The Paper Men - Softcover

Golding, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571134475 ISBN 13: 9780571134472

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1985

Synopsis

Fame, success, fortune, a drink problem slipping over the edge into alcoholism, a dead marriage, the incurable itches of middle-aged lust. For Wilfred Barclay, novelist, the final, unbearable irritation is Professor Rick. L. Tucker, implacable in his determination to become The Barclay Man. Locked in a lethal relationship they stumble half-blindly across Europe, shedding wives, self-respect, illusions. They confront terrifying abysses - physical, emotional, spiritual - and continually change roles, change themselves, change the worlds about them. The climax of their odyssey, when it comes, is as inevitable as it is unexpected. Powerful, unpredictable and unclassifiable, The Paper Men is as idiosyncratic and original as anything William Golding wrote.

About this title

Book Description

William Golding's The Paper Men is the story of Wilfred Barclay, a middle-aged novelist battling alcoholism and a dead-end marriage, and his would-be biographer, Professor Rick L. Tucker.

About the Author

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0571134475
• ISBN 13: 9780571134472
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 192