‘Free Fall,’ by William Golding
Golding was an amazing writer whose talents stretch much further than just ‘The Lord of the Flies’
Mention the name William Golding, and chances are you will be met with a blank stare. Mention The Lord of the Flies, however, and the reaction will be the polar opposite. William Golding is one of those writers, and there are a fair few, whose other books have been entirely eclipsed by a single title.
This is unfair to William Golding, a writer who in 1983 deservedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature. For all the allegorical charm of The Lord of the Flies, he has written more powerfully and more poetically, and Free Fall is a prime example of a writer in perfect charge of his abilities.
Sammy Mountjoy has lost his free will. Free Fall is his life narrated to us as he searches for the moment when this aspect was cruelly robbed from him. The story reaches a not totally expected conclusion; what I mean is that so many psychological and metaphysical dramas leave their endings open, a cheap escape if you ask me. Golding is brave enough to offer a conclusion, highlighting at last the moment when Mountjoy’s affliction took hold.
Sadly, Mountjoy’s free will and his possession of it or otherwise is the weakest aspect of the book. I don’t want to enter into a philosophical debate; when groups are classified by such unwieldy nouns as compatibilists and incompatibilists I tend to find my attention wavering. Golding sidesteps the issue somewhat by merely asserting that Mountjoy has lost his free will. We do not see Mountjoy apply his will freely before his fall; nor do we see how his life is metaphysically constrained afterwards. During his incarceration in a German prisoner of war camp Mountjoy looks back at his relationship with his first inamorata, Beatrice:
“And yet as I remembered myself as well as Beatrice I could find no moment when I was free to do as I would. In all that lamentable story of seduction I could not remember one moment when being what I was I could do other than I did.”
The writing is powerful and succinct, and yet one wonders at the message. When I ponder my own life I cannot see when I could have exerted free will to have made a difference in the decisions that made me who I am today. The man I used to be is not the man I am today, and the child who developed into that man surely no longer exists. Golding makes the same observation when Mountjoy considers his young self:
“He is some other person in some other country to whom I have this objective and ghostly access.”
Is it possible that Golding’s point is that free will is a myth?
It almost doesn’t matter. There are more books written about childhood memories than about almost any other subject, and yet I have never read a book that described growing up in the slums with such verve. The descriptions pick out the smallest details, like the lodger whose rattling breathing sounded like a ticking clock, or the etiquette employed to navigate the communal loo, and as Mountjoy looks back he is able to decode his experiences with a rare clarity:
“We were a world inside a world and I was a man before I achieved the intellectual revolution of thinking of us as a slum.”
I did not grow up in a slum, but the adventures of young Mountjoy, frightened by tales of an earl in a suit of armour, and sneaking with his young friend onto the grounds of the local aristocrat, brought back a flood of previously forgotten memories. I lost count of the occasions when I found myself putting down the book and envisioning for myself the adventures of childhood. Golding’s evocations of Mountjoy’s childhood began to drift away and what happened to him became what happened to me. I remembered climbing up a wall that once seemed dauntingly high, and how I tried to squeeze the tip of my plimsolls into each crumbling crack to help me to get up and onto the top. If I went back there today the wall would come up no higher than my shoulder, and if I chose to sit atop it I could now simply pull myself up, but at the time the challenge was almost insuperable, and I recall often returning home with grazed palms or with brick powder on the knees of my trousers. Had I not picked up Golding’s novel in a charity shop some months ago, I doubt I would now be experiencing such vivid recollections.
As Mountjoy grows his circumstances change dramatically and he finds himself removed from the slum and sent to the local grammar school. Here he meets the two greatest influences on his life. The materialist in him is attracted to his science teacher, Nick Shales, but the poet and artist in him is pulled inexorably towards the Bible, and thus to Miss Pringle, a spinster whose vindictiveness comes to be directed against the young narrator. I was fortunate not to suffer the influence of a demagogue at school, but Mountjoy does not escape so lightly. His treatment at her hands leads him to reflect on her hypocrisy:
“I can understand how she hated, but not how she kept on such apparent terms of intimacy with heaven.”
I have read many stories like this, of young people who have grown disillusioned not so much with the Bible but with those who preached religion whilst embodying immorality.
Mountjoy the adolescent becomes a socialist, a communist when the world was innocent of the depths that Stalinism would plumb. Golding never for an instant takes Mountjoy’s socialism seriously, and given what others have written I can go along with his criticisms. “Workers of the world — unite!” he says, before suggesting the carnal interpretation of ‘unite’.
Beyond the childhood memories, the communist dalliances, and the psychological torture of the POW camp, Golding most excels in his delivery of the romance between Mountjoy and Beatrice. This romance is one of the most explicable false romances in all of literature, and Golding manages it perfectly. The reader is left to wonder what the attraction was between the two in the first place just long enough to think that some terrible mistake has been made, only for Mountjoy to realise that there was nothing there in the first place. Beatrice initially enthralls the artist inside Mountjoy, and he experiences a painful attraction that he cannot explain nor rid himself of. He becomes desperate to get her into bed, going so far as to get engaged to her for that vulgar purpose, only to discover the sex is perfunctory. Golding is more insightful than you would expect on the matter of relationships and sex. Mountjoy considers his relationship with Beatrice, and how he had been so desperate to discover the secret that he thought was hidden in her soul:
“When you are young, you cannot believe that a human relationship is as pointless as it seems. You always think that tomorrow there will come the revelation. But in fact we had had our revelation of each other. There was nothing else to know.”
I have known far too many couples who experienced this same epiphany, and yet lacked the confidence or the will or the hard-heartedness to act on it and ended up suffering through a prolonged kind of break-up that never seemed to end, and in some cases never did.
Golding was a fabulous writer. There is so much here that I could have quoted to illustrate the quality, the sheer bravado, of his writing. Yet it never feels that he is showing off. When Mountjoy has his psychotic episode in the cell awaiting further interrogation at the hands of the German SS, Golding pushes his language as far as it will go without breaking. He accomplished the same effect in ‘The Paper Men’ when Wilfred Barclay suffers a stroke; the sense of dislocation is similar, though nuanced to reflect the conditions of the sufferer. There are few writers who could effectively attempt one such passage, let alone two.
Whilst I remain unconvinced by the free will angle at the centre of the book, there is still enough of philosophical value that I feel I have learnt something worthwhile by reading Free Fall. The biggest question is not whether we possess the freedom to act as we please. It is more interesting to contemplate what we are in the first place, and it is here that Golding reaches his greatest level of profundity:
“Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths.”
It would never have occurred to me to link mankind to coral growth, and yet now that it has been done, I cannot see it any other way. That is Golding’s gift.
