Book review: William Golding - The Scorpion God

Another failure, albeit a more curious and diverting failure than "The Pyramid". There is, at least, some sense of purpose here, some distant echoes of Golding's thunderous vision, even if the work falls far short of his best, both as a whole and in detail.

The problem is simply that none of these three novellas hangs together. They're listless and sketchy, lacking the physical definition and psychological potency of which he's capable. "The Scorpion God" itself feels flat and academic, even dusty, and never really thrusts you into the heart of the primitive civilisation that it describes. It's partly redeemed by a powerful ending, but even so, the reader remains on the margins, at a safe distance.

"Envoy Extraordinary" is even worse, a confused mess that can't decide what it wants to be, and spends an awful lot of time wading around in murky farce as a consequence. Again, the ending is sharp enough: it doesn't really belong to the story - a bright idea tacked on as an after-thought - but it's some reward for your effort.

In the middle, the hunter-gatherer society of "Clonk Clonk" is most successfully realised, most vivid in the mind's eye. It feels like Golding, mercifully. But then, ironically, he blows the ending completely: it just fizzles out, a half-hearted joke left behind to fill the embarrassed silence.

A great novelist. Really. But my word, his peaks are matched by some pretty testing troughs....