William Golding - A famous father

The Children of Lovers:

Novelist William Golding had even more success during his lifetime than he could have dreamed of.

He was a relatively late starter and had a tussle with writer's block in the 1970s but eventually all the biggest prizes came his way, including the Booker, the Nobel and a knighthood. Before Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, he was a lowly schoolmaster in Wiltshire, teaching evening classes to boost his income and writing his seemingly unpublishable novel in break times. Now that book alone has sold over 20 million copies and is standard school fare.

No one could be more proud of these achievements than his daughter Judy, who has been contemplating a memoir ever since her father's death in 1995. John Carey's brilliant 2009 biography of Golding (written with Judy's full co-operation) has freed her to be as personal and impressionistic as she wishes and the result is a lyrical meditation on the history of her tight-lipped, clever family, her sad strivings to please and emulate her adored father and "the many submerged rocks" in the choppy sea of their life together.

The book raises fascinating questions about how much one can ever understand about a parent or a child, especially one who writes famous books and leaves a lot of papers, and of the biographical value of information about an artist's "ordinary life". Since his death, Judy Golding has studied her father's archive minutely, made pilgrimages to sites connected with his childhood, education and war service and immersed herself in his writings.

But when he was alive, she avoided reading his books at all, and once mistook a radio adaptation of Pincher Martin for The Goon Show.

Judy couldn't help noticing when her father went on benders and tore up banknotes, nor when he seemed in a world of his own, but she only really understood about his drinking when she went through his journals after his death. Her own memories of family homes and sailing holidays, of grudges, jokes and quarrels were hard to square with the troubled pessimist she met there. How could the man she knew as a comfort and protector, a gentle, music-loving, Shakespeare-quoting deity, believe that "Man produces evil as a bee produces honey" and what did he mean when he told an interviewer, "I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled"? These are things Judy Golding frankly admits she doesn't understand.

Similarly, you can't expect a family member to read a relation's work detached from shared experience. The links Judy Golding offers between her father's life and writing show how unrevealing such special knowledge can be: perhaps the rock that the drowning Pincher clings to owes something to a wisdom tooth extraction in Fowey, she speculates; perhaps the name of Roger in Lord of the Flies was a "secret payback" for one of her brother's friends having made an illicit bonfire in the Goldings' garden.

This is all part of the book's great interest, the weirdness of knowing a famous person in the one context where they are not famous. Golding's rapid celebrity after Lord of the Flies was played down at home, not least by the man himself and his wife, "quick to debunk signs of veneration from journalists, students, even old friends". Judy Golding relates how she was sometimes taken to task by fans for treating her father like an ordinary person but adds the brilliant insight that "the irony was that I believed he was far more important, more extraordinary, than anyone else". But she believed it for quite different reasons.