ABSTRACT
William Golding always knew how to present the counter-intuitive situation in a story, to grab our attention and make a point. In The Scorpion God he has Pretty Flower, the king’s daughter in some pre-pharoanic Nile kingdom, shock the chief priest to the core by refusing to have sex with her brother, and denying her “lawful desire” for her father. She confesses to being titillated by the tales of The Liar, a non-relative and so not a lawful object of lust. No wonder, says the horrified priest, that the very elements of nature are against us. In Clunk-clunk, the unlikely hero is a flute-playing cripple boy, in an early hunting and gathering band, who is despised by the hunters (the Leopard Men), but adored by the Bee women, who invite him to their secret rites so they may get pregnant by him. The Leopard Men are useless at getting food, being only interested in hunting leopards for prestige. The women tolerate the men, whom they need for breeding purposes, and keep them fed with the vegetables and fruit they gather, while sarcastically pretending to admire them. (“O great Leopard men!”) In Pincher Martin, the shipwrecked Pincher, hopelessly stranded on a bare rock in the Atlantic, devises a survival strategy: he names every natural feature of his rock—“I will tie it down with names.” Safety Rock, Food Cliff, Prospect Cliff, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly, Leicester Square. “If this rock tries to adapt me to its way I will refuse and adapt it to mine.”
