Free Fall

Two other novels, Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also demonstrate Golding’s belief that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Free Fall contained some of his most personally inspired writing. Published a year after his father’s death, it includes scenes based on Alec Golding’s final…

Sammy Mountjoy, in William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), has fallen from the grace of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title makes clear. The eponym of Doctor Zhivago is so called because his name, meaning “The Living,” carries powerful religious overtones. In the Russian…