It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark
the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text, instantly familiar, is displayed alongside a collection of
Golding’s other, less celebrated books, highlighting the true paradox of his literary career.
While there’s no shame in growing fat off the royalties of a single masterpiece, one of the many things John Carey’s magnificent biography of William Golding made clear is that
he never wanted to be a one-hit wonder. In the uncomfortable run-up to being published for the first time, the prospect of achieving anything close to a hit with Lord of the Flies must
besides have seemed absurd. A barrage of criticism awaited the novel even after it had limped over the publishing hurdle. In the context of 1950’s England, its picture of mankind was deemed
too abysmal for mass consumption, particularly for children bred on the likes of The Secret Seven and Famous Five. We’re less sensitive souls today, perhaps (our children
apparently especially so – Lord of the Flies has been hanging around the GCSE English syllabus for well over a decade), often absorbed more by the books that make us feel
uncomfortable than those which offer some respite from harsh realities. But Golding’s later books, disturbing but slightly less controversial than the first in their own day, have failed to
capture our spirit in quite the same way.
Inheritors, the second of Golding’s ten
novels (he also wrote poetry, some plays, and collected essays) and his personal favourite, is a good example of one that ought to benefit off the back of our pleasure in the unnerving, and
enthrall now more than then. Published just a year after Lord of the Flies, it is similarly probing of man’s inner nature. A family group of primitives, the
‘Neanderthals’, each with a bizarre phonic name (‘Lok’ is the prehistoric narrator) comes face to face with Homo Sapiens and struggles to win the ultimate race of evolution.
The Homines Sapientes are intensely dislikable, thinking it their birthright to rule and plunder. Published in the wake of Britain’s imperial collapse, there’s a theoretically
good reason why the book didn’t take off the first time round; all the better reason, then, to read it today and embrace it with a new perspective.
The William Golding display is on at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, until December 23rd.
Daisy Dunn
Comments