The Paper Men

WILLIAM GOLDING

The Paper Men

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Andrew Martin
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
About the Author
By The Same Author
Copyright

For
my friend and publisher
CHARLES MONTEITH

Introduction by Andrew Martin

In The Paper Men, Wilfred Barclay, an ageing, bibulous writer of novels with such unpromising titles as Horses at the Spring, is pursued around Europe by Professor Rick L. Tucker, a young American academic hell-bent on writing Barclay’s biography. It sounds like an academic farce in the Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury line, lacking in scope for the philosophical and anthropological themes usually pursued by Golding. But in 1984, at the age of seventy-three, Golding wanted a change. He ascribed the Booker Prize-winning success of his previous novel, Rites of Passage to the dark drollery it undoubtedly contains. He had also decided to take his cue from the warm reviews for his wry and amiable collection of essays, A Moving Target. Perhaps, he fretted, he had been trying too hard with most of his fictions. Perhaps he could afford to lighten up.

His editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, seems to have doubted that hilarity was Golding’s natural métier, and he counselled against employing sillier names than the just-this-side-of-ridiculous Rick L. Tucker. Nevertheless, The Paper Men opens with broad comedy, indeed slapstick. Tucker is prospecting for literary gold in Barclay’s dustbin. As Barclay confronts him, his pyjama trousers fall down. Other pratfalls await Barclay, but most of the humour—and The Paper Men is funny for as long as it wants to be—comes from his scepticism about his adversary and the world he represents. In Seville, Barclay stumbles upon a lecture being given by Tucker: ‘A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them.’ As Tucker drones on, Barclay realises he is speaking about a graph he has made showing the incidence of relative clauses in Barclay’s work.

A chase begins, Barclay fleeing, the importunate Tucker pursuing. In their early encounters, Barclay maintains a weary forbearance—‘How are my relative clauses?’—while Tucker is deferential yet vampiric, and determined to get Barclay’s consent to a biography in writing: ‘Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters.’

The locations begin to succeed one another in a mad whirl. Barclay’s tactic is to leave false forwarding addresses, but at one point, he travels to South Africa, forgetting that he has given this location as a forwarding address and thus making true what was meant to be a lie. The kaleidoscopic nature of the tale is partly explained by the amount of alcohol Barclay puts away. He continually fights the bottle, and notes, ‘One of the good things about Greece is that the standard wine is undrinkable . . . I’d drunk myself into kidding myself that I liked retzina and then drunk myself out of that delusion again.’ The locations are incidental to Barclay’s mounting paranoia, but there is a casual beauty in their evocation. Barclay goes snorkelling off a Greek island, watching ‘the lovely nameless indifferent creatures with their colours and stillnesses and sudden darts and habit of being chums all together between meals.’ We have the ‘heavy light’ of Rome, that ‘dung-coloured city’. On a Swiss mountain Barclay experiences ‘the hygienic smell of pines and the suggestion round me of their massive darknesses in the fog’. An event occurs on this ominous mountainside that deepens the relationship between Barclay and Tucker, complicating its morality. But the reader may wonder why Barclay hasn’t long since accepted the attentions of the younger man as being a function of his success as an author?