William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. His father was a teacher, but the family was very poor. Nevertheless, they were able to pay his studies in a grammar school and then at the university.
He worked as a teacher like his father before him. He got married and had two children. During the WWII, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer and commanded a ship, although he didn’t belong to the ruler classes.
All his life he was disappointed with the humankind and said “men produced evil as bees produced honey”, and that he lived under (not in) the British class system and that this system was indestructible. This is more or less the message of his most famous book, Lord of the Flies. The novel narrates how a group of educated children gets stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, where all the adults die. They try to organize a society to survive on the island, but they fail because of a disagreement between them that drives them to war and to a regression to savagery.
At the beginning, the book (under the name of Strangers from Within) was rejected by the publisher, but then, after some changes in the text, was accepted. It was published in 1954.
The Spire, published in 1964, is about the construction of a spire on the Salisbury Cathedral. The dean is obsessed with the spire, but the cathedral doesn’t have any foundations, and his stubbornness will destroy human lives around him.
Rites of Passage, which got the Booker Prize in 1980, tells the story of Edmund Talbot, a man sailing to Australia during the Napoleonic time. Edmund Talbot keeps a journal where he records the life on the ship. But, if at the beginning the passage is amusing, it soon becomes cruel because the sailors bully another passenger, Reverend Colley.
William Golding got the Nobel Prize in 1983, after an unexpected and even contentious choice. Other nominees were Claude Simon, Anthony Burgess, Graham Green, and more.
He died at 81 in Cornwall.
SUMMARY
Sir Edward, the organist of a cathedral, tells us the story of two sanctimonious people: Miss Pulkinhorn, a bigoted old woman, and a sincere devotee (and perhaps mystic), lunatic old man.
Miss Pulkinhorn watches the behaviour of all people who goes to church, because she thinks that everybody is a Pharisee. According to the organist, she wants to punish one way or another everybody, even himself; and he feels a bit relieved when he is made Sir, because then he knew she couldn’t do any harm to him. But her worst enemy is the fervent old man; she is envious and thinks that he is a hypocrite because he goes to church three times a day to pray ecstatically in front of the Sacrament. She wants to give him a lesson, to punish him for his supposed fake piety.
By the way, you must know that the Sacrament is the holy Host, the bread that means Jesus's body, and that it is kept in a kind of cupboard called sanctuary with a candle near it; if the candle, or light, is lit, then the Sacrament is there; if not, the candle is put out.
One day, Sir Edward has to go to the cathedral to leave a note giving instructions to his substitute because the next day he is going to London. He almost forgot and went there very late. In his way there, he crossed paths with a priest (the precentor) who was carrying the Sacrament to give Canon Blake the last rites, because he was agonizing.
Inside the church, there were only two people more, the verger (or sacristan) Rekeby, who was checking that all things were all right, and Miss Pulkinhorn, all the time spying. After a while, the devout old man entered the church. This time he was late because he had met a poor man and had given him his jacket and shirt, in a kind of charity work; so he was beaming when he kneeled to pray in the chapel of the Sacrament. But the verger, in his round to check the things, saw that the candle of the Sacrament was on, but he didn’t see the tramp, because he was in the back of the chapel. However, the Sacrament wasn’t there, and Rekeby thought the precentor had forgotten to blow the candle out; so he put the light out. Now the tramp realized that he was praying to the void, and he felt so frustrated that he had a fit: he laughed and cried, went away and fainted near the door. The organist and Rekeby heard his cries and went to help him; they carried him to the verger’s cottage, and from there he was taken to the hospital, where he died some days after. Meanwhile, Miss Pulkinhorn was still inside the church, but she didn’t come to help.
But, how was it possible the light was on if the Sacrament wasn’t there? The organist suspected that Miss Pulkinhorn lit it after the precentor had put it out when he went away with the Host to Canon Blake. But she made a mistake: as she saw the old man wasn’t coming, although he was always punctual, she thought he wouldn’t come at all and was going to put the candle out again, when she met Sir Edward and couldn’t do it and had to go by.
Sir Edward believed she wanted to chastise the tramp, showing him his piety was a fake. But he didn’t say anything and kept watching her from the distance. Miss Pulkinhorn had to know of Sir Edward suspicions, because the evening of the events they saw each other inside the church. However, she went on attending the church with the same stiffness and affected righteousness as ever.
The time passed, until one day, all of a sudden, Miss Pulkinhorn approached Sir Edward and told him that her conscience was perfectly clear. Nevertheless, she died seven days after.
QUESTIONS
-What are the thirty-nine articles?
-Do you like visiting churches? Is there any you liked best? Is there anyone you remember because of something curious or interesting?
-Have you sung in a choir? Can you tell us your experiences with singing?
-How religious is Sir Edward?
-In your view, what was Miss Pulkinhorn’s cause of death?
-There’s the moon acting upon the characters. Do you think stars, planets and constellations have any influence in our lives?
VOCABULARY
chapter, what with, rubric, flat, buns, shoddy, ambulatory, sat out, instep, enmeshed, smouldering, curdles, steel-sheer adamant, decani, chantry, stumps, spell, close, turned up, flue, cantered, cheapened, precentor, pyx, aumbry, guttered out, anthem, rush-bottom