Resources

In Free Fall, Sammy Mountjoy meets Taffy at a meeting for the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Despite being engaged to Beatrice Ifor, Sammy is […]

Pincher Martin Stranded on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, Christopher Martin suffers from insomnia. Sleep represents both comfort and fear to Martin: […]

Golding visited Australia in 1975, and he was fascinated by the country, describing it as a place of ‘clear light and clean emptiness’. He was […]

The theme of social class, and its effects, appears in many of Golding’s novels, including ‘The Sea Trilogy’ and Lord of the Flies.

Reverend Robert James Colley appears in the first book of Golding’s Sea Trilogy, Rites of Passage, and is often mentioned in the following two volumes. He […]

Pincher Martin In Pincher Martin, Christopher Martin has been shipwrecked and is surviving on a rock, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His time on […]

Nick Shales appears in the final part of Free Fall in a memory from the protagonist Sammy Mountjoy. According to Sammy, Shales was ‘the best teacher I […]

Mary Lovell appears in Christopher Martin’s flashbacks of memory throughout Pincher Martin. Martin, a repugnant misanthropist, is obsessed with the idea of possessing her, but is […]

Pincher Martin Christopher Martin’s desire to defeat death forms the narrative of this whole novel, as he battles to survive. Early on, he declares ‘I […]

As many of Golding’s novels feature aspects of survival, hunger is a recurrent theme.

In Free Fall, Sammy and his ‘Ma’ live on Rotten Row, ‘right in the heart of the Garden of England’; ‘a slum’ with a wooden […]

Music is a major theme in some of Golding’s novels, particularly The Pyramid, but it also plays a minor, but important role in others, including Pincher Martin […]