THE NOVEL AGAIN
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Eventually he seems to be swept off the rock by a storm and is pre–
sumably drowned. The final chapter of the story, however, throws
everything into reverse again. Martin's body is swept on shore, and
we learn that he is still wearing the seaboots which we had been
led to believe he took off shortly after he was first thrown into the
sea. It suddenly appears that the entire novel takes place in the
mind of a drowning man, and that this elaborate story of survival,
retrospection, and madness, which covers about two hundred pages,
occupies the interval of time between his first sensations of drowning
on page one and his last twitch of delirious memory or sensation–
whatever brief interval of time that may be.
Impressive as it is,
The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin
seems
less successful than Golding's first two novels. And though it is al–
together clear that the ending is no mere trick, there is perhaps
something of the grand trick in it. It suggests an excessive reliance
on technique or form, as if either of them could finally do the work
of the intelligence. It reminds one of how in an earlier phase of the
novel's history, Conrad or Ford, when they needed to extricate
themselves from some difficulty of moral judgment, occasionally
resorted to a clever manipulation of point of view. But it reminds
one even more of how poets sometimes try to resolve what they have
set in motion by introducing at the end of their poems a new con–
sideration which turns the poem upside down, or ask some question
which casts the whole enterprise into doubt or ambiguity.
Golding's fourth and most recent novel,
Free Fall)
strikes off on
a new course. Though still exploiting virtuoso devices for the direct
presentation of experience, for bringing conscious and unconscious
processes simultaneously before the reader, and for rendering past
and present as co-existent, it attempts to deal with the life history
of a single man, an artist named Samuel Mountjoy. The representa–
tion of a complex, continuously developing person, however, turns
out to be a labor that Golding is unequal to. He fails because his
imagination seems unable to encompass society as we know it now
and because those parts of experience which we think of as developing
or developmental are almost impossible to deal with apart from the
experience of society. In a sense they
are
our experience of society.
Thus, although the theme of
Free Fall
is development, its style is
essentially discontinuous, and the discrete episodes of which it is
