662
FRANK KERMODE
(using a system of time shifts devised to expose the religious signi–
ficance of a man's whole experience) is as accomplished as any
novel of Conrad's. It is a mark of Golding's integrity that in every
book he invents technical devices of great ingenuity but entirely
without self-indulgence; his skill is never a hair's breath in excess
of what the moral occasion demands. One's coolness towards the
book has other causes.
The myth of
Free Fall
is basically that of all Golding's novels:
the Fall, the expulsion from paradise, erected wit and infected will.
It is a myth which has accumulated an enormous theology; this
doesn't matter until the novelist--or his hero in search of explana–
tions- turns theologian also. Samuel Mountjoy examines his life
with a view to discovering some pattern, some connection between
his two worlds of experience, one deterministic, rational, the other
horror and glory, heaven and hell. His conclusion (not the conclu–
sion of the novel) is that "there is no bridge."
It
is in Sammy's
speculations that one detects a hollowness, or what Coleridge called
"mental bombast"-"thoughts and images too great for the sub..
ject," because the subject is not the Fall but a commentary on
it.
In the other books you
taste
isolation, guilt, innocence; here you
don't. The prose is denatured, the narrative lacks plasticity. The
crucial episode, a man alone in a cell, calls for, and is not provided
with, the savage power of
Pincher Martin.
Yet it is, in its way,
wonderfully composed, passionate and cunning. There is no ques–
tion of a failure of power or nerve, only-to be bold--of a flaw in
the original conception.
Free Fall,
like
Paradise Lost,
is about
everything,
a tough as–
signment. The characters are named accordingly. Samuel Mount–
joy at first misunderstands his vocation (like Samuel in the Bible)
and as a child in a slum inhabits paradise (Mountjoy). As he
writes, he lives on Paradise Hill, "thirty seconds from the shops."
An important event in his life is the recognition of the beauty of a
girl called Beatrice; but he makes the opposite choice to Dante's,
and, by a positive act of will, rejects the possibility of living by
this
vision and subjects the girl to his lust. The two worlds between
which he is suspended (in a condition of "free fall," as we know it
in science fiction) are represented by a religious schoolmistress and
a science master called Nick. At some point, the point he is
in-
