Volume 27, Number 20 · December 18, 1980
The Good Ship Britannia
By Robert Towers
Rites of Passage
by William Golding
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 278 pp., $10.95
Though William Golding was by no means forgotten, it is fair to say that his reputation has been maintained on a very low flame for nearly two decades. Following the immense success of Lord of the Flies in the 1950s and the somewhat muted but still favorable reception of The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, his later novels met a progressively frigid response from reviewers and readers alike. Free Fall and The Spire had their admirers but were for the most part judged to be inert in narrative, symbolical to a heavy-handed, quasi-allegorical degree, prone to the tedium likely to be incurred nowadays by an author's too obvious concern with the Human Condition or the Problem of Evil. The Pyramid was simply dismissed as a failure on nearly every count. During the twelve years of silence that ensued, almost the only currency Golding still enjoyed was to be found among undergraduates for whom the central situation of Lord of the Flies and its themes (of the natural depravity of children, of the origin of cults) still retained—and retain—a freshness of appeal.
Review, 2453 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |