Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

                  “PINCHER MARTIN” by William Golding (First published in 1956)

Some years ago I wrote on this blog a critique of William Golding’s second novel The Inheritors. I made it clear that Golding’s first novel Lord of the Flies was so well known that I would be talking to the wrong audience if they did not already know the novel or had read it. Surely most high-school English teachers have set Lord of the Flies as an essential text. [I should know because I was one of those teachers.] Regarding William Golding (1911-1983, Nobel Laureate), his early novels could basically be called allegories or fables. To make it clear, Lord of the Flies is about the way even children can become violent savages if they are given the opportunity. The boys in the novel ignore the more level-headed ones among them and literally turn to murder. We human beings have many flaws built into us – jealousy, violence, envy, deceit etc. – even if we are intelligent, reasoning creatures. The Inheritors tries, allegorically, to understand why we human beings became so flawed. In this case, Golding sees our distant ancestors, homo sapiens sapiens, as violent creatures who kill a more primitive species of homo sapiens, presumably Neanderthals. In both novels Golding is suggesting what Christians would call “original sin”. Though we were made in the image of God, there was “the Fall” when we fell out with God. In Lord of the Flies the boys land on what at first seems an island paradise. The Neanderthals in The Inheritors live as if it were the Garden of Eden. Both are destroyed by homo sapiens sapiens.

Pincher Martin is one of Golding’s shortest novels [nearly all of his novels are short] but I personally found it one of the most difficult to read. A synopsis might show why this is so. 

Golding was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy in the Second World War and knew how treacherous the sea could be – a very dangerous place. He never encounted German U-Boats but he knew that they targeted British ships. Christopher Hadley Martin (nickname “Pincher” Martin) is a petty officer in a destroyer. A U-Boat torpedoes it. As the destroyer sinks, Pincher Martin is thrown overboard. He cries for help, but none comes. He kicks off his seaboots and starts swimming. With great effort, he reaches a small rock sticking up in the vast Atlantic ocean. He is able to, painfully, drag himself onto the rock. He is alone and there is no rescue in sight.

  And this is where the reading can become difficult. The first three chapters give us  minute details of how Pincher Martin climbs up onto the rock – the difficulty of getting on to the rock; the limpets and mussels and barnacles and green smears of seaweed; the waves that push him and pull him back; the slippery surface of the rock making it hard to climb; the coldness; the pain of crawling along rough rocks. Golding appears to be stopping time by noting every possible detail. Time is not happening as we think it should.

Pincher Martin is alone. He often talks to himself. He is enterprising. He works out how to feed himself on the available mussels and crayfish. We at first see him as an heroic person, surviving in an appalling situation. But soon delusions crowd his brain. For amusement, he names different parts of the rock as High Street and the Red Lion, and he piles up stones in the hope of being seen and rescued… but he begins to see the pile as looking like the shape of a man. He calls it the Dwarf. And the whimsical naming of streets reminds him of places he remembers. He recalls many things in his life. And at this point we understand that Pincher Martin is not a hero but he is a truly evil man.  He was formerly an actor who did not do very well in his profession– so he signed on to the navy. Not only did he often cheat people but he raped a woman, cuckolded a friend and was planning to murder one of his fellow seamen. There are flashbacks to conversations he had with colleagues and friends. His life has been opportunistic and narcissistic and potentially murderous. Later, when he says “I am alone”, he is not only referring to the loneliness of being in the middle of an ocean, but he is admitting to himself that he has never really had friends or loved them. He is cut off from the human race… like Cain.

He notices that, in all the time he has been on the rock, he has never once excreted. He also notices a red lobster swimming in the sea. There is no such thing as a red lobster swimming in the sea [they turn red only when they are cooked]. It now dawns on him. He is not only hallucinating. He is really already dead. He argues with God. Curses. Curses himself.

His body is washed up on a beach in the Hebrides. A naval doctor examines the corpse and, in the last words of the novel, he says “He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots.” In other words, he was dead by the time he was thrown off the sinking destroyer. The whole novel was what passed in Pincher Martin’s brain in a split second.

Some readers have suggested that Golding was mainly concerned with the old question of what we might think in the last moment before we die.  The best-known tale going in that direction is Ambrose Bierce’s short-story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Perhaps Golding was thinking about that idea, but it is not his main interest. Golding was not a conventional Christian. His father was an atheist. Golding went to, and taught in, Anglican schools but that was mainly pro forma. Often Golding said he was an atheist. But like it or not, he did use Christian concepts in his early novels and – as you will see – he adopted some specifically Catholic ones in his third novel Pincher Martin. I say this because, researching this novel,  I caught up with a B.B.C. interview he gave in the late 1950s, when his fourth novel had just come out [you can look it up on You Tube, as I did]. Golding said Pincher Martin is “a novel about a dead man” and goes on to say that, though he wasn’t Catholic, he wanted to write a story about Purgatory, the Catholic idea that there is, between heaven and hell, a possible cleansing for the sinful. Also, in another interview, his daughter said that her father told her that Pincher Martin had to be read as an “unredeemed wicked character”. Hence Pincher Martin’s cursing God.

Just a few side comments – the novel was presented in England as simply Pincher Martin. But when it was published in America it was presented as Pincher Martin – The Two Deaths of  Christopher Martin. Maybe American readers have to have things spelled out for them. Then there’s that odd nickname “Pincher” Martin. Just as in English slang, “Dusty” Miller meant somebody old fashioned, and “Snobby” Clark meant more-or-less a pretentious person, especially lower-middle-class people like clerks; so “Pincher” Martin meant somebody untrustworthy, because he pinched [stole] things… and the main character of this novel.is certainly untrustworthy.

Final comment – if you want to, you can search out [once again on You Tube] a “Cinematic Opera” based on Pincher Martin by Oliver Rutland. It is surprisingly very good but, like the novel, it is gruelling.