Issue 44 / May 2012
"Incandescent and furious" - William Golding centenary
This year William Golding would have been 100 years old. To celebrate, Faber and Faber publishes two special editions of his modern classics complete with centenary-branded book jackets and specially commissioned introductions from two literary giants: Peter Carey presents The Inheritors and Stephen King, Lord of the Flies.
Faber is also publishing Golding's daughter Judy's memoir The Children of Lovers. Later in the year there will be an exhibition of Golding's life and work at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the world of theatre is not to be outdone: Matthew Bourne's new stage production of Lord of the Flies opened in Glasgow in March and is destined for a West End run and beyond.
Here's a fitting extract from Stephen King's introduction to the centenary edition of Lord of the Flies explaining why the intense allegorical novel had such a deep effect on him on first reading, and why it continues to be significant for him as a writer. King succinctly sums up why Golding will always endure.
'To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, what makes them indispensible. Should we expect to be entertained when we read a story? Of course. An act of the imagination that doesn't entertain is a poor act indeed. But there should be more. A successful novel should erase the boundary-line between writer and reader, so they can unite. When that happens, the novel becomes a part of life - the main course, not the dessert. A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality. It glows, incandescent and furious. I've been espousing these ideas for most of my life as a writer, and not without being criticised for them. If the novel is strictly about emotion and imagination, the most potent of these criticisms go, then analysis is swept away and discussion of the book becomes irrelevant."
Wednesday, 3 August, 2011
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