Frank Kermode writes:

John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding's family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took a long time to achieve an understanding of how truly remarkable he was, and then did so only fitfully. Carey’s prose has a deliberate, unaffected quality, a cool and sympathetic style appropriate to his account of a hero often fighting against his own rather gloomy modesty, now relishing and now resenting his embarrassing celebrity. Golding has been fortunate in his biographer, and he, in his turn, has been fortunate to be entrusted with such a subject, a man who not only wrote some remarkable books but also had a life that turned out to be far more interesting than he could have predicted when he settled reluctantly into a career as a provincial grammar school master (he had no great skill as a teacher, though he was of independent intellect and had an enduring, endearing passion for Homeric Greek).

(LRB 5 November 2009)

Faber | hardback 573 pp. |ISBN: 9780571231638