Free Fall

by William Golding

First published 1959

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3.9(62)

Samuel Mountjoy rises from an impoverished and uncertain childhood to become a successful painter whose work hangs in the Tate. During the Second World War he is captured and interrogated in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Locked in total darkness and expecting torture, he begins reconstructing his life in an attempt to discover when his ability to choose freely was lost.

His memories move through adoption, school, religious fear, scientific education, art college and his obsessive relationship with Beatrice Ifor. Sammy recognises that social ascent and artistic success have not freed him from the harm caused by vanity, appetite and deliberate betrayal. The wartime ordeal therefore becomes less a story of physical captivity than an examination of whether accumulated choices can imprison a person before any cell door closes.