Fables are those narratives which leave the impression that their purpose was anterior, some initial thesis or contention which they are apparently concerned to embody and express in concrete terms. Fables always give the impression that they were preceded by the conclusion which it is their function to draw…. (p. 577)

[At the end of Lord of the Flies the] abrupt return to childhood, to insignificance, underscores the argument of the narrative: that Evil is inherent in the human mind itself, whatever innocence may cloak it, ready to put forth its strength as soon as the occasion is propitious. This is Golding's theme, and it takes on a frightful force by being presented in juvenile terms, in a setting that is twice deliberately likened to the sunny Coral Island of R. M. Ballantyne. The boys' society represents, in embryo, the society of the adult world, their impulses and convictions are those of adults incisively abridged, and the whole narrative is a powerfully ironic commentary on the nature of Man, an accusation levelled at us all…. Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beëlzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to.

The intentness with which this thesis is developed leaves no doubt that the novel is a fable, a deliberate translation of a proposition into the dramatized terms of art, and as usual we have to ask ourselves how resourceful and complete the translation has been, how fully the thesis has been absorbed and rendered implicit in the tale as it is told…. Golding himself provides a criterion for judgement here, for he offers a striking example of how complete the translation of a statement into plastic terms can be. Soon after their arrival the children develop an irrational suspicion that there is a predatory beast at large on the island. This has of course no real existence, as Piggy for one points out, but to the littluns it is almost as tangible as their castles in the sand, and most of the older boys are afraid they may be right. One night when all are sleeping there is an air battle ten miles above the sea and a parachuted man, already dead, comes drifting down through the darkness, to settle among the rocks that crown the island's only mountain…. When it is discovered and the frightened boys mistake it for the beast the sequence is natural and convincing, yet the implicit statement is quite unmistakable too. The incomprehensible threat which has hung over them, is, so to speak, identified and explained: a nameless figure who is Man himself, the boys' own natures, the something that all humans have in common.

This is finely done and needs no further comment, but unhappily the explicit comment has already been provided, in Simon's halting explanation of the beast's identity: "What I mean is … maybe it's only us."… This over-explicitness is my main criticism of what is in many ways a work of real distinction, and for two reasons it appears to be a serious one. In the first place the fault is precisely that which any fable is likely to incur: the incomplete translation of its thesis into its story so that much remains external and extrinsic, the teller's assertion rather than the tale's enactment before our eyes. In the second place the fault is a persistent one, and cannot easily be discounted or ignored. It appears in expository annotations…. Less tolerably, it obtrudes itself in almost everything—thought, action, and hallucination—that concerns the clairvoyant Simon…. The boy remains unconvincing in himself, and his presence constitutes a standing invitation to the author to avoid the trickiest problems of his method, by commenting too baldly on the issues he has raised. Any writer of fables must find it hard to ignore an invitation of this kind once it exists. Golding has not been able to ignore it, and the blemishes that result impose some serious, though not decisive, limitations on a fiery and disturbing story.

The Inheritors, published in 1955, is again an indictment of natural human depravity, though to its author's credit it takes a quite different form. This time the central characters are a group of hairy, simian pre-humans, much like Yahoos in appearance but in other respects very different. (pp. 582-85)

Like its predecessor The Inheritors is a disturbing book to read, passionate, often moving, and with a rich command of irony. (pp. 585-86)

The narrative relies heavily on irony for its pungency, and even the title and the epigraph were clearly chosen for their ironic force. The title reminds us that it was the meek who were to inherit the earth. The epigraph … is tellingly reinterpreted in what succeeds, where all doubt as to who are monsters and who not is soon dispelled. The very core of the book is ironic, for its purpose is to play off against our smug prejudices—like those of the epigraph—a representation of their grounds that is as humiliating as it is unexpected. Irony of this kind is always valuable to an author who wishes to be challenging, as [Jonathan] Swift knew when he put Gulliver in Brobdignag, but what gives it a special value here is its capacity to function instead of an explanatory commentary. We are sufficiently familiar with the ways of men and women to form an adequate idea of the motives of the humans, but their actions are presented through the eyes of Lok and his companions. Thus a persistent discrepancy is maintained between appearances and realities, and it is across this gap that the sparks of irony can crackle most sharply. No explicit comments are needed, for even an inattentive reader can see what is going on, and how it is being misinterpreted. The effect is that propositions pass quite smoothly into plastic terms, leaving no unnecessary residue to clog the prose.

Golding's skill and assurance can be seen throughout The Inheritors, both in this implicit exposition and in the approach he takes, beginning with the people and, by initiating us into their mental processes, establishing their full claim on our sympathy. Only at the end is the viewpoint altered to allow us to identify ourselves with the humans, after seeing Lok from the outside as "the red creature," and by then of course it is too late…. Again, a fable so intimately concerned with semi-mythical creatures might easily seem sketchy or incredible. Yet it is sensuously and persuasively rendered and seems unquestionably real. The people's existence is remote from any conception of existence we possess but its physical conditions are carefully re-created, and any thinness in its subjective texture is naturally referred to the limited awareness they enjoy. Since there is no equivalent to the boy Simon, the irony serving to replace him, the book is also more strictly faithful to the canons of its aesthetic type. It seems to me a marked improvement over Lord of the Flies and that in itself is no mean praise. (pp. 586-87)

The essential point [of The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin] is that this is a story about a dead man. It is about a consciousness so self-centered and so terrified of the infinite that it creates for itself, even in death, a fantasy existence which, however arduous and painful, nevertheless still permits it the luxury of personal identity. Dead as he is, Martin clings savagely to the idea of survival, inventing a rocky outcrop on which he can exist, inventing the conditions of that existence, re-creating his naval identity disc to prove that he is still himself, continually applying the intellect of which he is so impiously proud to obliterate and deny the fact of death. (p. 589)

The book seems to me, in all seriousness, as brilliant a conception as any fable in English prose. Perhaps the execution is not absolutely faultless, but it is impressive, with the interest finely sustained through nearly two hundred pages of ambiguity. Yet the novel is more than a technical tour de force. It has the organization of a poem and, like a good poem, its ultimate power lies less in the resources of its parts than in its scope as a whole. The symbols that it uses—black lightning, eating, the Chinese box—may not be uniformly compelling but they are integrated into a pattern which is, a pattern where the meaning is difficult to exhaust. This is where the book differs from its predecessors, in a sense transcending the mode of fable itself. In the earlier books the thesis to be conveyed is comparatively specific: however trenchantly expressed, however sensitively embodied, it remains finite and in consequence limited, what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. This one is richer because exploratory, a configuration of symbols rather than an allegory, and for this reason it will bear an intensity of attention that its predecessors could not sustain. Perhaps because it is exploratory it lacks a little of the clarity, and more of the warmth, of The Inheritors…. There is a degree of obscurity too about the symbol of the cellar, representing childhood terror, which seems to me either unnecessary or indicative of a limited but lurking incoherence. And there is some tenuity here and there, the result of conciseness, in the flashes of reality glimpsed in Martin's memories. But these are niggling criticisms. What impresses, beyond the qualification of any minor weakness, is the profundity and power of the emerging pattern, and the assurance that has left it to speak for itself. The book is arresting, with an originality all its own. It is also a penetrating comment on corruptions of consciousness which, however inveterate, are particularly in evidence today—some of them indeed, the less noxious, associated with our preference for fable over fiction.

This brings me back, uneasily, to my original point, that fable tends to tie a writer down within his conscious purposes, restraining him, while the freedom of fiction can draw him out beyond his ascertained abilities. In view of the level of Golding's achievement, especially here, it seems futile to insist that he will never be a major novelist, but the doubt must remain to taunt an admirer like myself. Obviously a man has to write in the vein that suits him best, so that it would be impertinent, and probably destructive, to urge a maker of fables to apply himself to fictions. (pp. 590-92)

To have published three such books as these in as many years, to be capable alike of the compassion of The Inheritors and the brilliance of Christopher Martin, to be able to write with the art and the succinctness that almost every page reveals—capacities of this order, in lean times like ours, inspire something close to awe. Already, working in a recalcitrant mode, he seems to me to have done more for the modern British novel than any of the recent novelists who have emerged. More, it may be, than all of them. (p. 592)