About this title: A young boy named Matty is rescued from a horrible fire during the London blitz and is permanently mutilated. He grows up to be a religious visionary. As in all Golding's works, the force for good is balanced by a force for evil, in this case a pair of twins who have been seduced by the attractions of darkness. The novel's title comes from Milton ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: American ed.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780374135027ISBN:0374135029
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 265 p. Audience: General/trade. Edgewear to DJ, appears unread, 82 read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: FSG
Date Published: 1979
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
"Good and evil? Light and darkness? damnation and redemption?
All that's in there. This is one that I don't fully agree with on a philosophical level, but still found it intriguing. There are some pretty weird scenes in here. Especially when the guy who's had 1/2 his body burned up sees some guy with chains rising out of a swamp."
"Weird book, course William Golding doesn't write bland literature! I am 10 pages from the end and can't figure the point of the book other than weird things happen, child molesters exist, and people can be monstrous. It's not an offensive book, and the only thing that would make it a difficult read is that I can't figure out the 'point'. It's a couple of biopics of people who's lives cross this poor strange man who was blown up or burnt in the London Blitz. The cover says it's a mystery, but well, it's a mystery that there's no attempt to solve. At the time, due to his Lord of the Flies book, this book may have been more esteemed, but it just seems like a diary of people who aren't very nice, mixed in with one or two who are. Times have changed, and the monsters in this book may have been more monstrous at the time, when child molesting and gangster types were a lot rarer. I think he was intending to shock, but it's lost it's shock value with the degradation of Western Culture. It's an interesting read and maybe gave me validation that a lot of bad things in my culture had it's roots in the 60's, not in the 80's that I thought. It's very well written, smooth and gentle and the insinuations of insight is interesting."
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