In the William Golding canon, his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most famous, and his third Pincher Martin (1956), his most controversial. Both are concerned with castaways and their fight for survival.

When Lord of the Flies opens, nuclear war has broken out in Europe and a school from the English Home Counties has been evacuated by air to an unknown destination. On the way there, they are attacked, the crew killed, but the ‘passenger tube’ released so that it can crash-land on the jungle below. At the moment of impact, a fierce storm is raging and only a number of boys manage to scramble out of the ‘tube’ before the wind sweeps it out to sea. Those who do, scatter in the forest undergrowth. They are castaways —though it is some time before it dawns on them that they are marooned and consequently ‘island castaways’.

The island itself is never named. But the description of its coral reef, beaches and fruit trees that bear all the year round, suggests that it might be one of those lying south of Sumatra or Java. The ways in which the boys adapt to their new tropical background is the book’s main theme, and ‘interpretations’ of it depend largely upon a reader’s own particular preoccupations. Freudians, for instance, have already noticed how the boys’ behaviour fits the theory that if parental, state, or Church authority is taken away, children will evolve their own gods, totems, and taboos. Others have found the story a parable of man stripped of the sanctions of custom and civilization.