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William Golding: The Man Who Wrote "Lord Of The Flies" (2009)

by John Carey(Favorite Author)

4.19 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0571231632 (ISBN13: 9780571231638)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Faber & Faber

review 1: I bought this book after going to a talk by the author. Like so many other people, I had only read Lord of the Flies, but I'm now determined to read some of Golding's other work. After a slightly slow and confusing start about Golding's grandparents and parents, with slightly intrusive quotes from Golding's journals, the biography proper started, picked up and quickly becamse fascinating. An irascible man with an extraordinary vision, the drafting of his novels and subsequent revision process is covered in some depth, but so too is Golding's war career and nonchalant approach to school-mastering. Carey was given unprecedented access to Golding's journals but also to the Faber archives and many of Golding's contacts at universities around the world, so the details provi... moreded and Golding's feelings about his various escapades, as written in his journal, add to the richness of the text. If it wasn't for the slow start, the book would have been a five star.
review 2: I've always loved LORD OF THE FLIES, and I was woefully ignorant about the life of Golding. Carey's new biography, with access to Golding's almost lifelong personal journal, numerous correspondences, and the cooperation of his surviving family, was most informative and intresting. If perhaps I didn't need to know chapter and verse on so many individual days of Golding's life, and perhaps a more astute biographer could have pruned some things without ruining the efficacy of the biography, that was a small price to pay. I was particularly fascinated (and thrilled) to learn details about Golding's disgust with the British social class system. Like so many other writers, he suffered from alcoholism, fear of never again writing anything worthwhile, and an intensely complicated psyche. However, his oeuvre is prolific, and I must amend the hole in my own reading and get to some more of his works. If Carey is accurate, I think Golding did the best he could for his family (his loyal wife of many years outlived him by only a short time; both his daughter and, more seriously, his son, have suffered from mental illness)within the parameters of his own troubled self. One piece of distressing, disappointing, and utterly depressing news: the man who wrote LORD OF THE FLIES and eventually won the Nobel Prize did not like ULYSSES, by the ever-noble, but Nobel-less, Joyce! less

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