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quiring aft!;!r, he loses freedom of will, is locked in the wrong world;
but he finds the other after a Gestapo interrogation modeled on
that of Christ in the desert. Is he a son of God? He peoples his cell
with egotistical terrors, and at the height of his agony bursts out of
the cell--or is let out of it, a crucial ambiguity-forgiven. He walks
into the world of vision, hearing the music "of earth and sun and
,unseen stars." But Beatrice has been reduced (and this is as fine a
passage as anything in Golding) to an incontinent in an asylum.
Sammy cannot reconcile his worlds; the novel does so on the last
-page (Golding's first and last pages need to be read with fantastic
care) but I'm sorry to say I don't understand the bridge it builds.
At any rate there seems to
be
nothing Mr. Golding cannot try,
and to write with this kind of resource about the fall into and the
delivery from the body of this death is to require with a certain
justified imperiousness the respect of all readers. That this is a book
flawed by a certain dry brittleness in the writing as well as by the
sheer size of the conception I think to
be
no less than the truth;
but in its way it suggests very strongly that Golding's greatest work
lies ahead, and
if
it can be called a failure it
is
only in the sense
you might use when speaking of a known and revered master.
Miss Compton-Burnett, I hardly dare to say, is a little off form
in her new book. I do not dote on her novels but it is possible to
see her extraordinary distinction without doing so. She shares with
very different writers--Salinger and Wodehouse, for instance–
the knack of infecting one with a dialect; just before going to sleep
one can, after reading one of her books, entertain oneself with end–
less conversations, automatically witty. Her books are what they
are. But I owe it to myself to add that this
is
not infallibly what
they ought to be. And debts of this nature are never left unpaid. In
the last novel,
A Fath er and .his Fate
(a better book than this, I
think), one character explains why he has been whispering (use–
lessly, for in this world everything is overheard): "What is there
about any of it fit to be uttered aloud?" This is true of all Miss
Compton-Burnett's fiction. In her artificial hell nothing goes with–
out saying provided it can be said in the infernal dialect. All speak
it, serVants and children included, because they breathe it
in
with
the poisonous air. Every remark, false, sentimental, cruel or appa–
rently generous even, breeds a malicious consequence by a sort of
