Word: tuckered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This revelation interrupts and transforms Barclay's struggle. An eminent though declining novelist, Barclay has been beseiged by a young American academic, Rick Tucker, who badly wants to be the foremost expert on Barclay. As the novel begins, Barclay discovers Tucker rooting through the dustbin looking for torn-up papers. The incident proves disastrous: after Tucker discovers a letter from an old lover of Barclay's, the novelist's wife leaves him. The scene also gives Golding the chance to satirize culture-vultures. When Barclay expresses his anger, Tucker, "out of the depths of his reverent absurdity," says "'I understand...
Repulsed by Tucker's methods and motives, Barclay flees from country to country. Through Tucker's persistence, though, Barclay learns more and more about his pursuer. Tucker, an emmisary from Astrakhan College in Nebraska, has been given a special commission by a man named Halliday, a patron of the school, to write Barclay's official biography. Halliday likes Barclay because of an admission in one of his books to "liking sex but having no capacity for love." Barclay, remembering that he wrote the sentence simply to record a stray idea, is confused and disgusted by Tucker's persistence...
...became a commercial and critical success and apparently goes on selling as vigorously as Lord of the Flies, Golding's first and most famous novel. "I hit the jackpot," Barclay says. "Someone has to." In addition to fame and fortune, he has also won Rick L. Tucker, a burly young American professor with designs on Barclay's literary remains. Their relationship begins badly. Hearing what he thinks is a badger rooting through his garbage, the author investigates and finds his house guest Tucker instead. In the ensuing confusion, a discarded love letter from a former mistress is spotted...
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...