Marlon James on Pincher Martin in The Telegraph

Booker-Prize winning author Marlon James has written a new foreword to Golding’s 1956 novel Pincher Martin. The foreword is published in the new Faber & Faber edition and also appears in full in The Telegraph. James emphasises the radical invention of the book, and reminds the reader that it has ‘one of the most devastating endings in all of twentieth-century literature’. Crucially, James notes the shared connections to Golding’s other books, like Lord of the Flies and Rites of Passage. Pincher Martin is a novel that demands re-reading, as James points out. Having finished his introduction, I turned straight back to the beginning and read it again, for his extraordinary prose and subtle interpretations. In this way, the foreword mirrors the story it introduces.