It is untrue that Golding's novels leave us without answers, as [some critics] suggest. Golding admits that he cannot subscribe to any particular religion, but insists that he is a fundamentally religious man…. [His] faith in a pattern that transcends man is not the only difference between Golding's position and that defined in the early work of Sartre and Camus, but it is the basic one…. [It] is this belief which underlies all other aspects of his philosophy and determines the t...

In contrast to [Arthur Koestler's] Darkness at Noon, which introduces one complete system, examines its collapse, and then tentatively offers another one, Golding's Free Fall presents only fragments of systems. Its hero begins with no system at all and ends with only a hint of one. Yet, in describing man's approach to meaning rather than his scrutiny of its elements, Golding examines [an] important aspect of the modern confession. Superficially, the hero of the novel is a success, a boy...

The fiercely obdurate quality of Golding's imaginative achievement—what has been called his poetic intensity—derives from his ability to construct solidly patterned novels on foundations of the most daring verbal modes. His technical range is great, encompassing material as diverse as a sailor's sea-washed body, the befuddled encounter of prelapsarian creatures with rapacious interlopers, an 18th-century sea voyage across the equator. Yet, however, heterodox his fictional topogra...

In his preface [to A Moving Target] Golding explains that five of the pieces included began life as lectures. And he says: "When you get down to it, what an audience wants to hear from a novelist is how he writes. Since how he writes is in intimate association with what he is and how he lives the novelist finds himself in danger of being his own raw material." He goes on: "I have always tried to resist this and have always given way in the end so that at last I find myself talking about...

The leading proposition in Golding's mind as a writer, endorsed alike by Freud and Christian theology, is that each of us recapitulates the history of the race. For Golding, the ink is not yet dry on the social contract. Civilisation, like Jocelin's spire rests on foundations still writhing like hell-mouth. This being his bent, his interests naturally concentrate on boyhood—that is, on the embryonic stage of the civilised human: for there animism and polytheism, matriarchy and the prima...

I may as well begin with a flat proposition: I think William Golding is the most interesting English novelist now writing…. I'd be rather surprised if [that proposition] were widely accepted; my impression is that Golding tends to be overlooked when the Novelists' League Standings are made up, as though he was known to be good, but at some other game. The rankordering of artists is, of course, unimportant—it's only a book reviewer's parlor game; but it is important ...

William Golding is evidently a bit fed up with being the author of Lord of the Flies. It was greeted with proper applause when it came out in 1954, but soon became the livre de chevet of American youth, and, worse, a favoured text in the classroom in the years of the great boom in Eng Lit, when a sterile popular variety of the New Criticism was encouraging all manner of dreary foolishness; whereupon the cognoscenti turned away, and called the book naive. Yet it was indeed a noble and a novel performance, to...

Although critics have acknowledged that the narrator of Free Fall, Samuel Mountjoy, must not be identified with Golding, they have failed to distinguish clearly between Mountjoy's purpose in writing his narrative and Golding's in writing his novel…. [Critics] have taken the wrong approach to Mountjoy's assumption that it is possible freely to relinquish one's freedom of will. It is only when we recognise that this assumption is not shared by Golding that novel and narrativ...

The deep satisfaction we feel in reading and reflecting on William Golding's novels rises from his power to isolate, describe and make real to us moral problems that concern us all. The notable moralists of our day are novelists and poets. Philosophy is remote from the average intelligent person and the churches rarely command his allegiance, but for all that he is eager to come to grips with serious problems of morality. Much popular fiction offers him nothing but a reflection of the easy, fashionab...

Few in recent years can have written better than William Golding about the sea and bullies. Pincher Martin, that terrifying metaphysical sermon, was marvellous about the action of water, the way it moved in the sun or under rain, when lapping that awful rock or being hurled at it in a storm. As for bullies, Lord of the Flies is a sort of treatise on the variety in which they come: and The Inheritors a statement about the supersession of an earlier, gentler human being by Homo Sapiens, your original hooligan...

William Golding has taken exception to the neohumanists and the prophets of despair. He rejects their view of mankind: "I believe that man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view, in the belief that it may be something like the truth." His novels are exceptions to the socio-realistic novels of his contemporaries, and Golding himself has characterized them as "myths." His goal is always the nature of man, and this can be examined as well under ...

Just as Eliot's criticism is read more to learn about Eliot than, say, Marston or Massinger, so [A Moving Target, a] collection of lectures, essays, reviews, and travel articles, will be read primarily for sights of the author rather than in expectation of intrinsic merit. Golding will not be pleased with this state of affairs … he dislikes 'value by association', disparaging in 'My First Book', the situation whereby his Poems, published in 1934, 'has been on...

After the pretension of "The Spire" William Golding seems to be relaxing, or at least thudding down to earth, with "The Pyramid." Its ugly-jolly narrative is in the reminiscent, realistic vein of "Free Fall" rather than the mythmaking manner variously seen in "Lord of the Flies," "Pincher Martin," and "The Inheritors."… Even among the crude humor, old-fashioned shock effects, vagrant symbols, and stitched-together set...

Amid a literary world dedicated to debating, reporting, or re-editing the effects of the human condition, William Golding on his lonely eminence continues to ponder its cause…. For others the private language, the prestige narcissist obscurantism; he must take up the archaic challenge of the artist, to make known, to attempt communication, and be seen to succeed or fail—a heroism so rare today as to seem almost quixotic. Mr. Golding communicates. His sayings are hard, but no harder than the th...