There is much about this book that is masterly and everything in it is fascinating. Carey writes with refreshing clarity and Golding's peculiar life story is told with an attractive energy and relish, but for all the intensity of detail the narrative is spoiled by noticeable omissions. The author's date of birth is not given and there is no explanation as to why he joined the war as a navy cadet in December 1940 but applied for a job as a teacher in April of that same year. More importantly, there is no serious discussion of Golding's writing methods or the sources of his inspiration. Odd clues are dotted here and there. We learn, for instance, that Golding submitted the typescript of Lord of the Flies to his publisher, Faber, saying that he "thought" the plot was original. Later he admitted that he was "anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled." Carey describes Lord of the Flies as both a "black" and a "reversed" version of R. M. Ballantyne's Coral Island. Another theory accuses Golding of stealing the plot and some of the characters from W. L. George's 1926 novel, Children of the Morning. But Golding apparently said he had never read that book.
Later, displeased by accusations that he had snitched material from Taffrail's 1916 novel Pincher Martin O.D and copied them into his own Pincher Martin (1956), Golding said that he "vaguely remembered" reading Taffrail in the Twenties. Carey again calls Golding's book a "reversal" of Taffrail's "though Golding may not have realised when he wrote it." Elsewhere we are told that The Inheritors is "a reversal" of a book by H. G. Wells; that one story from The Scorpion God seems to retell Wells's Country of the Blind; that The Spire is startlingly similar to a play by Dorothy Sayers; the short story Clonk Clonk comes from Euripides' The Bacchae; Darkness Visible is drawn from Patrick White. So what is going on here? Golding admits to nothing and Carey refuses to draw all these examples together or try to explain this bizarre plurality of borrowings.
My own conclusion, drawn from but not stated in Carey's book, is that Golding, although not a conscious plagiarist, wrote his novels in some kind of trance or daze. The words simply spilled out of him — sometimes as many as 60,000 in a fortnight. Carey notes that he was an ecstatic visionary, who hallucinated and talked on occasion like a foaming prophet. "The devil smote me out of Sakkara, He came up, higher than the sky, and pelted me in the back," Golding once declared in all seriousness to the writer Andrew Sinclair. Golding believed that he could not think logically but "only dream in pictures." Like Moses, Muhammad or Joseph Smith, he was a kind of idiot savant whose works contain flashes of brilliance, a great deal of nonsense and large amounts of material subconsciously drawn from buried memories of a lifetime's reading.
Like these prophets, Golding, too, heard voices and took them down from dictation. Of the pig's head in Lord of the Flies he said, "It spoke. I know because I heard it." So it was perhaps a very perceptive young Turk who, reviewing "the purest gibberish" (The Scorpion God) in the Spectator in October 1971, wrote regretfully that Golding seemed to have reached the stage in life when writers "start to mistake themselves for St John."
