, it was heralded as a triumphant return to form, although Golding had arguably never been off form, and it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A grim, Manichean examination of the nature of good and evil, it echoed, and in some respects even surpassed, the dark tone of Lord of the Flies. Matty, a sweet-natured, enigmatic boy, apparently simple and burnt horribly during a Blitz fire, becomes the only agent of protection for a boy targeted for kidnapping by an amoral gang, all of them moving through a London alive with a mosaic of cultures in the immediate post-Empire period, also cast in the shadow of the Northern Irish conflict. Golding refused to ever discuss the novel publicly, another instance of his refusal to obey instructions, as interest was naturally high in the book that had garnered him levels of attention equal to that of his early work.

At one book signing, Golding commented that he hoped that his next novel, one that he had been working on in tandem with Darkness Visible, would counteract any depression caused. That book was Rites of Passage, which won the 1981 Booker Prize against stiff competition from Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. Rites of Passage is a delight to read: at times extremely witty, it presents a convincing portrait of life at sea in the early 1800s, whilst meditating on philosophy, morality, social ritual, and the cruelty of the mob. It seems exemplary of Golding that he would hope that this book would act as light relief for his readers, a book he had conceived to explain to himself 'how a man might will himself to death', after reading of a real life episode on a ship under the command of the Duke of Wellington, where a young priest had behaved in a similar way to the unfortunate Parson Colley, with fatal consequences.

Two years after this came universal acclamation: Golding received the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature, the last British writer in the twentieth century to do so. In a press release, the Swedish Academy touched on the multiplicity within Golding's work: 'William Golding's novels and stories are . . . not only sombre moralities and dark myths about evil and treacherous destructive forces . . . they are also colourful tales of adventure which can be read as such, full of narrative joy, inventiveness, and excitement . . . His fabled world is tragic and pathetic, yet not overwhelming and depressing. There is a life which is mightier than life's conditions'.