Word: barclay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH The Paper Men, Nobel laureate William Golding's latest novel, the protagonist, the footloose novelist Wilfred Barclay, experiences a sort of revelation. Standing in a church, in front of a statue of Christ, Barclay realizes...
Drinking more heavily than ever, Barclay goes on the run from Tucker's persistent badgering ("I am a moving target," Golding has written in a confessional essay describing his own pursuit by eager scholars). Tucker tracks his prey to a resort in the Swiss Alps and makes his pitch: "Wilf. I want you to appoint me your official biographer." He tacitly offers his beautiful but dim-witted wife to seal the bargain. Barclay resists this awkwardly staged temptation, but he winds up indebted to Tucker all the same. During a fogbound mountain walk, the author leans on a guardrail...
...does he owe Tucker his Life, authorized and handsomely bound between hard covers? Barclay postpones the answer by escaping once again into aimless, inebriated travel, leaving a trail of bogus forwarding addresses. By this point, Golding reaches for his old standby, the clamoring metaphysical question. Does Barclay flee because he is afraid of being saved or damned? Who is Halliday, the mysterious American billionaire who has given Tucker seven years to win Barclay upi as a trophy? Broad hints are dropped that the author and the critic have begun to exchange identities. Barclay asks the American: "How come you speak...
...very well in classrooms and seminars. Teachers can I extract from the novel a long list of I topics for discussion. Scholarly journals should prepare for a host of submitted articles bearing titles punctuated with the obligatory colon ("Art I vs. Life: The Self-Loathing Narrative ill of Wilfred Barclay"). All this freewheeling interpretation in depth may obscure the fact that The Paper Men implies significance through lapses rather than design. The autobiographical touches suggest that Golding wished to settle a few scores with critics and also to satirize the "paper men" of the literary life, himself included, who live...
...Golding has never been content to leave literal enough alone. Wilfred Barclay cannot just be a talented writer and an unusually repugnant person; he must be made to stand in some inchoate manner for mankind, that abstraction imprisoned on "the crazy ball flying through space which if you care or have to think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage." At this level of ambition, The Paper Men invites unfortunate comparisons with Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the best and funniest work yet on the usurpation of a creative mind. Golding's book cannot match...