The greatest...?
Harriet Waugh
The Paper Men William Golding (Faber & Faber £7.95) Mr Golding must have written The Paper Men before he received the ac- colade of The Nobel Prize for Literature. This possibly has relieved him of the strain of feeling that it is incumbent on him to produce yet another masterpiece to follow the last, and confounded those critics who are querying whether the honour has been well-earned. His last novel, Rites of Passage, was a masterpiece and well deserv- ed to win the Booker Prize in a vintage year for novels, notwithstanding the growls of Anthony Burgess. However, The Paper Men is disappointing. It would be con- sidered a fair enough novel if produced by me or even, possibly, the reader, but it does not stand out as a particularly distinguished offering from someone who has just been rubber-stamped as England's greatest living novelist.
As with all his novels, William Golding in The Paper Men deals with original sin, ex- posing the corruption at the base of man's nature and showing his inability to com- prehend or face his own motives and urges. Where the hero of Rites of Passage is forced in the end to acknowledge, in some degree, his own nature, in The Paper Men the hero flees self-acknowledgment in a physical odyssey leading to madness. It is this retreat, and his persecution that is the gist of the story.
The hero, Wilfred Barclay, is a middle- aged novelist with the physical characteristics of William Golding. There are other such conceits that seem a little self-conscious. Barclay is both successful and rated highly as a writer, although his reputation stems from his first novel, an acknowledged masterpiece. Although it is possible that he is a great writer, there are indications that he is not, or, at least, that he is played out and now produces hollow reflections of his earlier works. This is ob- viously not autobiography, and un-self- regarding fiction plays the major part. The hero is an unpleasant, alcoholic, hypocritical fellow whose train of thought, particularly in the first two chapters, is tediously verbose.
This becomes less important as the reader's interest is engaged, and what tedium does survive comes from being forced into close acquaintance with someone whose personality is disintegrating. (The book could be likened to The Ancient Mariner, and we know how his audience felt about him.) I suppose it says quite a lot for Golding that this internal travail is as readable and entertaining as it is. The disintegration of Wilfred Barclay's mind is
already under way when the novel opens. Drink and spooks from an ugly, selfishly in- dulgent life are waiting to get him. The trig- ger for their onslaught comes in the guise of an earnest, young American academic call- ed Professor Rick Tucker who has set out to become the world's authority on Wilfred Barclay.
The novel opens with Barclay finding Tucker rummaging through his dustbins in the middle of the night, mistaking him for a badger and taking a shot at him. This sounds funnier than it is. The satire is
curiously coarse-grained while the characters, with the exception of the author and his bitter wife Liz, are cardboard cut- outs overloaded with hate. Mr Golding could, of course, deliberately have por- trayed them like this because their reality or lack of it is shown through the eyes and pen of Barclay who may be a poor writer and who has, in any case, lost his connecting link with humanity. But if it is a deliberate contrivance, it does not work very well. It makes the novel seem a bit thin.
Anyway, Professor Rick Tucker unearths some love letters in the dustbins, and Liz decides to get rid of her husband. Barclay sets forth to travel the world and gradually becomes unhinged as he is pursued, or thinks he is being pursued, by Tucker from continent to continent. There is one ex- tremely fine comic scene in a Swiss hotel, where Tucker tries to force the demoralised Barclay to make him his official biographer, throws in his wife as an induce- ment and rescues Barclay from death on a
mountain slope. Tucker also manages to in- dicate, without altering for one moment his obsequious behaviour, that the only reason he wishes to become 'The Barclay Man' is because nobody else wants to, and so the field is wide open. He is also being paid verY handsomely by an eccentric millionaire to do so. This is terrific, and the novel never quite loses momentum afterwards, but neither does it give anything as good again. Both the pursued and the pursuer, driven by their personal devils, become increasing- ly madder, badder and more dangerous to know as the years pass. A stereotype of a bitchy homosexual intellectual flits through the pages representing literary life, and the ending is clever but not very satisfactory.
Previous page
