John Carey

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: John Carey, welcome to Australia, welcome to Sydney and welcome again to The Book Show.

John Carey: Thank you, it's good to be here.

Ramona Koval: The book of yours is called William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies and, by the way, it's been short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for non-fiction, so we'll find out what happens to that later in the year. But why the subtitle?

John Carey: When I went around to people when I was writing and said I'm writing a life of William Golding, I thought oh gosh, they give a very blank look. And when I said, 'The man who wrote Lord of the Flies,' they immediately brightened up, and it came through to me, very unjustly I think, William Golding as a name has disappeared. This happens, you know, to people who write great books. Robinson Crusoe, everyone recognises that. Say who wrote it? Quite few people do.

So what I wanted to do, of course, was to introduce people to the whole lot of Golding that is not Lord of the Flies. But by putting that on the jacket I hoped (and maybe it will work) that people who had just seen the film or even just talked to people about this famous book which is cited all over the place, would think, oh, maybe that's worth trying to find out about, or, maybe I remember that from school and I'd like to know more about him. That was the idea. Whether it will work, we'll see.

Ramona Koval: William Golding...if I hadn't read this book and if I just met him, what sort of impression would he have made? What impression did he make on you?

John Carey: He made an impression that was false, I think. I met him first in 1985 because I was editing a book for his 75th birthday the next year, and he struck you as a sort of bluff old sea dog, you know. I thought to myself he can't have written the novels that I've read, this man. I mean, he's very nice, he's very chummy but didn't seem very sensitive. And then when I started to write the biography I was given his journal, he kept a journal for 20 years, every day, two-and-a-half million words, took me six months to read. And it was a revelation, because I realised, reading it, how deeply sensitive he was.

Right from childhood...he was a very timid child, he had terrible nightmares about the house they lived in. They lived in Marlborough where it was next door to a medieval church, and he had the idea that the church yard, the graveyard, had stretched under their garden, the garden was full of graves. He would dream about coffins poking up through the lawn. And the house was quite old and it had cellars, he found them terrifying, cellars where he would be pursued in nightmares by a hag, a crone, and he couldn't get away. So he was a very, very frightened little boy, and he was a frightened little boy partly because of his mother, not only that she told him terrible ghost stories...he trembled in bed as she told him these stories, 'I froze,' he said...

Ramona Koval: I bet she thought she was doing the right thing though. You read the kid things at night...

John Carey: Yes, but she was a strange lady. She was quite violent. He remembers, it's in the book, how once when he was a toddler and had been having a bad dream, he was whimpering for a light, it was very dark, and suddenly the door of the room opened and through the air flew a brass candlestick and a candle and a box of matches and hit the wall behind him, matches went everywhere, the door slammed, that was the end, it was all he saw of his mother. And he cowered under his bedclothes until dawn. I think these things marked him.

Ramona Koval: Access to all of this journal and all of the papers, you got access for the first time. He was a very private man before that, he didn't like being interviewed, did he.

John Carey: Didn't like being interviewed and hated the idea of a biography. I wanted to write his biography way back then in '85 because I had to do some work on him, to interview him for the book. No, he didn't want that. Charles Monteith unwisely said, 'John Carey would like to write your biography.' Now I've read the journal I know how he reacted. He says in the journal, you know, 'John Carey wants to write my biography. Not on your life,' he says, and how he's going to start writing his own autobiography and he did, thank heavens, because I've got it. It's a manuscript, it was never published and it's not finished, but it's called Scenes From a Life, and it's marvellously vivid impressions of particular moments in his life. So I had that as part of the archive.

Ramona Koval: And the book about men and women...

John Carey: That's right, a book called Men, Women and Now, another of these unpublished autobiographies, which he wrote in 1965 or thereabouts. Ann, his wife, had said to him, 'You don't write about women.' She always said this, kept on at him about it. I talked to Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, who said he was at a festival with Golding at Barcelona, and after Golding had done his reading, a voice from the dark hall said, 'Why do you never write about women?' This was Ann. And really it was a kind of double act, I think, because once someone had asked that so rudely, after that people liked him and didn't blame him for not writing about women. Anyway, Ann said this and so he wrote a book called Men, Women and Now, which is his contact with women right from his great-great-grandmother who he saw once and his terrible grandmother, a terrifying figure, and his mum and things like her violence, and the girlfriends. So it's absolutely fascinating and very detailed. So that was another of my materials.

Ramona Koval: I'm now just trying to work out what it is that...when you sat down as the biographer, what you had laid out in front of you.

John Carey: It would be very nice if it was as clear as that because this great archive has never been catalogued. A lot of the time it's locked up in Barclays Bank in Bristol. So I would go through the rough list of what there was and Judy would get it out, she was tremendously helpful. Jill and I would go down and photocopy for a couple of days...

Ramona Koval: Jill's your wife?

John Carey: Jill's my wife, she's here now. But really Judy would sometimes say, 'Oh I found such an interesting thing...'

Ramona Koval: Judy, his daughter?

John Carey: Judy his daughter, and she would have found...one thing she found...a great tragedy of Golding's life was his son David's breakdown in 1969. The boy was 29, he'd done very well, he was at Oxford and so on, he suddenly had this breakdown, diagnosed with schizophrenia, never really recovered, absolute disaster. When that happened Golding looked back over his relationship with David and wrote this manuscript that Judy had found, and it is one of the most devastating documents. One of the things that I greatly admire about Golding is his ruthless self-examination and honesty.

David was born in 1940, Golding was just off to the war, and David was born with a club foot, and Golding records his reaction which was horror and anger and resentment against the boy. Of course when he wrote this 25 years later he was repentant, but he was trying to be absolutely honest about what he felt, and what he felt was that he was, as he said, now linked with people he'd always wanted to keep apart from; as it were, the crippled.

And it's terrible, he goes on and says when he came back on leave from the navy, '42, '43, when the boy was little, he would bully him. He talks about a pillow fight, deliberately having this pillow fight when he would deliberately knock this little boy over, hurt him. It seems to me, to be able to write like that, with such honesty about yourself, that is one of the things that makes him a great writer, I think, that he sees into people and starts by seeing into himself.

Ramona Koval: How did you feel reading that though? You're the biographer, you knew that he didn't really want a biography and you're reading such intimate thoughts there. Did you feel that you were transgressing?

John Carey: In a way. To tell you the truth, I think men always slough off responsibility onto women and I thought it was Judy who had to choose to start with, his daughter. She had chosen me as the biographer, she had given me access to this whole thing. She was tremendously generous. You might call this an authorised biography, but that does not mean that there were strings attached, I could do anything. I showed her of course the typescript at the end, but there were certainly things in it I thought she would ask me to leave out.

For example, when he was on his first vacation from Oxford he says that he attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl. This was a girl he had known at school, had a long and torrid affair with afterwards, all described in Men, Women and Now. But the first time was when he was on his first vacation from Oxford, he was 18, 19, and they went up a hill...she clearly was attracted to him because he was cultured, at Oxford, he was a bit of a catch, and they walked up this hill, sat on a bench, she wanted to talk about books...his mind had only one thing in it and it was not books. They started to struggle, he says, like enemies. She allowed him to touch her breasts but, going further than that, she started to howl, started to snivel, he says, and when that happened he blew her nose and patted her back and led her down the hill. But he describes this as attempted rape...

Ramona Koval: I'm not sure that that's really accurate.

John Carey: No, many people wouldn't, but you see, again, it's being hard on himself. Again, it is being severe. It is a very accurate description of what happens a lot of course between adolescents. Still, she was under the age of consent. It was a crime.

Ramona Koval: William Golding's father was a teacher and he went into teaching but he seemed to be a different kind of teacher than his father.

John Carey: Yes, he couldn't have been more different. Alec, Golding's father, was a wonderful man, he left a journal, I read the journal. The journal is in a leather book, clasped with a lock, a beautiful Victorian relic, and fascinating. He came from a very poor family, they were boot makers in Bristol. Alec's father was a boot maker, his uncle, his grandfather was a boot maker. Alec was a clever boy and he signed on as a pupil teacher...he left school at 15, signed on as a pupil teacher in one of things called board schools, they were schools set up for the poor under the 1870 Education Act.

He had a terrible time as a teacher to start with in very poor districts of Bristol. They would stone him outside the school on his way home, shouting 'Bloody old Golding,' and stone him. He had a terrible time. He came near to breakdown, contemplated suicide. He was a very intellectual young man, he was an atheist, a scientist, worshiped Darwin's theory of evolution, which he said was the greatest breakthrough of the human intellect, but once he had met and married Mildred, Golding's mum, it became okay. He got a job which he loved at Marlborough Grammar School, and became known as a wonderfully genial teacher with a great dramatic gift.

For Golding, he was at the school, he was a pupil, it was pretty devastating actually because he knew he would never be a teacher like that, yet he didn't know what he would do. He was a very good pianist so he thought of being a concert pianist, realised his wasn't good enough. He wrote poetry, he wrote a book of poems. He was always deeply ashamed of it, it was published in 1934, and he realised after that book failed to make any impact at all that he wouldn't be a poet. He wanted to be an actor and did indeed become a...I say professional actor but it was in club theatres, that kind of thing. I couldn't get him to talk about it, just one or two parts he said he had taken. So those were no good. So what would he do?

So he became a teacher in what was a Rudolph Steiner school in Streatham in the 1930s. He didn't much like teaching, but it got him onto telling stories because he was bad at keeping order and the kids in the class, they made a pact with him, he said, well, if you behave well in the first half of the lesson I'll tell you a story in the second half. And they remember these stories, amazing wild tales of magicians and sorcerers, which he seemed to be able to do just off the cuff.

Ramona Koval: But he would also set up little situations with the boys which then perhaps made their way into Lord of the Flies.

John Carey: Yes, that was later. He went into the navy in the war, came out in '45 and got a job at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, and I think by that time he was a better teacher because he had learned to control men in the navy. Several of the boys have said this to me, he used to stir up hostilities between them, and even for physical hostility. He took them out to a prehistoric earthwork in Wiltshire called Figsbury Rings and divided them into two groups, defenders and attackers, and encouraged them to go at it. It seems, from what he later said, that there was a real risk of someone being killed. He says that his eyes came out like organ stops when he saw what was happening, he had to intervene. And yes, that's not a million miles away from Lord of the Flies.

Ramona Koval: Just going back though to his experience at Oxford, he always felt on the outer, didn't he.

John Carey: And he was right, he was on the outside. It's a very important point for any English writer in the pre-war period was that the class system was extremely rigorous and extremely finely calibrated, for heavens sake, who was above who is very hard to work out. But Golding regarded himself as lower middle class, and he thought, right from early on, how hurtful this was.

Golding lived, as I said, in Marlborough, down the road was Marlborough College, one of the great public schools of England, and Golding was thrown into contact with the young gentlemen from Marlborough College every day, and he hated them. He said he felt hatred and envy, and he felt guilty about that, though later he came to consider it was quite reasonable because Marlborough College was just a channel for social privilege. He hated them. He realised, he said, that to them, his beloved father and his family were beneath contempt. He said it was as real as a wound.

Then he went to Oxford where he was the only...I looked up the records of Brasenose College Oxford where he went up in 1930, and he was the only boy from a grammar school in the 71 new undergraduates in 1930. They were all from public schools and of course had their own friends, their own moneyed connections. He was none of that. He made four friends at Oxford, that's all.

Ramona Koval: And the report from the Oxford Appointments Committee says he was 'not top shelf', 'not quite a gentleman'.

John Carey: Yes, amazing, I found this...they used to interview you to see what career you were fit for and he had his interview, and I found this index card with the notes on it, 'not quite a gentleman', 'fit only for day school teaching, not for public school'.

Ramona Koval: And something about his accent.

John Carey: Oh yes, how the accent...they had two interviews, and they said in the second one his accent had improved a little, he was speaking rather more like a gentleman.

Ramona Koval: And then I think about the biographer and the subject, and you had a similar background, didn't you? Didn't you come to Oxford with the feelings of not having gone through the public school system yourself?

John Carey: Yes, it was much better for me because it was later, it was the 1950s, not the 1930s, there had been a world war and a big shake-up in between of society. Nonetheless, you know, it's quite true that when I went up to Oxford in '54 there were still what were called closed scholarships at the colleges. That is to say, you could only go in for these scholarships if you'd been to a particular public school; closed scholarships for Winchester, closed scholarships for Eton. It seems unbelievable nowadays. I got an open scholarship which is open to the ragtag and bobtail...

Ramona Koval: Riffraff.

John Carey: That's right, yes, and another thing that made it better for me and worse for Golding is there was still national service so I'd been in the army, so I'd got to know people who were going to be up at Oxford. He had none of that, he came straight from school to this atmosphere...he said if he wrote the full account of his Oxford life it would make unbearable reading, he was deeply miserable.

Ramona Koval: So did you feel an affinity with that part of his life when you were writing it, did you connect with that?

John Carey: Yes, I think so. I think you need to be English to write Golding's life because you can then understand the class system to some extent. He never forgot the experience of being humiliated. He felt humiliated. The things he did later on, the one that I feel most ashamed about is that he accepted a knighthood. Why should he accept a knighthood from these people who he'd always regarded as antagonistic to him?

Ramona Koval: And then what did he do with his knighthood? How did he behave? This is the question, isn't it.

John Carey: I know. He loved it. The first thing he did was to get his passport changed to 'Sir William Golding' and that's sort of dreadful, particularly when you think of great English writers like Kipling and Conrad who have not done such a thing. They're writers and that's what matters, not being a knight. And I say all this in my priggish way, but then he went through things I have not been through. He went through the Marlborough College thing, he went through the Oxford thing, then he went through, after the war, writing three novels (I've read them) which he sent to every publisher he could think of and they sent them back. And he felt (and I think he was right) that that happened because he didn't belong to the...

Ramona Koval: And he hated them all the way through, didn't he, the people who he thought were the literary set, he hated Bloomsbury.

John Carey: Oh yes, absolutely, he never lost that, that's right.

Ramona Koval: Tell us the story about Monteith and his rescuing from the slush pile.

John Carey: Yes, I will tell you that, but I wanted to say first that you shouldn't think Monteith sort of wrote the book. The fact is I've read the actual first manuscript of Lord of the Flies which survives, one of the things in these amazing archives, and I've read that of course several times...all the big, wonderful passages are there already. Simon's death...

Ramona Koval: For those who haven't read it...there might be a few.

John Carey: Okay, sorry. Lord of the Flies is a post-nuclear novel, so the rest of the world has been engaged in atomic war and some boys from various schools, the plane they were in has been shot down. It's a kind of plane with a kind of passenger tube that has landed on this island. So there are these boys, not knowing if the rest of the world is alive or not.

It's a novel about...what they start to try and have is a democratic society. There's a conch shell and Ralph, the good boy, says you must have the conch shell before you can speak...and then eventually fascism, dictatorship takes over, they get savage. And it's a wonderful novel because of the writing, the way the boy Simon, who is killed, and his body being taken out to sea is just an astounding passage. And a creature they think is a beast is actually a dead parachuter who lands among the trees, and when the wind takes him away from the island there's this amazing passage where he sort of treads the treetops. Wonderfully written.

Golding wrote the novel. Charles Montieth, who was his editor at Faber and Faber, nonetheless was a wonderful man, he was an astounding man actually. He got all the top honours at Oxford, went into the army, had a fine army career, served in Burma, was wounded, came out, appeared a very grand gentleman. Actually Charles was the son of a draper in Belfast but he seemed very grand.

Ramona Koval: Because of his accent. Everyone changes their accent.

John Carey: He had trained as a barrister and he had changed his accent. When I phoned up Charles's relatives when I was writing the book I wanted to find out what relatives remained alive, and I couldn't believe the phone, it was like Irish radio, these voices that came over...that's not Charles. But they are, he'd completely changed himself.

To cut a long story short, the book as Golding wrote it is a religious novel. Simon, the boy who is killed, is actually in touch with God. He meets this being in the forest, this other being, who is quite clearly meant to be God. He's invisible of course, like God is. But somehow they communicate without language, without seeing, which is a thing he was interested in, Golding, and they do a solemn dance. And then Simon develops this halo. Charles Monteith said all this must go, the scene with God, the halo, every scrap of supernatural must go from the novel. The correspondence (I've read it, it's in the Faber archive) letters back and forth for months...

Ramona Koval: 'Get rid of God.'

John Carey: 'Get rid of God', they got rid of everything. Golding at first protested and then gave way because he wanted to publish the novel. So what comes out, as I see it, is a novel which is one that Alec, the atheist father, would have approved of because religion in this novel is something made up by terrified little boys who stick a pig's head on a stick. It was not like that. But it was a great novel already in its first manuscript version, no question.

Ramona Koval: And it was going to go out on the reject pile.

John Carey: Yes, he sent it to six publishers and a literary agent in the course of 1953 and they all sent it back. Then it went to the professional reader of manuscripts that Faber and Faber employed who was a lady called Polly Perkins. And Polly Perkins' green biro annotation remains on the top left-hand corner of Golding's letter of submission, where she says, 'Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.' And Charles Monteith had been in publishing for a very short time. He wanted to be a barrister, decided he hadn't got the killer instinct, so he went into publishing. He'd been a publisher for a matter of weeks, and he took this rejected manuscript home, read it, said he couldn't put it down the whole evening.

He felt a great affinity with Piggy. Piggy in the novel is quite an interesting figure, he's the only lower middle class boy, wears glasses, has a lower middle class accent and is mocked and eventually killed by the other boys. Charles said he was fat and bespectacled at school so he felt a great affinity with Piggy and that was one of the things that encouraged him to persist in trying to get the novel published. He had to fight and fight. Faber and Faber is a great publishing firm, with TS Eliot as one of the directors. Eliot didn't want to publish it, none of them did. Charles stuck to his guns and it was actually an immediate success, it got wonderful reviews, people like EM Forster, Stevie Smith, and eventually sold, as you said, 20 million copies.

Ramona Koval: He thought that his book The Inheritors was the best of his books, and this was a book...

John Carey: Yes, so do I actually. The Inheritors is a very strange novel and it came straight after Lord of the Flies. He wrote it, again, very quickly, within months actually. The Inheritors is about Neanderthal man. Golding worked out, correctly, that there was a period where Neanderthal man, this sort of beetle-browed hare-coloured figure, was occupying the same sites, the same living regions as our ancestors, Homo sapiens.

And he had read HG Wells, his father was crazy about HG Wells, being an atheist and a socialist, and had read in HG Wells that Neanderthal man was a ferocious, gorilla-like creature. So Golding always disagreed with other people's opinions, by and large, and he disagreed with that. He decided he would reinvent Neanderthal man as a very beautiful, gentle, bewildered figure. These Neanderthals can't think, they can imagine. They can't actually think. Golding told an audience later on, talking about the book, that he thought thinking was the fall, because it's when man starts to think that he starts to become wicked. When he's imagining...

Ramona Koval: This is when he starts to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

John Carey: Exactly, that's the Old Testament version, Golding's is when he starts to think. Rousseau's is when he starts to live in society. There are various versions of the fall, Golding's is thinking, that's what it does for you.

Ramona Koval: But aren't these interesting ideas, the idea of putting a whole lot of boys on an island and seeing what happens, the idea of what happens when...what could Neanderthal man have been like, and what about the relationship between these two kinds of creatures. They're fantastic ideas.

John Carey: They are fantastic ideas, he was a fantasist, and he was tremendously keen on science fiction. Both those novels are science fiction, he had wonderful science fiction ideas, and he interpreted other works as such actually. He says in the journal that Milton's Paradise Lost is science fiction, which is brilliant actually because Milton in Paradise Lost is really interested in questions like 'what do angels eat?', 'how do angels have sex?' Well, these are science fiction questions, and Golding saw that this great epic poem is actually science fiction.

One of the things I love about him is that he kept on doing new things, not just with the novels, every novel is a new kind of novel, new subject, but at the age of 70 he learned to ride a horse. He bought a horse called Cobber, he got riding lessons at a stable, and he would ride around the Wiltshire countryside by himself, finding little historical places where there'd been a monastery and just the orchard remained, that kind of thing. He did jumps. Amazing, at the age of 70. In the navy he taught himself ancient Greek. In the long periods of boredom he taught himself ancient Greek, and for the rest of his life he read the Odyssey and the Iliad in the original again and again.

When he was in his 60s he taught himself to write Latin elegiacs, Latin verse. Again, a sort of class thing I suppose, catching up with Marlborough College, because young gentlemen learned that kind of thing. He taught himself how to do it. I found the book where he did the exercises, 1,500 lines of Latin verse. Not many other modern novelists have done that. He learned from an old schoolbook where you were given a piece to translate, told what words you would need and then you had to fit it in so that it scanned. It's ever so complicated and difficult. I've tried it myself, it's difficult. He did it. So yes, he was always doing new things.

Ramona Koval: But still, he was still haunted by this idea of not being acceptable, not being good enough. He hated reading reviews, even after all of this huge success he'd had.

John Carey: Absolutely true. His family found that they had to keep reviews away from him. That didn't work because he always suspected then they were keeping them away because something unutterably bad was in them. Yes, he felt curiously ashamed when he got bad reviews, the kind of reviews that other people would shrug off were deeply hurtful to him, and I trace it back to his early childhood, this whole Marlborough experience. He still felt shut out, he thought there were those who were going for him, and he was right in a way. A sort of antagonistic anti-Golding faction among reviewers is observable quite early on...

Ramona Koval: What are they saying about him?

John Carey: 'He's too clever by half', 'he doesn't write proper English'...I mean, amazing. You read Pincher Martin, his third novel, it's about a sailor who is shipwrecked on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. I won't spoil the surprise at the end, but in a sense the whole novel is a kind of illusion, and this sailor invents the rock as a place where he may survive. It's devastating. I mean, the descriptions...he sees these huge red birds and realises they are his hands which have become reddened by the sea and the sun.

It's a devastating novel about illusion and reality, and it's written in a prose which is absolutely electric. There's a bit where he finds in the pocket of his oilskin a tiny wrapping from a bar of chocolate, and he searches with his tongue and he finds a granule of chocolate and Golding says, 'It was brief, agonising, and was gone.' 'Agonising', that word, the moment of sweetness.

And the critics said this is not proper grammar because he has sentences of only one word long, it's not proper grammar. I mean, amazingly stupid...and of course, 1950s, I suppose it all did seem very avant-garde and experimental, but it's not really, it's perfectly clear, it's not obscure, it's just that they were hidebound, not keen on some upstart who was using a new kind of prose.

Ramona Koval: Even when he gets his CBE and he gets his Nobel Prize for literature and he gets to be called Sir William Golding, he still has this fear of not being acceptable.

John Carey: Yes. Again, there's a better side to this. I love his grumpiness, he's grumpy and it's really attractive, I find. I like his anger and I like his grumpiness, particularly about the Nobel Prize. He goes to Sweden to collect it. He's getting on by this time of course, it's 1983, so he's in his early 70s. But yes, he complains that they all talk Swedish, it's terribly funny.

Ramona Koval: You said he was quite amusing. The comedy of Golding isn't something that's obvious.

John Carey: Yes, he is very funny. Again, it's something I try to bring out in the book because it's only in the unpublished stuff...people were always saying to him, 'Why aren't you funny in the books? You're so funny.' For example, when he first went to Fabers, Charles took him to a party at Fabers and introduced him to TS Eliot, 'As to a god,' says Golding. And at a party after that someone pushed into Golding, nudged his back, and he spilled champagne down Eliot's trousers. So he says, 'Not only did I worship at the god's shrine, I poured a libation over him,' he says, and he says, 'He sprang back with an agility surprising in one so mummified.' You never get that in the books.

Ramona Koval: His relationship with alcohol was complex, wasn't it. He spilled it but he drank a lot.

John Carey: Yes, he drank a lot because he got writer's block, he got bad, bad writer's block in 1970. I can tell you actually Australia actually saved him, his visit to Australia in 1975, he thought Australia was wonderful, he thought it was science fiction. He says, 'The birds, the trees, the light. Greece is blurry by comparison.' Actually that saved him.

Ramona Koval: Yes, he was very impressed with Australia. And was Australia impressed with him? He met Patrick White, didn't he?

John Carey: Certainly, yes he did.

Ramona Koval: AD Hope?

John Carey: Yes, he did. I think he thought they were a little touchy, as a matter of fact, but yes, he did meet them.

Ramona Koval: Well, he was probably right about a lot of things about the world. I could talk to you for a long, long time about William Golding, you've got a lot in this fantastic book, it's called William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies, and it's published by Faber and Faber, of course, the same publisher that William Golding had all his life. We've come to the end of The Book Show, it's been gorgeous speaking with you John Carey.

John Carey: It's been wonderful, thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: And we'll do it again. Please thank John Carey.

Publications

Title: William Golding: The man who wrote Lord of the Flies

Author: John Carey

Publisher: Faber and Faber