Think about women then or eating. Think about eating women, eating men, crunching up Alfred, that other girl, that boy … lie restful as a log and consider the gnawed tunnel of life right up to this uneasy intermission.
This rock.
WILLIAM GOLDING’S PINCHER MARTIN was one of the first grown-up novels I read, somewhere in my early teens when I was still looking for sea stories, unaware till then that my taste for salty melodrama had begun to cloy and it was time to move on. I probably read half the book—as anyone can—thinking it was indeed about a torpedoed sailor struggling to survive on a bare rock in the North Atlantic. Yet its startling imagery and metaphysical freight must have sunk in, because a few years later, while experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms in the mountains of Oaxaca, I saw my hands turn into lobster claws—the claws of Pincher Martin as he dies.
Lieutenant Christopher Martin, an actor before he is called up for convoy duty in World War II, has always “pinched” things not on offer—a friend’s wife, a girl’s virginity, countless cruel and shabby victories over friends. He plays foul because winning is the thing that matters and the only alternative he can imagine is to be devoured. He knows himself for a cannibal: “You could eat with your cock or with your fist, or with your voice.”
Contemplating murder at the moment a U-boat strikes, he is blown from ship to sea, the eater suddenly eaten. He washes up on an uncharted rock, where he fights cold, hunger, thirst and voracious gulls like “flying reptiles.” But Pincher’s struggle is not really with external Nature; it’s with human nature and his own nature, the “dark centre” he has become in life. There are echoes of Pedro Serrano (“There is someone else on the rock with me. He crept out and slugged me”), of Caliban and Crusoe (“I will tie it down with names”).
Pincher is “a good hater,” and his reward is a nightmare built of the memories strewn in the wake of his ruthless life. Slowly and inexorably, as he writhes on the rock, the poison seeps from sealed chambers of his past into the welter (a favourite word here) of his mind. There are obvious religious themes: that we make our own heavens and hells; that hell is listening forever to one’s own monologue; that whether or not one believes in an afterlife, the moment of death viewed from inside may well be everlasting. Golding underlines all this in a shock ending that a lesser writer could never have got away with. But the book transcends belief to examine conscience and consciousness; remembrance and destiny; the rise of our personality and our species; and the forces inside ourselves that we have every reason to fear, for behind us are a million years of ruthless victories.
I reread Pincher Martin at twenty, soon after the Oaxaca trip, and then not again until I bought a copy recently. I think it was out of print until Golding won the Nobel prize; even now it’s hard to find, squeezed out by Lord of the Flies. I worried that it might have palled like other adolescent tastes—sweet Vermouth, white lipstick (on girls), magic mushrooms. But on every reading I’ve found more to admire and think about, more phrases and thoughts to cheer. Few writers have attempted half his themes in twice the room, barely two hundred pages of jaggedly poetic prose. Each reading cuts deeper as one reads further and further beneath the dying seaman, nearer to one’s own being, and then beyond self to considerations of what it is to be human, in both the evolutionary and moral sense.
I will tell you what a man is.… He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out in the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there and sets a thunderstorm flickering inside the hardening globe.…