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510 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present<br />

Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Aldous Huxley’s<br />

Brave New World, Golding’s Lord of the Flies has been described as a<br />

dystopia. Instead of showing an optimistic picture of a perfect world,<br />

Golding depicts a pessimistic picture of an imperfect world. The novel<br />

is also a revision of the desert-island myth originating in Robinson<br />

Crusoe and continued in The Coral Island (1857), a novel for boys<br />

written by R.M. Ballantyne. Ballantyne shows individuals who maintain<br />

their humanity in uncivilised places because of their innate goodness<br />

and virtue. Golding’s novel shows the reverse.<br />

Golding explores related themes of ‘decline and fall’ in several<br />

other major novels. In The Inheritors (1955) he examines the evolution<br />

of man in primeval times and shows how one tribe supersedes another<br />

because it can perform more evil deeds. This is also one of the major<br />

explorations of the relationship between language, thought and action<br />

in the modern novel. Free Fall(1959) explores man’s capacity to choose<br />

between good and evil, demonstrating how the fall from grace is not<br />

predetermined but a matter of human choice. Other novels include<br />

The Spire (1964), and Rites of Passage (1980), the first of a trilogy<br />

which takes the narrative of an early sea journey to the Antipodes as<br />

a metaphor for the progress of the soul. The trilogy was completed<br />

with Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989).<br />

In 1983 William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.<br />

He is in the great tradition of the storyteller, and is not afraid to point<br />

up a moral truth while keeping the reader entertained. His final work,<br />

the posthumously published, nearly complete The Double Tongue<br />

(1995) opens up new territory (a female narrator as central character,<br />

an ancient Greek setting) and confirms Golding as one of the great<br />

explorers of myth, and of how truth and myth interrelate. All his<br />

works contrast human potential and the reality of human achievement.<br />

As the ‘goddess’ of his final novel wonders, watching herself being<br />

presented to the world as a goddess, by Ionides, a cynic and atheist:<br />

I suppose we all change. I had believed in the Olympians, all<br />

twelve of them. How much did I believe now, after years of<br />

hearing Ionides inventing speeches for me? How much after years<br />

of inventing them myself? How much after years of remembering<br />

that the god had raped me, years of part-belief, of searching for<br />

a proof that all I had believed in was a living fact and if twelve

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