William Golding’s legacy

Is a nightmarish vision of society William Golding’s chief legacy? The place of Lord of The Flies on the curriculum over the decades has ensured that Golding’s warnings about human instinct have reached millions. It has been filmed, re-written, drawn and generally parodied countless times. Today much is made of a starkly divided society riven with envy, competitiveness and violence. Of course it’s all there in Golding’s micro-communities – the base savagery in Lord of The Flies, the fear of the ‘other’ in The Inheritors, the rigid hierarchy on board ship in Rites of Passage