Pincher Martin

World War II in the North Atlantic. A drowning naval officer, Christopher ‘Pincher’ Martin, finds a rock, a seeming refuge. Surviving, he must confront his fate and face a final reckoning.

  • “An hour on this rock is a lifetime.”
  • “He remembered that he had been certain of rescue in the morning and that made his heart sink unaccountably as though someone had broken his sworn word.”
  • “There was nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted. They were outlined like a night sign against the absolute nothingness and they gripped their whole strength into each other.”

Drowning in the freezing North Atlantic, after his ship has been torpedoed in World War II, Christopher ‘Pincher’ Martin, temporary lieutenant, happens upon a grotesque rock, an island that appears only on weather charts. To drink there is a pool of rainwater; to eat there are weeds, sea anemones and nausea-inducing limpets. Through the long hours with only himself to talk to, and haunted by flashes of memory and hallucination, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate, piece by terrible piece.

William Golding first wrote Pincher Martin as a short story called ‘The Rescue’, set on the tiny island Rockall in the Atlantic Ocean. Realising the power of this tale of shipwreck and survival, he developed it into a full-length novel. Some of the flashbacks draw on episodes from his own life at Oxford and in the navy. Just before publication, Golding and his family were involved in their own sea disaster on the family boat Wild Rose.

You might like Rites of Passage

If you liked this story of the power of the sea, you’ll love Rites of Passage, a darkly funny tale of a nineteenth-century sea journey. Told in the form of a journal, it mixes the comic incomprehension of Edmund Talbot, the journal’s aristocratic author, with the story of the ship’s parson, the Reverend Mr Colley.

View Rites of Passage View all books

Explore