REVIEW / BOOK
DISCOVERING A BADGER IN THE DUSTBIN
THE PAPER MEN, BY WILLIAM GOLDING. FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX. 191 PP.
$13.95.
Author: By Margaret Manning Globe Staff
Date: Sunday, April 15, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: BOOKS
When the publicity handout that always comes with review-copy books by the
famous says the author has produced "an extremely good read," one thinks, oh
God!
Especially when this author is William Golding, best known for "Lord of
the Flies" and last year's Nobel Prize winner. Nobel Prize winners have to
produce something better than reads. John D. MacDonald can come up with a read
while boating a bonito, and more entertainingly.
This "good read" is about an aging, alcoholic English novelist and a
perfectly poisonous young American professor, someone like Matthew Bruccoli,
who is determined to write the life of - blank - after blank has departed
these realms.
"The Paper Men" does start with promise. The author, Wilfred Barclay,
having drunk quite a lot, wakes up in the middle of the night in what he
perceives as a black hole and goes downstairs ostensibly to count the empties
but in fact to shoot a badger that is clattering around the garbage can, in
England called a dustbin.
The badger turns out to be the professor, Rick L. Tucker, who in the cause
of scholarship is searching among the remains of the evening's dinner for the
author's biographical memorabilia. Tucker is momentarily speechless, Barclay
wishes he had shot him. As it turns out he should have.
For one thing Rick, through his pre-dawn foray to the dustbin, is
responsible for the break-up of Barclay's marriage because he finds a jam-
stained letter from one Lucinda, famished for love. He reads it to Barclay's
wife. Barclay does not like his freedom from matrimony, which takes some time
and some lawyers to sort out. He moves to Italy. There he enjoys a
"relationship," which doesn't last because she believes in stigmata and he
believes in nothing.
He writes another book and then just drives around for a couple of years,
avoiding everything and everybody. He is not much of a fellow, this Wilfred
Barclay.
In Switzerland, where he goes for a rest cure, Rick L. Tucker turns up
once more, with a wife, a pretty one. Rick says things like "You are part of
the Great Pageant of English Literature." Barclay can't believe that even
Tucker would say such a thing. He thinks of his life as a series of farces,
not worthy of investigation. He is right.
But Rick wants to be appointed Barclay's literary executor. Rick is so
importunate and so inordinately ambitious that one must believe he is out of
his tiny mind.
Barclay nearly falls down the Alps into a gorge, and so great is his
dismay that he flees because Rick had rescued him, Rick whom he not only
detests but believes capable of sending his wife as a temptation to get his
hands on Wilf's papers. (It is Rick, not I, who calls Barclay "Wilf.")
Years go by, and Barclay continues his pointless wandering. He is so
paranoid he thinks the FBI is after him, or perhaps a billionaire named
Haliday, or maybe still Rick. He hallucinates. "In hell there are no eyelids,"
he mourns, if he is capable of mourning. One isn't sure. His principal
capacities seem to be drinking and typing. Neither, in his case, are
interesting.
After surviving repeated fainting fits Barclay pleads with his London
agent to find Rick for him. I was not convinced by anything Golding had to say
that there was any reason for Barclay and Rick to speak to each other, except
for further pain in Barclay's case, but they agree to meet at the site of the
years-ago Alpine slide, which turns out to have been another farce. Barclay
manages to deflate Rick instead of the other way around, and from there we
proceed to the less than ironic ending: Barclay had every right to be afraid.
There are probably a lot of people who will read this book because of the
author's name. They are welcome to. In my opinion Golding should be sentenced
to a week with his face to the wall
MANNIN;03/29,13:35 LDRISC;04/16,13 B07663042
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