Free Fall

by William Golding

"I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl." from Free Fall

Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Transfigured by his ordeal, he begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. He determines to find the exact point at which the accumulated weight of those choices has deprived him of free will.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Nobel Prize, English Literature

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Sir William Gerald Golding was an Engish novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.

As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Reviews

[Mark Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite work of literary fiction. It isn't for the story - though that is very interesting - it isn't for the cleverness of the twist - though it is clever - it's because it represents a brief period of clarity when one of the great writers of our time really got to grips with the business of what being human is all about. Golding exercises a subtle genius here and just lays out truths for you. There aren't necessarily answers to accompany those truths, but he says what you know, in ways that you couldn't say it - and somehow it's comforting to know he has seen and felt what you have.

This is a book written by a literary giant, and what you find here rather depends on what you bring and at what point in your life you arrive.

Here are snippets from a passage that reached me - if they leave you cold then maybe come back later:

My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us.

[...]

Deep calls out to deep. Our communion (communication) must of needs be imperfect for we are fallen creatures, yet we must of needs make the effort.

[...]

I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place. I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself onto white paper. The rivets join us together and yet, for all the passion, we share nothing but our sense of division.

The book focuses on the idea of freedom:

When did I lose my freedom? For once, I was free... Free-will cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes. I remember one such experience. I was very small and I was sitting on the stone surround of the pool and fountain in the centre of the park... The gravelled paths of the park radiated from me: and all at once I was overcome by a new knowledge. I could take whichever I would of these paths...


Not a book for everyone, but perhaps a book for you...



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[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reaching Out With Tongs

Forget about theological mysteries; the anthropological ones are at least as mysterious, and a lot closer to home. Most theology is just folk trying to explain themselves to themselves. What is this amorphous thing we call consciousness that inhabits (or infects or is generated by) a human body? Is it real or is it a delusion? Does it have authority and freedom or is it merely a part of some long chain of cause and effect, a mere response to pain and pleasure? Is it intelligible even to itself?

All of our lives demand holding the issues of personal metaphysics in suspension. In order to function we need to pretend that there is no mystery, that thought aware of itself is not just natural, but also uninteresting. To let down our guard by investigating ourselves too carefully would be wasteful and needlessly risky. People might snigger. And there are deeper problems, as Golding’s protagonist discovers: “... when the eyes of Sammy were turned in on myself.. what they saw was not beautiful but fearsome... to live with such a thing was unendurable.” So he prays; he doesn’t know to whom 0r what, but he prays: “If I could only take this world for granted!” He prays to himself, of course. And there is no reply.

But insistent thoughts appear unbidden and unwanted: “They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry around with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree.”

Experience itself. Reflection upon experience. The experience of reflection. Simultaneous experience and reflection. These sum the unavoidable facts of human existence. But how accurate are any of these facts? Are they contradicted by someone else’s facts? To attend to them generates uncertainty and confusion but to ignore them is solipsism. Both are potential conditions of dark madness. Besides “What we know is not what we see or learn but what we realize.” And realising takes time, perhaps more time than we realise.

But there must be a beginning, that point when the light bulb got turned on, a Big Bang of the Self. What happened there in the slight lack of uniformity of primordial psychic energy to produce this particular consciousness and set its course of evolution? “... what am I looking for? I am looking for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of darkness, the point where I began.” Or is this fuss just a matter of not knowing who my father is?

No, that’s not it. And neither is the explanation involving Ma, childhood friends and enemies; nor the youthful crimes, not the ones discovered, not the ones got away with. Not the sorrows or the tragedies that are there but have no force. Even the betrayals, given and received, are sterile. There simply was no choice. Like human language, or the human species itself, “I” doesn’t seem to have a definite beginning. And like the fossil of the ‘missing link’ between monkeys and men, I couldn’t know it if I held it in my hands.

Eternity is out of the question. Yet here “I” am. Why does it, this “I”, do what it does, want what it wants, think what it thinks? Who’s pulling the strings here? God? The past? A clever torturer who wants me to confess what I don’t know? Some deeper (collective) consciousness? “I cannot find the root. However I try I can bring up nothing which is part of me.” The line of bricks of memory builds something but not the bodily edifice I see now.

Was there ever freedom? If so, what happened to it? “Somewhere, some time, I made a choice in freedom and lost my freedom.” But nothing ever felt like a choice. It always felt like the next thing to do, the next part of a life of distinct parts, separate epochs. But now they all seem to be connected. Connected by what if not this “I”?

The answer and the point of it all seems to be this, this right here, right now. Literally this, what’s happening to me and then happening to you. “My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book.” The story is the answer. The story is where we originate. The story is mother, father, those we love, those we hate and fear, those we care nothing about. Others “had and have a finger in my pie. I cannot understand myself without understanding them.” Their story is my story. The story, therefore, is a simultaneous gain and loss of freedom. It’s what “I” is, which is always “we.”

Metaphysics is not for sissies.

[Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

السقوط الحر ..... وليام غولدنغ(نوبل 1983)
من أعمق الأعمال الروائيه التى قرأتها فى حياتى وأكثرها احترافيه.
عمل أكاديمى ممتاز .
عمق إنسانى ملحوظ جدا ومحير.
من الأعمال التى من الممكن ان تجد صعوبه فى فهمها طول ما انت تقرأها ولكن العجيب انك ستجد نفسك تنهيها .
قد لا تجد متعه كبيره فىها ولكنك ستجد أثر عظيم على نفسك منها
اللغه عمليه (وأكاديميه) ومحدده
تفاصيل انسانيه بالغة الروعه والابداع
لطالما رأيت فى أعمال الجوائز (وخاصة نوبل) عمق وتعقيد فنى بديع
الأحداث مختلطه بصورة مذهله وتجدها فجأة بسيطه.

[Momina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am the sum of them. I carry round with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree."

I can't help but feel that the writer who penned the celebrated Lord of the Flies is very underrated, and not appreciated as much as he deserves to be outside academic circles. For though this novel might not be as powerful as Golding's magnum opus, it is still a painful meditation on human freedom, the possibility and failure of intersubjectivity in our postmodern world. The narrative solipsism, thus, fairly suits the concept of man's essential ignorance of the minds around him, his loneliness thereof, and the angst and despair that results within. Sammy Mountjoy deconstructs his past with the hope of trying to understand exactly when, where and how he lost his freedom. Golding being one of the most empathetic writers of childhood takes us through young Sammy's life, his innocent admirations, to his adolescence and the discovery and exploration that follows of one's sexuality. The writing is honest and brutal, with instances of lyricism, but stylistics is not Golding's concern with this novel. He, of course, takes from the modernist aesthetic of a subjective POV, the narrative being all in the first-person, but where modernists before focused on a kaleidoscopic version of reality, including various POVs, Golding's novel, as I wrote above, is painfully solipsistic. There is little dialogue, much of it is fragmented, expressive mostly of the failure to communicate on Sammy's part.

"To communicate is our passion and our despair."

Characters are seen and judged through Sammy's eyes, and we never really get to know anyone deeply, intimately. What we are offered are Sammy's "ideas" of them, their significance in his life. He delves in his most shameful memories with the bravado that is very much like him, almost Dostoevskyan, remembering how he was marred by others, and how he ended up destroying those he loved. Characters in this novel are not flesh-and-blood individuals in their own right--they are Sammy's hell and heaven, his sins, his redemption. We all are the origin, center, the ultimate telos of our consciousness and view others in relation to our own self. To transcend the confines of our subjectivity and "empathize" has been, thus, reduced to an idyllic concept in the postmodern age, where minds cannot understand each other, intersubjectivity cannot be achieved, where communication is just mere noise and babbling.

"The rivets join us together and yet for all the passions we share nothing but our sense of division."

This novel never quite reaches what it sets out to achieve but achieves many other things in the process. Apart from studying the possibilities of human agency and freedom, there is in the last chapters a dialectic drawn between the rationalist interpretation that science offers of man positioned carefully in a material universe, and the spiritualism of religion and its construction of man as God's deputy. This science/religion dialectic is not important in itself but for Sammy's sake as he comes to the conclusion:

"Useless to say that a man is a whole continent, pointless to say that each consciousness is a whole world because each consciousness is a dozen worlds."

Golding is more than the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies, though it has been enough in itself to carve his legacy in modern British literature. He is also the writer of Free Fall: a novel that questions the loose threads which bind our postmodern existence, the vulnerability of man, and his futile attempts at identification and "knowledge" which might bring him some sense of security. In the deterministic scheme of things where every man is the sum of all that has happened to him, where he is the convenient "effect" of sociopolitic, historical, and personal influences, what hope can he have for freedom.... or what is freedom anyway?

[oguz kaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

* Kitap boyunca meydana gelen değişim ve hikayenin planlanması kusursuz. Yine de bende eksik olan şey hikayeye giremememdi.

**Fazlaca dolu paragraflar ve Mountjoy karakterin hayat, kader, aşk, din vs gibi bir çok konuda ki fikirlerini karaktere nakış nakış işlemiş, zirvesinde bir yazarın, bir karakterin gelişimi okuyucuya nasıl yansıtılmalı ve hikaye anlatımının önemi üzerinde verilmiş uzman sınıfı dersi gibi bir kitap bu.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder, at times, how much we fool ourselves when we look back on past actions and reflect upon their consequences. How objective can we be, given that we have to face ourselves and the memory of what we've done every day that we have left on this Earth? "How do you live with yourself?" That's a question from an outside perspective, a question that can't be anything but rhetorical; what else is one to do?

Here's a freaky question that I haven't delved into (more peeked at, the way Pandora might have before saying "Fuck it" and prizing the lid all the way): what kind of conclusions does a person with suicidal tendencies reach about his own actions? Does he always come up short?

Sam Mountjoy, the narrator of this story, is looking for a moment in his life when he chose one way over another. With each memory, he asks, "Here?" and until late in the story, the answer is, "No. Not here." The closer he draws to this desired demarcation, the more he shows a thread of guilt that grows thicker with the telling. The moment, once revealed, goes into both the when and the what, the latter act delivered with the gravity of an inhuman crime.

Golding's prose is dense and excellent, and while wrapped in its layers I could empathize with Mountjoy's queries and agonies. Once I took a step back, though, I felt like I did when I watched "Reefer Madness"--as in, no shit: Mary J makes you crazy enough to kill another person?

In the case of Golding's book, I wonder if he wasn't contending with his own hang-ups about sex and love and relationships that have one without the other. Mind you, I'm not curious enough to look into this (not even on a wiki level); I do hope, though, that he didn't go through anything like his narrator. Guy really needs to chill out.

[MM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that I'm struggling to verbalize my thoughts. Everything about it was amazing. That's an insufficient adjective. "Enchanting" is more suitable.

I had never reading William Golding before. I really only bought this book because it was for $1 and the cover was cool (my cover shows a mangled man free-falling into a city). Then, in anticipation of a God-awful six hour bus ride, I decided to check it out.

Holyyyy... it blew me away.

The writing is amazing. It's a stream-of-consciousness novel, which normally I dislike because it's badly done by amateurs. But Golding took it to a whole new level.

The protagonist and narrator, Samual Mountjoy, is an artist who is recollecting when he "lost his freedom". (Honestly, I couldn't help but think how unfair it was that Mountjoy got to be both a famous artist AND a really really good narrator.)

Anyway... so Mountjoy takes us through his life, with his semi-normal Ma, Communist tendencies, calf-love with Beatrice, and prisoner-of-war experience.

So the story is super interesting. But basically, my main super-favourite thing about this book is the introspection that Mountjoy is subjecting himself to. Golding has a way with words, which, rather than sounding pretentious, comes across as profound and deep. The writing is absolutely magical. The way he describes things feels as though you're reading a painting, or reading a musical piece.. it's simply wonderful.

Mountjoy's own personal demons are only revealed near the end, but the sense of torment and wretchedness form the backbone of the novel. It leaves you constantly wondering - why is he so desperate to find his freedom again? What has he done or what has happened to him? (Turns out to be both.)

The way he links experiences with philosophies (he says at the beginning that he has tried all the major philosophies and they hang like hats upon his wall - none quite fit), speculating about human personality, searching the depths of both himself and those who have affected him... it's really beautiful.

Ahh I love this book!

[Mohsen Rajabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

از ابتدا تا انتهای کتاب، راوی می‌خواهد بداند چه زمانی آزادی عمل خود را از دست داده و مسئول کارهایی که می‌کرده نبوده است و برای این کار زمان را زیرورو و وارسی می‌کند... صداقت راوی با خودش و ماجراها و آدم‌های اطرافش فوق‌العاده است و باید بگویم من این کتاب را که به نسبت کتاب سالار مگس‌ها بسیار فردی‌تر بود، خیلی بیشتر دوست داشتم.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first experience of Golding, and his oblique way of telling a story - leaving half of what he wants to say unsaid. I do not remember anything of the tale, but remember the vague sense of dissatisfaction I carried away from it. I guess if I read it now, I'd appreciate it much better.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book three weeks ago. I kept no notes as I read it and was enduring various major family and physical issues at the time. All I remember is that it moved me, it spoke to me. It was his most accessible book so far (I am reading Golding's books in the order that he wrote them.)

A man who was born in poverty to a mother supporting herself by prostitution, who found himself an orphan at five years old or so, who became a successful painter, looks back over his life. He wants to discover when he lost his freedom, his power of choice.

What was extremely interesting to me was that he survived all manner of horrific incidents but though in his adulthood he had managed to achieve the usual security one strives to accomplish, he had lost his personal freedom.

Well, if that isn't the story of life, I don't know what is. I have also discovered through my reading project that it was THE major concern of 1950s literature.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

More accessible than the Inheritors, not nearly as bleak as Pincher Martin, Free Fall begins to show the fruits of William Golding's experimentation after The Lord of the Flies, a labor that will eventually win him the notice and recognition of the Nobel Committee.

In this novel, the narrator ponders when he lost his "free-will", essentially: at what point in his life did he make a leap such that he is stuck in "free fall" unable to choose the course of his fate? The narrator is young, or rather the space in the novel can not exceed more than his first 28 years of life, but I'm not sure if this could be termed a bildungsroman. There are a lot of dialectics at play here, the most notable being rational/religious, forgiveness/guilt and, of course, freedom/set-course. And quite a bit of talk about the taste of potatoes.

Sammy's story does not flow chronologically, but rather in the way time flows in memory. This means that yes, Event A caused Event B, but you may consider Event G before arriving the other two, even as you see the influences of what came before on what came after. This demonstrates Golding's masterful structuring, but also will cause some confusion initially as you here about a person that has not been talked about yet.

Sammy's story is not anything grand. It is actually incredibly mundane ("the taste of potatoes" is a recurring refrain throughout the novel). The writing however is so immediate and powerful, that the mere happenings of Sammy are more intense than the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

William Golding, all ready a master novelist, begins to hit his stride with his fourth novel, Free Fall. Its heavy themes, pedestrian events and poetic writing make for an experience that is enlightening, intense, and somewhat brain-frying.

[Mohsen Hasanpour · Rating 4 out of 5]

به نوعی میشه گفت مهمترین و شاید منظور اصلی نویسنده از کل کتاب توی بخش ۱۱و ۱۲هستش که تقابل دو فکر مذهبی سنتی و تفکر علمی که به مذهب از بعد آسمانیش اعتقاد نداره‌ و راهی سومی که گولدینگ توی فصل ۱۲ بهش اشاره داره .((درست غلط مسله گزینشی است که با تصمیم آدمیزاد روشن میشود))
کتابی با نثری زیبا تعامل برانگیز و همچنین ترجمه خوب
بخشی از کتاب((فقط درک نمیکنم به رغم آن نفرت٫ در ظاهر چنان ارتباط صمیمانه ای با آسمان داشت ))
سقوط آزاد

[Jerry Mead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Golding literature!

[Frances Rebollido · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult for me to completely size up a book when the intent of the writer is unknown. I've only read one other book from Mr. Golding (Lord of the Flies, of course) and that was written in an entirely different style from Free Fall, so I couldn't help but be SLIGHTLY suspicious of some pretentious play going on here. Regardless, I am grateful for having a book like this in my collection. For one, it had one of the best opening paragraphs I've ever read. Another is that you end up a different person upon finishing it. The waterfall of curiosity, honesty and passion was rendered with such grace that it is almost unparalleled by any piece of literature I've come across. My copy of this book has been marked with underlines and scribbles and that is how I know that it did its job well. At one point I imagined what I was reading to be an autobiographical account, as it all sounded like unfiltered truth coming from the writer himself. The way the words were thrown in and around and how the conventions of grammar were ignored presented this book as a stream of consciousness that can also serve as a "literary cassette" for the suffering romantic, something to fall back to when you're having one of those days.

[Elnaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

این کتاب به تمام و کمال نشون میده که هر لحظه از زندگی وقتی به عقب برگردیم و رفتارهامون رو مرور بکنیم حتمن در یک برهه از زمان میبینیم که چقدر احمقانه رفتار کردیم...در حالیکه دقیقن در اون نقطه از زمان تشورمون از خود بیرونیمون و درونیمون منطقی ترین و انسانی ترین فرد بوده

داستان نقاشی که در پسترین و فقیرترین بخش جامعه شخصیتش شکل میگیره... به واسطه استعدادش در نقاشی میتونه وارد جمع های مختلفی بشه...اما درک واضحی از محیط پیرامونش نداره
اتفاقات و جریان ها باید اونطور شکل بگیرن که اون خواسته
ادمهایی که بعد از سالها در ذهنش موندن کسایی هستن که در هر دوره از بلوغ فکری و سنی ولو با یک جمله تاثیر روش گذاشتن و خط فکریش رو سمت و سو دادن

ابتدای داستان کمی کند پیش میره
کمی هم ترجمه سهیل سمی سختش میکنه اما چند فصل که میگذره و با شیوه روایی داستان اشنا میشیم...وارد فضاش میشیم
کتابی نیست که بگم همین الان بخونیدش اما خب اگه کتاب دیگه ای نبود که فکرکنید لازمه خونده بشه از طرفی هم نمی خاهید با خوندن یک کتاب فقط وقتتون بگذره...میتونید این کتاب رو دست بگیرید

[Sukumar Honkote · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book written by a brilliant author. The first few pages are the finest I have ever read. This book explores the existential nature of the protagonist in terms of 'free' choices that he made. The reason I can't give this book 5 stars is that the language of the book is quite metaphorical and abstruse. While I enjoyed the writing, I found it difficult to be taken into the flow of the story. Some parts of the story seem to be over analyzed while some parts were underplayed. The usage of satire is quite brilliant. All in all it was a great read and I am glad I bought it. Probably years later when I read it again, I will get better insights.

[Technetium · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I enjoyed Golding's first two novels immensely, his following two have been needlessly confusing. Freefall is... well, I am not really sure what it is - a series of loosely connected anecdotes from the main character's life, told out of sequence. Some of these elevate to being interesting on their own. I am not really sure why Golding chose to write this way. Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors were true novels, with engrossing stories that have plotlines. Checking out the brief synopses for his next few, I'm fairly pessimistic about whether or not he returns to story-telling, so I've decided to skip those and read Rites of Passage next.

[Michael sinkofcabbages · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange but i think that a lot of american kids grow up having to read lord of the flies for school. After that it seems we never really think about him again unless its for a class or something. But recently (i dont remember why) i started looking towards this author again. Id have to say this book is in my opinion even better than Lord of the Flies. It wasnt anything that i was thinking it would be. The language he uses is nothing like L O T F.
I highly recommend it.
Slightly similar fate as George Orwell?

[Bohemian Bluestocking · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Golding's Free Fall. Golding was the 1983 Nobel Laureate in Literature. You may be more familiar with his novel Lord of the Flies, which I haven't read yet, but am now planning to. I have seriously never read a book like Free Fall in my life. He is a genius of word and thought. AMAZING.

[Kinga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a strange book with a not-so-strange story.

I wanted to read this only because Mark Lawrence has left quite a nice review, and because I enjoyed Lord of the Flies a lot when I read it a few years ago.

This one wasn’t a disappointment, but it wasn’t a memorable read either. I read it in Hungarian because I couldn’t get it in English somehow, and it was available in my local library. Maybe some magic was lost in its translation, maybe not, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stunning opening to this hallucinogenic novel of remembrance and tragedy gripped me; a true triumph of language and prose poetry:

"I have walked by stalls in the market-place where books, dog-eared and faded from their purple, have burst with a white hosanna. I have seen people crowned with a double crown, holding in either hand the crook and flail, the power and the glory. I have understood how the scar be­comes a star, I have felt the flake of fire fall, miraculous and pentecostal. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are grey faces that peer over my shoulder. I live on Paradise Hill, ten minutes from the station, thirty seconds from the shops and the local. Yet I am a burning amateur, torn by the irrational and incoherent, violently searching and self-condemned.

When did I lose my freedom? For once, I was free. I had power to choose. The mechanics of cause and effect is statistical probability yet surely sometimes we operate be­low or beyond that threshold. Free-will cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes. I remember one such experience. I was very small and I was sitting on the stone surround of the pool and fountain in the centre of the park. There was bright sunlight, banks of red and blue flowers, green lawn. There was no guilt but only the plash and splatter of the fountain at the centre. I had bathed and drunk and now I was sitting on the warm stone edge placidly considering what I should do next. The gravelled paths of the park radiated from me: and all at once I was overcome by a new know­ledge. I could take whichever I would of these paths.
There was nothing to draw me down one more than the other. I danced down one for joy in the taste of potatoes. I was free. I had chosen.

How did I lose my freedom? I must go back and tell the story over. It is a curious story, not so much in the external events which are common enough, but in the way it presents itself to me, the only teller. For time is not to be laid out endlessly like a row of bricks. That straight line from the first hiccup to the last gasp is a dead thing. Time is two modes. The one is an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and coil, of that day nearer than that because more important, of that event mirroring this, or those three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether. I put the day in the park first in my story, not because I was young, a baby almost; but because freedom has become more and more precious to me as I taste the potato less and less often.

I have hung all systems on the wall like a row of useless hats. They do not fit. They come in from outside, they are suggested patterns, some dull and some of great beauty. But I have lived enough of my life to require a pattern that fits over everything I know; and where shall I find that ? Then why do I write this down ? Is it a pattern I am looking for? That Marxist hat in the middle of the row, did I ever think it would last me a lifetime ? What is wrong with the Christian biretta that I hardly wore at all ? Nick's rationalist hat kept the rain out, seemed impregnable plate-armour, dull and decent. It looks small now and rather silly, a bowler like all bowlers, very formal, very complete, very ignorant. There is a school cap, too. I had no more than hung it there, not knowing of the other hats..."

You can keep your Proust Marcel, it is Golding that grapples most successfully with a remembrance of things past and even artfully wrestles the familiar stranger time to the mat: "Time is two modes. The one is an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and coil, of that day nearer than that because more important, of that event mirroring this, or those three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether."

Only Darkness at Noon rivals this work for giving the world view and hopeless recollections of mind brutalized by authoritarian imprisonment. The shards of a damaged mentality follows a crooked path to a Notebook-like ending: "I see now what I am looking for and why these pictures are not altogether random. I describe them because they seem to be important. They contributed very little to the straight line of my story. [...] They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry round with me this load of memories."

[Keogh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book, simultaneously the most accessible of William Golding’s I have read, whilst also being so profound; I feel like it’s changed how I think.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Golding's fourth novel is a demanding book, in more than one sense of the word. It's not always an easy read. From the stunning opening paragraph, the first few pages are both a dazzling promise of what is to come - an exploration of the yesterdays that keep step with and peer over the shoulder of a narrator who has "understood how the scar becomes a star" but who is also "torn by the irrational and incoherent, violently searching and self-condemned" - and a challenge that the reader must read through and overcome. Golding is quite explicit about this difficulty, which is one both of expression and of reception:

How can you share the quality of my terror in the blacked-out cell when I can only remember it and not re-create it for myself? No. Not with you. Or only with you, in part. For you were not there.

It does get easier, but I found myself having to read some later sections, and a couple of whole chapters, more than once. But Free Fall is also demanding in the sense of being insistent: it's almost impossible to put down, generating a feeling not so much of wanting to know what happened (although there is a plot, and a revelation) as of needing, like the narrator, to understand how, when, where, and why its painter and prisoner-of-war protagonist made the choice that lost him his freedom; and indeed what that choice was. The structure and writing is superb, even to the title ("Free Fall", not "Free fall" or "Freefall"), the full implications of which are revealed only in the light of having read the whole book. The final demand that the book makes, indeed, is to be read again.

[Venky]

A metaphysical work of magnificent proportions, William Golding once described "Free Fall" as a 'confession' of sorts. Samuel Mountjoy is raised fatherless in the abject slums of Rotten Row. Upon the demise of his mother, he finds a benefactor in Father Watt-Watts who takes the orphan under his custody and arranges for the appropriate schooling.

Influenced by the prurient teachings by the religious Ms.Rowena Pringle and a man of atheistic bent Mr.Nick Shales, Samuel Mountjoy leads a life racked by seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. The push and pull of tangentially different philosophies invades his being and permeates confusion in no small measure. Even when Mountjoy finds his works displayed in the galleries of the prestigious Tate, he is a person torn from within. A melancholic tryst with love running in parallel with a sly sexual affair only stokes the raging flames of paradox.

When Mountjoy is taken a prisoner of war in World War II and banished to solitary confinement coupled with an imminent threat of torture, he conducts his own personal and scathing interrogation, the subject of which is the life which he has led until the time of his capture.

William Golding provides a gleaming insight into the prowess that has made him one of the greatest writers to have ever held a pen. With a style that is at times inexorably abstract and at others, strikingly lucid he undertakes an unbelievably intricate assessment of human values, personal influences and conflicting qualities of trust and treachery.

Free Fall - A Plummeting route to realisation!

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest I only picked up this book from the give and take pile because of Lord of the Flies, held onto it for about a year and a half, and then decided to "give it a chance" by reading the first chapter before returning it to the pile. Unfortunately I was hooked by the end of that chapter and knew that I needed to read to the end. This book is a look at the raw forces that drive humanity and is humorous and dark and quite revealing- something I have come to expect from William Golding after Lord of the Flies. I can't say that the book was enjoyable so much as important. It had interesting, and at times terrifying insights and added a lot to my "things to think about" bank. I don't know that I will read it again but was glad that I did the first time.

[MiNa Sal · Rating 4 out of 5]

خیلی از تجربه چنین فضاهایی لذت میبرم.وقتی سرنخ یک "هیچ چی" رو میچسبی و پیش میری و اطلاعات اصلا بصورت نرمال در اختیارت نیست اما باز هم پی میگیری تمام واگویه ها و ذهنیات نویسنده رو و درنهایت در فضایی بین سطرهای کتاب و برداشتهای شخصی مجموعه ای شکل میگیره که قابل بیان نیست اما بشدت قابل فهمِ
از کتاب:
شمع زیرجامی شیشه ای میسوخت. آب بلند شد و فضایی را که زمانی اکسیژن اشغالش میکرد،پر کرد. شمع خاموش شد، اما پیش از آن، جهانی را روشن کرد، جهانی چنان شکیل و لبریز از خرد و فرزانگی که اشک از چشم آدم سرازیر میکرد؛ راه حل همۀ مشکلها اینجاست! اگر مشکلی وجود دارد، این مشکل به حتم دربرگیرندۀ راه حل خود نیز هست. جهانی که در آن مشکلات لاینحل باشند، جهان منطقی ای نیست.

[Anna]

I read this book for a philosophy class that examined issues of free will and determinism. I now remember virtually nothing about this book except that there was something about “the taste of a potato” in it.

[E&cdad · Rating 5 out of 5]

An elegant exploration of the nature of human freedom.

[Hollis Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this. It was good but I think it just lacked that unforgettable quality I have found in everything else I have read by Golding so far.

[Gerrit · Rating 4 out of 5]

What stands out is the books depth and the level of expression and metaphor. It ponders existence in a way I sometimes found myself inadequately prepared for, or just too young. I believe this is a book which fully uncovers it's own greatness only when being read again in later decades of my life.

One interesting element in the book is the picture that's drawn of the early 20th century and the collective atmosphere at this time. The notion of "having no future" resonated with me and our current Zeitgeist. A world filled with openly brooding conflicts that could erupt into a full scale war at any time.

Sammy's experience at school was another element I could empathize with - at least at some level. Reading about the up-tight and authoritarian teachers that reminded me about Hesse's time at school. I was relieved to only have been at school this century, but still noticed some old methods that carried over into my time at school (being scolded for advancing in the class's material without the teacher; being isolated from the class to a seat in the front by a teacher that disliked me ... as if he had read this book as well, and related more to Ms. Pringles than Sammy.)

While being able to understand Sammy in his younger years and his upbringing, Sammy is not exactly an object of sympathy. It seems to be intentional, by the tone of voice, and the lack of a 'hero', or 'poor troubled' protagonist only adds to the realness of this story.

That being said, in its core thesis, the book strikes me as too apologetic, even when addressing the the atrocities Sam did to Beatrice. I took this from the way the notion of 'having no freedom over your actions' is conveyed. At times, the book reads like 'an easy way out' of being held accountable to moral standards.
Maybe counterintuitively, I find this even more prevalent when looking at actions that happened in the past. When one uncovers and understands why they hurt someone, when one analyzes a path that lead to something 'wrong' as judged by their standards today - one should take *responsibility* for one's actions!
This can be done, even when the full picture of one’s action is only understood at a later time. It's possible to understand how something happened and why one did not have the agency to act differently at that time, and still take responsibility.

Golding seems to be of different opinion. If he were still living today, he probably would be a "but I did not mean it in a [insert discrimination] way" type of guy.