Who knows? With intolerance backed right out of the light there is room for an unconvenanted mercy like the one that drives me to give Rick these papers: a mercy by which those unsatisfactory phenomena, Wilfred Townsend Barclay and Richard Linbergh Tucker, may be eternally destroyed. Is that what keeps me happy?
Rick is a hundred yards away across the river, flitting from tree to tree like playing Indians. I shall have an audience for my ritual. Now he is leaning against a tree and peering at me through some instrument or other.
How the devil did Rick L. Tucker manage to get hold of a gu
About the Author
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.
Books by
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
Nobel Prize for Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE PYRAMID
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(a revised text of Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in one volume)
Essays
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Play
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by
Nigel Williams
Copyright
First published in 1984
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© William Golding, 1984
The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26741–5