William Golding achieved international fame and wide critical acceptance with his first published novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954. Since that time he has produced six other distinguished novels (at least two of which have been mentioned as his masterpiece) and six novelettes (three of which are sometimes treated as a novel, under the heading of The Pyramid, 1967). This fictional canon has won Golding a special niche in the pantheon of modern British fiction. It is a niche that deserves to be inscribed with the phrase sui generis, for Golding's fiction does not fit within any modern school of writing. Although his work can be categorized as broadly Christian in outlook, it advocates no specific church or political system, and it does not represent any ethnic subdivision within the British Isles. Each of his works, moreover, has been an attempt to treat a different subject in a different...