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.
“FREE FALL” by William Golding (First published in 1959)
William Golding’s first novel Lord of the Flies told us that there is inevitable evil in the human race even if there are some saintly and reasonable people around. His second novel The Inheritors tried to explain how our evil came from our distant ancestors, homo sapiens sapiens. His third novel Pincher Martin in effect has an evil man finally having to admit the evil he has done [wherein the evil man finally faces God… even if the author wasn’t sure whether God existed or not]. But when we come to Free Fall, we have a long confession or self-examination, told throughout in the first person. In many ways this is a very complex novel and one that has baffled many readers. Not only is there much theorising by the narrator Samuel Mountjoy [often called Sammy or Sam], but the novel is not presented in sequence. We go through childhood and early adolescence; then skip to young adulthood; then go through full manhood; then back to young adulthood… and all the while Samuel Mountjoy theorises, justifies himself, and perhaps [but only perhaps] finally understands who or what he has become.
The only way I can navigate through this novel is by looking at it in four blocks.
First – Chapters One, Two and Three, dealing with childhood. Sammy is probably a bastard and it is suggested that his mother is a prostitute. He lives in a slum, not in London but in what is called the “Garden of England” – in other words, a rural area where there are both middle-class people and slum-dwellers. Little Sammy does not fully understand how adults act and as a very little boy he is influenced by a girl, a little bit older than him, called Evie. She is clever. She spins him stories that he fully believes, even if the reader understands that these are made up. Golding catches exactly the moment when young children make up tales and/or believe them. They both go to an infants’ school, which is presented to us in all its rawness. A little bit older, Sam goes to a junior school and makes friends with Johnny Spragg, a bit of a tearabout who is obsessed with aeroplanes and leads young Sam into escapades around the nearby air field, sometimes getting into trouble as when they spy on peoples’ homes. This is open mischief. Quite different is a boy called Philip Arnold who is able to manipulate other boys, getting them into trouble without himself ever being caught. The destructive schoolboys have shades of Lord of the Flies. Philp Arnold, mocking the religion they are taught, gets Sammy to go into the church and piss in the chalice. Sammy is caught in the act. He is dragged off by the verger… and he now has ear-ache, a common affliction in the 1920’s…. He is put in a hospital ward. The deacon forgives him for his misbehaviour. There is at this time much discussion in the Anglican church about high- church and low-church. Sam is more-or-less adopted by the church and given a better home than the one he was born into… but even as a young boy he is very sceptical.
Second - Chapters Four, Five and Six. Golding skips over Sam’s adolescent years and goes straight into his young adulthood. Sam, aged 19, is now an art-student in London. He aims to be a painter. He has a deep crush on Beatrice Ifor. In a way he is jealous of Beatrice. She is studying to be a school-teacher, she has polite manners, is somewhat prim, and regularly goes to “chapel” [the condescending term used by Anglicans when referring to non-conforming protestants]. Sam tries to woo her, but he is inept and they remain “just good friends”. It is the 1930s. Communism is popular with the more naïve young men at that time. Sam signs on. The devious Philip Arnold comes back into his life. Philip is very sceptical of all ideologies and makes Sam a little less interested in the course. Sam is more desperate to make Beatrice his lover – to bed her… But she will not respond to his advances. He seems to love her, but sex is more and more what he wants from her. She fends him off. His frustration grows. Finally she submits on the promise that they will one day marry, and they bed. But soon he thinks that she doesn’t really enjoy sex. Using much self-justification Sam, looking at his painting of Beatrice in the nude, and on his way to becoming a popular painter, he decides he is bored with her… and he takes up with a free-lover Communist nicknamed Taffy, with whom he now sleeps. He moves to a different area and Beatrice tries desperately to find where he is, with no success. It is now wartime. The bombs are falling on London. Though Sam and Taffy both have adopted the idea of a sort of “free-love”, they marry and Taffy has a baby. In this context, Sam justifies not caring for other people because, after all, the world is a dreadful place anyway.
Third – Chapters Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Golding throws us into a completely different environment. In the war, Sam has become an R.A.F. pilot. His plane has crashed. He is in a P.O.W. camp in Germany. Some English prisoners have escaped. The Gestapo suspect that Sam knows how they escaped and Sam is hauled into interrogation. The Gestapo man who asks the questions is Dr. Halde, a sophisticated man, in fact a psychologist. He knows more about Sam than Sam expected. Bit by bit, smoothly, Dr. Halde attempts to break him down, but Sam insists that he knows nothing about how the prisoners escaped. Finally, to make him confess, Sam is locked into a small concrete room where no light can get in and where there is little space for him to settle…. In the dark, Sam remembers what it was like when he was looked after and more-or-less adopted by the Anglican priest Fr. Watts-Watt. Sam is scared of the dark and matters weren’t helped by the fact that the priest comes close to being a paedophile, though he never literately violates Sam …In the space of the concrete-made cell in which he physically cannot manoeuvre, and in complete darkness, endless hallucinations, his theories about his body and how he might survive, torture him. He comes to loath himself…. He is let out of the cell, but he now gradually understands himself. He realises that his life has been narcissistic - he did not care for others and lacked empathy. He thought about the fragility as well as the purity of Beatrice whom he had tossed away. His friend and former teacher Nick Shales told him that Beatrice had a nervous breakdown after Sam had left her.
Fourth – Chapters Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen. Golding takes us back to Sam’s earlier days. When he was a teenager at a co-ed school he was taught religious knowledge by a Miss Rowena Pringle. She was harsh, chastising and frequently punished Sam for his lack of studying. By contrast, his science teacher Nick Shales was open-minded and agnostic. This suggests a dichotomy – faith or science… but even though Nick Shales was the better teacher, it was faith that held Sam up when he was imprisoned by the Nazis … he remembers being taught by different teachers, going through puberty being tortured by sex, feeling inadequate, and knowing that he lusted after Beatrice… and later he remembers in full what eventually happened to Beatrice – after Sam had left her, she not only had a nervous breakdown, but she was permanently confined to a psychiatric ward. Sam had visited her. She could not speak, she urinated in her clothes… and he discovers that another man is now with Taffy… the novel ends with deliberate ambiguity. The commandant of the Nazi prison lets Sam out of the cell and allows him go back to the camp. The commandant says to Sam “The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.” What does this mean? That Dr. Halde did not know how to deal with people? That the commandant was more humane? That they decided that Sam had nothing to do with the escape of some prisoners? Who knows? I don’t.
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At this point you are shouting at me, because all I have done is to give you a synopsis without helping you to understand what the novel is really about. Bearing in mind that the novel is written in the first person, we have to accept that Sam is often an unreliable narrator – he frequently justifies himself and until the last moment he does not really take responsibility for what he has done in his life. On one level we could say that he was badly brought up, coming from a slum without real parents and moving on to following bad company when he was youngster. But does this really explain how he became so narcissistic? This is not only a matter of his boasting about having some of his paintings in the Tate. In his quest for sex, he lacks any real empathy and ignores the deep fragility of Beatrice – and his marriage with Taffy is at best shallow All the while, remember that he is examining himself. Nothing completely damns him. He seems to have some fortitude when he faces his interrogation In his final thoughts he wavers between the religion of the (very flawed) priest and the (equally flawed) teacher of science… but in the end he needs faith.
What is the Free Fall that names this novel? Possibly it could refer to Sam’s having to fall out of his plane… but more likely Golding is interested the “the Fall” of the Bible, the original sin. We have free will but we often fail. As in his earlier novels, he insists that we human beings are very flawed.
I am interested in some of the names that Golding gives to his characters. Could the name Samuel Mountjoy suggest somebody who seeks for joy, as in looking only for personal gratification? Could Beatrice be like Dante’s Beatrice, chaste and pious but never fully understood? And for the record, the little story-teller Evie, who leads Sam along when they are tots, has the same name that Golding gives to a character in his later novel The Pyramid – she is a temptress.
