Golding was a Nobel Prize winner for Literature, but that is not always conclusive as to artistic stature; so was Galsworthy in his time, and some other writers whose names writ; in gold have faded into near illegibility. Lord of the Flies, in particular, has been widely, spoken of as a masterpiece; it has been put on school and university courses, turned into a film, has been the subject of much well meaning stuff about The Violence that Lurks In Us All, an Allegory for our Age, and so forth. I can just faintly remember similar claims being made for Orwell's Animal, Farm and 1984, or about Koestler's Darkness at Noon, books which caught the ears of their generation in rather a similar, semi oracular way. Quite frankly, Lord of the Flies has always seemed to me a meretricious, unreal and much overrated book - though say that not aloud, above all not in the corridors of Faber! The other three novels constitute the volumes of Golding's Sea Trilogy and they start off badly with Rites of Passage, which already seems contrived and almost, unreadable but the later two volumes improve a good deal. Purely as a writer of the sea, however, Golding is not only outclassed imaginatively and stylistically by Conrad, Stevenson and even Masefield; on a rather lower level, he is actually less readable than Patrick O'Brian or C.S. Forester of Hornblower fame, though he is a great deal more portentous and "literary" than they are. It is precisely this mannered portentousness and lack of humour, however, which have helped to lay the foundations for his very considerable cult.