Malcolm Bradbury on William Golding Golding addressed fundamental questions of good and evil, being, wholeness and creative aspiration in a godless age. His stories were, he once said, not fables but myths—fable being ‘an invented thing out on the surface whereas myth in something that comes out of the roots of things in the ancient sense of being a key to existence...and experience as a whole. Golding’s work challenges many of the liberal and humanistic conventions of much British fiction, and there is a certain timelessness about the prose—though not the technique—which makes it stand monumentally apart from much contemporary writing. But it is and will surely remain a central contribution to the modern British novel. The 1983 Nobel Prize winner author, Golding had the unique distinction of being both a fabulist and a realist. Golding’s works will remain of significant relevance as long as man continues to careen madly on the razor’s edge of so-called civilisation while his ugly true self-barbaric and greedy claims his soul in Mephistophilean triumph. At times Golding’s eschatological views are sombre, but he weaves a torturous path through the paradoxes of good and evil in his novels; Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire (to name only a few). He tried to achieve a synthesis of flesh and spirit through an illuminating reconciliation. Golding wished to salvage the soul of man from the wreckage of 20th century godlessness, entropy and the malaise of whoring after false gods. How do you react to the charge of Peter Moss and a number of critics that you are a pessimist? I would call myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist. My novels examine the human condition. Just as a doctor diagnoses a physical disease I explore the spiritual ills of man. I am too old to go about preaching on the state of man, but one has to harbour hope. The very act of living today is one of hope. Golding’s commitment to truth and reality is undying. He speaks through Samuel Mount-joy in Free Fall: “But we are neither the innocent nor the wicked. We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.” Or again: “I am looking for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of darkness, the point where I began.” Golding demands from man a moral evolution, a spiritual growth worthy of his species. As he observed, “What the world now needs is the Homomoralis the human being who cannot kill his own kind, nor exploit them nor rob them.”

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The Problem of Evil in Golding and Some Contemporary Writers 2. War and Violence 3. Sex and Sexuality 4. Class-Conflict and Modern Social Ethos 5. Religion 6. Conclusions