Pincher Martin cover art

Pincher Martin

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Pincher Martin

By: William Golding
Narrated by: Julian Sands
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About this listen

Experience a shipwrecked sailor's psychic disintegration into 'a naked madman on a rock' by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Marlon James.

An hour on this rock is a lifetime.

Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the brutal cold, and the aching terror of his isolation. To drink there is a pool of rainwater; to eat, seaweed and anemones, preyed upon by feathered reptiles. As he descends into the abyss of his consciousness, weathering lightning strikes of memory, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate - piece by terrible piece.

'A work of genius.' Philippa Gregory

'The utmost inventiveness ... No reader will forget the world it reveals.' Kingsley Amis

'Wizardry of the first order.' Observer

©2021 William Golding (P)2021 Faber & Faber Classics Genre Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Psychological Fiction

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{Spoiler Alert} do you want to know what it is like to go through the process of dying? Well, you can of course, but then you also can’t, and either way you won’t be able to tell your friends about it. And neither can William Golding, talented author though he most certainly is. What he takes us through in this novel is a kind of prolonged dismantling of the senses and the mind, an advancing horror and, despair. Any sense of narrative gradually drowns in a mess of memories, religious unease, hallucinations, illogic, and delusion. The better the writing the less chance the reader has. The final chapter, which is an epilogue back in the sense-making normal world, finishes with one huge meta-twist that undermines even the rest of the self-undermining book. Ug.
Style: 1940s war-adventure, somewhat macho.

Determinedly Unsettling

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