The fiercely obdurate quality of Golding's imaginative achievement—what has been called his poetic intensity—derives from his ability to construct solidly patterned novels on foundations of the most daring verbal modes. His technical range is great, encompassing material as diverse as a sailor's sea-washed body, the befuddled encounter of prelapsarian creatures with rapacious interlopers, an 18th-century sea voyage across the equator. Yet, however, heterodox his fictional topographies may be, his seminal themes, like those of other obsessional artists, are limited and homogeneous. Each of Golding's novels represents another face carved from his earliest, most deeply held conviction that the two signs of man are his belief in God and his capacity to kill. (p. 217)

Golding has taken upon himself the formidable task of arousing the religious impulse and restoring to this recalcitrant time the spiritual dimension which is the stuff of vital religious mythopoeia. The problem for...