As Golding himself declared, during a Third Programme radio discussion, "There's really very little point in writing a novel unless you do something that either you suspected you couldn't do, or which you are pretty certain nobody else has tried before. I don't think there's any point in writing two books that are like each other....
"I see, or I bring myself to see, a certain set of circumstances in a particular way. If it is the way everybody else sees them, then there is no point in writing a book."
None of this means that Golding has been a wild literary experimenter or originator of philosophical ideas. He has worked well within the pale of recognizable forms (of the novel and allegory) and an outline of Judeo-Christian morality. In some respects, he is as conventional a writer as H. G. Wells; and like Wells he sees things from a perspective that is personal, corrective, and highly original. Unlike Wells (at least the early Wells), he does not believe in the efficacy of science; and he writes with the contained fervor, the subdued musicality and sensitivity of a poet, an entranced seer. In his novels we pause at the depths of childhood's depravity; we peer down into the deep free-fall well of birth and rebirth; we teeter at the top of a spire, with the last nail in hand; and we are brought into the presence of something truly awful, perceiving the gap between man and God.
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