[William Golding's] three books, Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955) and Pincher Martin (1956) are romance in the austere sense of the term. They take the leap from the probable to the possible. Lord of the Flies has a strong pedigree: island literature from Crusoe to Coral Island, Orphan Island and High Wind in Jamaica. All romance breaks with the realistic novelist's certainties and exposes the characters to transcendent and testing dangers. But Golding does more than break; he bashes, by the power of his overwhelming sense of the detail of the physical world. He is the most original of our contemporaries…. [Golding] scarcely uses an argument or issues a warning. He simply shakes us until we feel in our bones the perennial agony of our species. By their nature, his subjects … could easily become the pasteboard jigsaw of allegory, pleasing our taste for satire and ingenuity; but the...