Does this device succeed? Do the arguments cohere? You may not have a vote

Does this device succeed? Do the arguments cohere? You may not have a vote in November; but you have one on this page.Icon Books, £7.99. It can be difficult finally to prove that a cause has a consequence. Indeed, Golding said that this was the biggest of the arguments he had with his father. Golding senior saw cause and consequence as rationally and unquestionably related. Golding junior remembered very clearly that he just could not accept that. But, in any case, it is likely that Lord of the Flies has had a big impact on subsequent fiction “about” children.Having proved that a full-time and arduous job was positively helpful to creating major fiction, Golding, in true English awkward-squad fashion, went on to prove the opposite.

The bounty from the book set him free to write full time, and although that time, as happens with many writers, was often filled up with doubt, depression, drift and drink, his wide intellectual interests and the corresponding intellectual creativity of Anne sustained the best of him again and again. “I loved to walk with my son on paths which Neanderthal man had loped along so many tens of thousands of years ago” – and indeed, for Golding himself, the imaginative feat of The Inheritors, set in prehistoric times, outreached Lord of the Flies.The Spire, of course, was in effect his parish church. He saw it through the window every teaching day, and “I was always puzzled by it It seemed an impossibility given 13th-century technology. I wanted to find out how people did it.”He turned to his life as a naval commander and then as a bold yachtsman before he and Anne, in 1972, were run down in a fog in the English Channel and were lucky to escape with their lives “What would those people have? Block and tackle I knew all about that What would sailors do? I copied that It seems to work. People who read The Spire believe it…”The central character in The Spire is Jocelin, a Dean whose vision or hubris it is to build the spire against all odds An act of will? Of faith. Golding, when I met him then, and again for the much longer period of time the second film took, was never to abandon a belief which could be called religious. “The history of man and the history of religion are almost the same.”If Golding had one abiding interest, both intellectual and emotional, it was the sea.

“The sea has this almost unimaginable depth in it – crystalline, Shelley would say – it is what it is…” We were sitting on a broad rock, waves pounded, leaden Channel sea all before us. “If it is an image of anything, it is an image of our unconscious, we have the sea in us. The sea is not a single image, it is anything the human mind could discover.”And, as it were, out of the sea came the idea for a novel which once again pitched him to great heights of acclaim and popularity. He read about an English parson aboard ship in the Bay of Bengal “who had gone naked among the sailors or the sailors had stripped him naked…” He went to his cabin and turned his face to the wall and set himself to die. “Lord Wellington came to see him and said, ‘You’ll be a better vicar for all this, buck up…’” But the man would listen to no one and died, and that wormed its way into Rites of Passage, another story.Golding was rhapsodic about “the story”.