Pincher Martin; The Spire; The Inheritors; The Pyramid, by William Golding (Faber, £6.99 each in UK)

Pincher Martin, now more than forty years old, is possibly Golding's best novel, though it may owe something to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and also to Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. A true blue nautical Englishman, Golding had a real feeling for the sea and many or most of his best books are inspired by it. The Spire, about the obsessed churchman Dean Jocelin, is spoiled by its portentous, rather tawdry symbolism, while The Inheritors moves into that territory of super-science-fiction already tracked out by H.G. Wells. The last novel of the four is comparatively light in tone and content, without straining after grandiosity or multiple meanings - it has an English provincial setting in the 1920s. I doubt very much if any of these four books is a masterpiece and, Nobel Prize or no, Golding's prose style seems more mannered - and dated - at every reading or rereading, while his symbolism is often "literary", ponderous and rather boringly obvious. Those critics who have acclaimed him as a modern prose master may end up with mud on their faces, when his reputation comes to be reassessed in a few decades' time. B.F.