posted on 06 Nov 2022

Free Fall by William Golding

Published in 1959 and Golding’s fourth novel, Free Fall, takes us into the mind of the spiritually (and physically) tormented artist, Sammy Mountjoy. Mountjoy is being held as a prisoner-of-war during the Second World War and is locked in solitary confinement in a cell that turns out to be a small cupboard with no source of light. This gives him the chance to review his life choices and to search for the moment when he believes he lost his belief in the concept of free will. 

As he ranges backwards and forwards over his life experiences it leads Mountjoy to ask himself what is meant by the concept of ‘freedom’ and freewill and how we define and recognise it. He struggles to pin down the characteristics of free will – it is, he concludes, real but in some way outside language with an existence:

‘that cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes’

Mountjoy’s memories take us back to his childhood which is lived with his protective, combative and at time grotesque mother in grinding poverty but which he views as relatively happy. However, when she dies and he’s left an orphan the local priest adopts him and he’s sent off to the local grammar day-school where he encounters and is influenced by two contrasting teachers – one, Nick Shales, the science teacher is kindly and encouraging; the other, Rowena Pringle, is a sadistic Religious Studies teacher. 

He also develops a passion for Beatrice, one of the girls in his class and as they grow older he pursues her, intent on a possessive relationship. She is not ready for the intensity of what he wants, especially the physical side of the relationship, but she gives way and becomes dependent on him. He, however, becomes bored with her now he has achieved his goal and casts her aside to marry another women. Subsequently he, and we as readers, discover that the trauma of this relationship had driven Beatrice to the edge of insanity and that she was subsequently committed to an asylum.

Locked in the cupboard by his would-be torturers, Mountjoy ranges over all these events searching for the way they fit together and how, collectively, they robbed him of his freedom and his freewill. In the pitch black he starts to lose control and cries out pitifully for help. In a very Golding-like way, his suffering is ended by a mundane, even banal escape from his spiritual torment when he’s released from his cell with a modest apology from the commander of the German soldiers holding him prisoner.

The book is a claustrophobic experience that reflects the physical and spiritual box that Mountjoy finds himself in. The book probes some of the key philosophical and religious questions that have concerned humanity for centuries – what is the nature of freedom and just how free are we to really influence what happens to us. Are we doomed to make decisions based on our cumulative life experiences or is there a higher ‘freedom’ that we can claim for ourselves?

I don’t personally feel that this is one of Golding’s most successful novels because, ultimately, neither Mountjoy or the key characters in his life quite convince or seem to earn our empathy or sympathy. Nonetheless, it is a thoughtful and intense experience, one that John Gray in his introduction to a more recent edition of the book, described in this way:

‘Free Fall is an inquiry into some of the deepest human questions, but it also recreates a particular time and place – the sexually repressed, class-bound England of the thirties, moving uncertainly towards war – and the life of a particular human being, a fictive hybrid that includes much of the author himself’. 

The book is available in paperback and in several editions at well under £10.

 

Terry Potter

November  2022