William Golding
William Golding(1911–1993) is a name likely to last, and not only for his
immensely popular Lord of the Flies(1954), a fable about a party of boys from a
Cathedral Choir School marooned on a Pacific island. A teacher, Golding knew
something of boys, and his strong tale is believably reported through the eyes and
idioms of Piggy, Ralph, Simon, Jack and Co. As commander of a rocket ship in the
Royal Navy, Golding also knew something of how people behave in emergencies.
On the last page of the novel, Ralph, running for his life from the spear-wielding
boys, runs smack into a naval officer who has just landed on the beach. The officer,
looking out to his trim cruiser, says, ‘I should have thought that a pack of British
boys ... would have been able to put up a better show than that.’ A little later, ‘Ralph
wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the
air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.’ The text had just mentioned R. M.
Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), a jolly adventure in the self-reliant happy-
ending tradition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).The Coral Islandwas still a
popular boys’ book in 1954.
The officer’s appearance emphasizes the fictiveness of happy endings. His ‘pack’
recalls the Boy Scouts, as do the rituals the boys invent; but the pack had gradually
become tribal and savage, worshipping a pig’s head on a stake: the ‘lord of the flies’
is Bee lzebub, a name for the Devil. Simon, an ‘oversensitive’ boy, disbelieves in the
idol; he is put to death. The book is an ethical fable. The metaphysical pessimism
of Conrad and the early Eliot is here delivered to the schoolroom, more tellingly
than in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929).The spiritual void and
moral relativism sensed before 1914 had not prevented the evil of genocide in
Europe’s most scientific country. The sacrifice of the Jews as scapegoats for the ills
that had befallen Germany became fully known only after 1945; the killing of
Simon may not refer to this evil, but the intolerability of good is one of Golding’s
themes.
Golding is not a simple moral fabulist like Lewis or Tolkien.Lord ofthe Flies
adopts the frictionless simplicity of a boys’ book only to challenge the assumptions
of boys’ books. His other allegories are embedded in temporal as well as physical
settings. Such an allegory is executed boldly in The Inheritors.The opening takes us
into the imagined sensory world of a group of Neanderthals, ‘the people’:
The sun dropped into the river and light left the overhang. Now the fire was more than
ever central, white ash, a spot of red and one flame wavering upwards. The old woman
moved softly, pushing in more wood so that the red spot ate and the flame grew strong.
The people watched, their faces seeming to quiver in the unsteady light. Their freckled
skins were ruddy and the deep caverns beneath their brows were each inhabited by
replicas of the fire and all their fires danced together. As they persuaded themselves of
the warmth they relaxed limbs and drew the reek into their nostrils gratefully. They
flexed their toes and stretched their arms, even leaning away from the fire. One of the
deep silences fell on them, that seemed so much more natural than speech, a timeless
silence in which there were at first many minds in the overhang; and then perhaps no
mind at all. So fully discounted was the roar of the water that the soft touch of the wind
on the rocks became audible. Their ears as if endowed with separate life sorted the
tangle of tiny sounds and accepted them, the sound of breathing, the sound of wet clay
flaking and ashes falling in.
Then Mal spoke with unusual diffidence.
‘Is it cold?’388 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Leading post-war
novelistsJoyce Cary (1888–1957)
Rebecca West (1892–1983)
Jean Rhys (1894–1979)
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983)
Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957)
Sir William Golding
(1911–1993)
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990)
Barbara Pym (1913–1980)
Angus Wilson (1913–1991)
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993)
Olivia Manning (1918–1980)
Dame Muriel Spark
(1918–2006)
P. H. Newby (1918–1997)
Dame Iris Murdoch
(1919–1999)
Dame Doris Lessing (1919–)
Paul Scott (1920–1978)
Bryan Moore (1921–1999)
Sir Kingsley Amis
(1922–1993)
John Fowles (1926–2005)
Malcolm Bradbury
(1932–2000)
David Lodge (1934– )
A. S. Byatt (1936– )
W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)
See also ‘Events and
Publications of 1940–55’
(p. 373) and ‘Events and
Publications 1955–’ (pp.
380–81) – and Chapter 15.