When Englishman William Golding published Free Fall 50 years ago, in 1959, he was 48, and the author of three previous novels, the iconic Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, and Pincher Martin, that announced him as a writer with a unique ability to create modern myths, but not necessarily a writer of the highest order. Free Fall, however, is a prose masterpiece that every budding fiction writer worth his salt today should pore over, and the kind of novel that readers today should be demanding from publishers.
Layering It On Thick
The plot of Free Fall has three layers, all told by the narrator, Sammy Mountjoy, who, Golding masterfully makes it clear, is invoking segments of his past in order to engage in self-analysis and self-healing. The first segment involves Mountjoy’s childhood in a slum in Kent called “Rotten Row.” In the next segment, Mountjoy is a 19-year-old art student, and has his first sexual experience with a girl named Beatrice, whom he eventually abandons.
Then we learn of Mountjoy’s cathartic experience in a World War II Nazi prison, where he mourns the loss of Beatrice and wonders about the choices he’s made in his life. It’s in this third segment that all the subtle yet disturbing and forthright psychology swimming around inside Mountjoy begins to envelop the reader.
When a Story Becomes a Creation
This structure, though distinguished by large narrative leaps, is essentially a typical dramatic coming-of-age story. And it has its flaws. Toward the end, it’s obvious that Golding the myth maker is out to turn Mountjoy into a poster boy for the fateful dilemmas and existential challenges involved in the human condition.
It’s the writing itself that turns everything into gold (no pun intended). The building blocks of a coming-of-age story become fluid, and are swept away on a tide of gorgeously integrated details and ideas that appear made up of both of immediate sensation and tranquil yet fragile recollection. Even when Golding appears to be engaged in telling the reader what to think, the telling is so sensuous that it’s as if the reader has come to it first, and so sentences feel like confirmations, rather than pieces of external evidence.
Free Fall is a marvel of creation, and a stunning example of how a writer in mid-career can tap even deeper into his resources and develop his abilities. It’s the Golding of Free Fall, and not the Golding of Lord of the Flies, that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1983, and hopefully a place on every future reader’s reading list.
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