Ralph and co. in

The Lord of the Flies,

by William Golding.

“A more violent and deeply disturbed novelist is William Golding whose concern with evil is not civilized by irony and by chastened expectation, but remains at a level of almost mythic intensity. Lord of the Flies, written since the war, is the story, told with meticulous realism and at the same time with a visionary clarity that shows up everything as symbolic, of a group of small children wrecked on a desert island degenerating into a society based on fear, violence and tyranny”. (Daiches, David).

“This is a savage gloss on the Victorian writer R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, in which some British boys are wrecked on a desert island, and create a decent Christian society. Golding’s boys create as a memorably horrible a dystopia as anyone has thought up since Well’s Rampole Island. There’s something modish about Golding’s vision of these prep-school boys’ vileness”.  (Seymour Smith, Martin).