Amid a literary world dedicated to debating, reporting, or re-editing the effects of the human condition, William Golding on his lonely eminence continues to ponder its cause…. For others the private language, the prestige narcissist obscurantism; he must take up the archaic challenge of the artist, to make known, to attempt communication, and be seen to succeed or fail—a heroism so rare today as to seem almost quixotic. Mr. Golding communicates. His sayings are hard, but no harder than the thought contained in them; he speaks in parables, but they sharpen not fuzz the meaning. His subject is tremendous: man's first disobedience, and the fruit….

[In] "Free Fall" hell is harrowed, the rescued sinner pays the hard redemptive price of self-knowledge; the tissues of the spirit, healed and living, have become capable of pain.

Sammy Mountjoy, a painter and war artist, is in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp...