You know when you pick up a book to have a look at it and don’t put it down until you’ve finished? The bookseller was not amused. I’d read two or three of Golding’s novels before and I think he’s an amazing writer, but bless him, dialogue is not his strongest suit. What piqued my interest was him working entirely with dialogue. Nothing to worry about here. Check out that opening conversation between Mamillius and the Captain and you can hear their contrasting tones so clearly.

I think this could be a very funny play if staged properly, but wasn’t laughing as I was trying to work out the intellectual architecture. I struggle with Golding at the best of times and miss a lot because he’s so bloody subtle and reading this was particularly difficult because of course I was standing up and people kept trying to get past me in the aisle looking for copies of Knowledge of Angels.

My best guess is that first you have a world divided into inside and outside. Inside is the villa and by extension Capri. The world itself runs on order and routine as exemplified by the Captain. This ordered world keeps intruding into the womb-like, death-like villa. Also coming into the villa are the old and the new. Old and new religions, pagan and Christian, as also old and new warfares. I think these five things, inside, outside, order, old and new are the five bright windows of Mamillius’s mind that he speaks about in the opening lines of the play. Or something like that anyway. As I say, I was standing up when I read it. ( )

A play set in ancient Capri, where the Roman emperor welcomes a Greek scientist who has invented a deadly weapon, a steamship, and a pressure cooker. The emperor is interested in the pressure cooker; the inventor is more interested in the steamship. Rivalries in the empire lead to disaster as the weapon moves front and center, being detonated in the attempt at a military coup. An exploration of the risks and values of science, and questions of the ethics of scientific discovery and the worries about them backfiring on the inventors. Also a side story about Christianity beginning to take hold in a pagan society. ( )