[The Hot Gates is art because Golding's] talents simply are not for those matters which aptly fashion themselves into 'occasional pieces': trips to America, reviews of books about otters and headmasters, and potted-boilers on Copernicus. Mr. Golding goes through the Copernican motions. Just occasionally something from the world of the novels brings life with it…. Mr. Golding's imagination is kindled by fantasy as it hardly is by fact—at least, not the brochure-type facts about Stratford-upon-Avon or the stale news about Creative Writing courses which are trotted out in this book. Sententious, over-written, trivial and lumpishly jocose, much of this volume stands to the novels as did that inept play The Brass Butterfly….
Still, even if most of these essays are intrinsically slight, a good deal of extrinsic interest accrues to them. Mr. Golding's novels are certainly not slight, and whenever a filament reaches to the novels his prose regains urgency…. The essay on The Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island is somewhat banal in itself, but valuable as an annotation. Not as valuable, though, as 'Fable', a plain unvarnished account of the writing of The Lord of the Flies: its premises and its meaning. What is most notable about 'Fable' is the huge gulf between the distinctive vitality of the novel itself and the thin obviousness of this commentary on it…. [It] will be a pity if 'Fable' achieves classic status, even if a full understanding of Mr. Golding's gifts would involve pondering how he can write so inertly about what he wrote so forcefully. Now that The Lord of the Flies is a set text, authoritative diminutions of it are much in demand, and Mr. Golding has obliged.
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