Lord of the Flies reveals Golding as the supreme revoker, the most obvious abrogator in modern literature, employing the dark discoveries of our century to disclaim the vapid innocence of its predecessor. The target is R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island and Golding points up the ironic contrast by lifting even the names of his boys from the earlier work. Ballantyne's book could be used as a document in the history of ideas, reflecting as it does a Victorian euphoria, a conviction that the world is a rational place where problems arise so that sensible, decent men can solve them. God has his place in this world but his adversary is pleasingly absent and, with him, the sin which is his hold on humanity. (pp. 139-40)

Lord of the Flies was conceived in a very different moral landscape and Golding himself tells us that the horrors of the...