With Pincher Martin, for all its real claims as a breathless and mysterious tour de force, two or three things went wrong. Mr Golding had taken a dive into the chaos of a single consciousness; to do this makes hay of the traditional novel, which is a work concerned with the differences between people. Pincher Martin was a one-man scream of pain. The defence may be that Golding is a poet-novelist, an exponent of the anti-novel, that he is writing 'black' literature or reviving the Gothic tradition; and these are worth considering. But it did look as though a distinguished writer was about to go down into the underworld of fashionable paranoia. The inquisitional scene in Free Fall, with its overtone of torture, confirmed this,… [In] The Spire, the process is complete and the result is obscurity, monotony and strain. His inventiveness is dulled. His clean narrative is...