William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
By John Carey
Faber £25, 573 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

William Golding is known mainly for one book, Lord of the Flies, which has become a staple of exam syllabuses and a massive cultural influence – from the work of Stephen King to television drama Lost. Despite this, it is neither Golding’s best novel nor the one for which he would have wanted to be remembered. In later life he disowned it and even complained that the wealth it brought was “Monopoly money”. When Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature, King Gustaf of Sweden told him that he had been obliged to study the book at school – the kind of backhanded compliment that Golding often had to swallow.

As John Carey emphasises in this tactful and detailed biography, the first since Golding’s death in 1993, Lord of the Flies might easily have slipped into oblivion. When the manuscript arrived at Faber and Faber, it had already done the rounds and looked correspondingly tatty. The publisher’s professional reader reported that it was an “absurd & uninteresting fantasy”, “rubbish & dull”. But the donnish editor Charles Monteith recognised Golding’s original gifts and picked the book up for a tiny advance of £60. So began a lustrous literary career.

Carey, an Oxford professor, is closely interested in the mechanics of the writer’s life. As a result, there is a good deal here about the genesis of Golding’s fiction, his dealings with publishers and how his books were received. It is necessary information, judiciously handled, but still at times rather dense and flavourless.

Altogether more peppery is the exposition of Golding’s character. On the surface, his was an ordinary life – much of it spent as a schoolteacher – but a fierce oddness nestled within him. He was energetic and intellectually curious, passionate about chess, orchids, sailing, science and underwater photography. Carey shows that he was also preternaturally sensitive, tight-fisted and morbid – and an attention-seeker, who used his acting skills to conceal his real self. And while he bristled with leftish principles, he was desperately eager to receive a knighthood and found that paying a tax bill left him grief-stricken, as though mourning a death.

Behind these peculiarities lurked something occult and ominous. It burgeoned in his dreams, about which he kept detailed notes. In his private journal he provokingly declared himself “a monster in deed, word and thought”.

The most monstrous episode presented by Carey is Golding’s clumsy attempt, while a student at Oxford, to rape a 15-year-old girl. The incident caused Golding deep shame. Yet it is apparent that a vein of sadism throbbed within him, seemingly dilated by his naval experiences during the second world war. He claimed to understand the Nazis because he was himself “of that sort”, and delighted in explaining to schoolboy actors the proper way to stab a man with a dagger. Heavy drinking exacerbated his wild behaviour; on one occasion he destroyed an acquaintance’s puppet of Bob Dylan, having mistaken it for Satan.

Carey excels at divining the qualities of Golding’s fiction – its imaginative concentration and allegorical richness – and deftly picks a way through the thicket of his weirder attitudes. Yet the darkness of the man needs more probing. For instance, Carey presents him as having been for the most part a good husband and father, but what are we to make of his wife’s challenging him at a public lecture, asking why there were not more female characters in his books? There are other traces of domestic sourness, as well as of personal recklessness and fanaticism. Carey’s account is nimbly intelligent but there is an abiding sense that the gnarled complexities of Golding’s psyche have yet to be fully explored.

Henry Hitchings is author of ‘The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English’ (John Murray)