Golding himself was a very private individual, who felt himself hounded by critics; and a teacher of literature from San Diego was breathing down his neck at the time he was dreaming up The Paper Men. His densely allusive works were particularly prone to dissection, and he felt that the concentration on his scholarship wore away the magic of the stories. And so the question arises: is Barclay Golding? They have a lot in common, including a beard and liking a drink. Barclay’s globe-trotting is funded by the commercial success of his first novel, Coldharbour, just as Golding had a cash cow (and also a millstone around his neck) in the shape of Lord of the Flies. In his biography of Golding, John Carey is in no doubt that Barclay was Golding, and that Golding tried to throw readers off the trail by giving Barclay reasons for shunning scrutiny that could not possibly apply to Golding himself. Hence some allusions to criminality in Barclay’s past.

Whether Barclay is Golding or not, the book becomes ever more Golding-esque, in that the whirl culminates in a spiritual crisis, triggered by Barclay’s contemplation of a statue of Christ in an Italian cathedral. He suffers a breakdown of a nebulous but hauntingly described kind. It might be encapsulated by saying that his ego collapses under the weight of self-consciousness generated by Tucker’s thraldom. The Paper Men is a short novel, but we are by now a long way from loose-waisted pyjama trousers. It is Golding’s willingness to address the deepest existential questions that (as he grumbled in the title essay of A Moving Target) made his books ‘the raw material of an academic light industry’. By its density and mesmerising strangeness, The Paper Men would only add fuel to the flames.

Chapter I

I knew at once that it was one of those nights. The drink, such as it had been, was dying out of my brain and leaving a kind of sediment of irritation, vague discomfort and even remorse. It had not been—no, indeed—a bender or booze-up. By the exercise of special pleading I could have persuaded other people that my evening’s consumption had been no more than reasonable with regard to the duties of a host: an English author entertaining a professor of English Literature from overseas. I could also have pleaded that it had been my fiftieth birthday and that we had been having, quote, one of those long, continental meals that are at the heart of European civilization, unquote. (Come to think of it I don‘t know if that’s a quote or not. Call it a clitch.) But the indefatigable analyst of my character—myself, that is—would have none of it. There had been those drinks at lunch. They were the fatal first step, implying in themselves a desert period between four and five o’clock when one would feel not justified but urged, shoved, compelled by the process started at midday to bring the six o’clock hour of offering the guest a drink back to five o’clock, which in its turn—and so on. If I could congratulate myself on a degree of sobriety at half-past three in the morning, it was a minuscule triumph that most people would have considered a defeat.