The leading proposition in Golding's mind as a writer, endorsed alike by Freud and Christian theology, is that each of us recapitulates the history of the race. For Golding, the ink is not yet dry on the social contract. Civilisation, like Jocelin's spire rests on foundations still writhing like hell-mouth. This being his bent, his interests naturally concentrate on boyhood—that is, on the embryonic stage of the civilised human: for there animism and polytheism, matriarchy and the primal horde, are re-experienced one by one—as is the Fall, if you believe in the Fall. But indeed, for good or evil, Golding is somewhat tied as a writer to boyhood, for some imaginative block prevents him from handling adult life with confidence. With great tact and intelligence, he has largely accepted the limitation, which is also a stimulus. He began writing in the era of Camus, Sartre and Orwell, a classic age for the fable, and his allegories are now part of the permanent furniture of our minds—or, perhaps I should say, of English minds, obsessed as they are with boyhood. (p. 579)
The three stories in Golding's new volume are set, respectively, in Ancient Egypt, the Stone Age and the later Roman Empire. And what first strikes one about them, as compared with Wells and the great preceding school of Edwardian fable, is the extraordinary rigour of Golding's method. Here there is no impressionable time-traveller, no measurement-taking visitor, to make things easy. The reader, bundled blindfold into an action, must make out the rules, learn what the human score is, and take sides into the bargain, while the game goes on. This disciplined anthropological and archaeological dreaming is marvellous, and is the main interest in these stories, which have less in the way of message than his longer novels. In his Egyptian story ('The Scorpion God') particularly, the dream springs from deep levels: Egypt of the Pharaohs, as Golding has told us elsewhere, is the place nearest his own obscurantist, necrophilic, boyish heart. It is a place where the humanist is a low, rancorous fellow, sordidly prizing his one life and his own shabby skin above the golden dignity of immortality; where the smuttiest joke you can make is about making love to a stranger, a person neither your parent nor sibling. Golding's style is all alive in this story, leaping to the demand—as he once put it—of 'my own mournful staring into the darkness, my own savage grasp on life'…. Dimly we discern a parallel to this Egypt. It is England, the England of 'The Ladder and the Tree' and The Pyramid (is the title a clue?): a sheltered West Country childhood, sex shut out like a horror behind the lace curtains, and in the midst a golden-haired savage, dreaming necrophilic dreams while his progressive father tinkers with wireless and stumps the country for Labour.
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