Other than his well-know Lord of the Flies novel, who knew that William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature way back in 1983? Huh… not this guy.
At any rate, I came across a mention of this book while reading Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It is one of a handful of books that Kingsnorth could think of where the natural world played a leading character role in a work of fiction. Pincher Martin, written two or three years after Lord of the Flies, flows from a pretty similar premise as Lord of the Flies: a guy is stranded on a small crag of an island in the middle of the north Atlantic. The difference is that instead of a group of boys devolving into a cutthroat mob, it’s just one guy alone on a rock.
I won’t give any spoilers about how it all works out for Pincher but I will say that I ended up not really giving a damn about the fate of the guy. He’s kind of an ass. But whether it was intentional or not, the story of a human on a rock floating in space and trying to bend the rock to his will reflects the larger story of all of humanity: we’re stuck on a rock floating in space and the sooner we figure out that there are limits to what the rock can provide, the ending of our tale may be a happier one.
Giving this three-stars only because who wants to spend a couple hundred pages with the inner thoughts of a jerk? But still, worth the read. Go find a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/910928524
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