BOOK (1954)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Perigee)

For an author nothing spells success more clearly than writing a book whose title enters the language. The tremendous feat was achieved by William Golding, the 20th-century British novelist and Nobel laureate responsible for the adapt-or-die survival story Lord of the Flies.

In keeping with the plot of Golding's novel, the title has come to symbolise the fragility of civilisation and the tendency for people, in particular children, to turn wayward and nasty in chaotic conditions.

Search the online news for the phrase 'Lord of the Flies' and more than 200 hits may roll up. Many reports play on the phrase's figurative meaning and concern delinquency.

One relates to the blandly named but provocative Golding memoir Men, Women & Now. The unpublished memoir, which recently surfaced, records that he once attempted rape - a subject that resonates because his classic novel centres on a group of schoolboys who revert to savagery.

At the opening of the novel named after an alias for Satan, a plane evacuating schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a tropical island. Only the boys, dominated by the charismatic, athletic Ralph, survive. On the beach, they find a shell they realise could be deployed as a horn to call meetings, and get organised but struggle to adjust.