The Paper Men

A satirical tale about the relationship between a biographer and his reluctant subject is a work of great comedy, with an unexpected climax.

  • “You don’t know about my life. You aren’t going to either.”
  • “The books that followed hadn’t been bad either. There were things, mantic moments, certainties, if you like, whole episodes that had blazed, hurt, been suffered for – and they were wasted.”
  • “I feared to be the object of a biography. At the same time I was – no matter how hard I tried not to be – I was flattered by the possibility.”

Famed writer Wilfred Barclay has success and fortune. But he also has a drink problem, a dead marriage and he is being pursued by academic Rick Tucker, who is desperate to write his biography. Locked in a lethal relationship, the two men stumble across Europe, shedding wives, self-respect and identities in a game of literary cat and mouse. The climax is an inevitable as it is unexpected…

Golding was inspired to write this novel after reading Hemingway’s biography and imagined ‘the idea of a writer watching a biographer coming apart at the seams’. Shortly before the book’s publication, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

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If you enjoyed the explosive ending of The Paper Men, you’ll love Fire Down Below, which marks the end of Golding’s ‘Sea Trilogy’.

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