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Poor William Golding. Doomed to be remembered for that one classic allegory, Lord of the Flies — which as a teenager I found far too symbolic and savage to be much fun. (Why are allegories so beloved of school syllabuses? It took me years to recover from Animal Farm and discover that I loved George Orwell.)

Fifteen years before I became a writer, Rites of Passage (which won the 1980 Booker Prize) was one of my favourite novels, and its formal perfection still fills me with admiration. First, there is the closed world of the ship’s voyage (from “Old England to the Antipodes” as the narrator reports, full of priggish jollity). All strata of early Victorian society are represented, pushed to the extreme of type, and examined at leisure. This is also a first-person narrative and coming-of-age novel, in which the horrific rite of passage involves the torture and death of a young cleric, and the “hero’s” tacit participation therein.

Within the creaky, leaky walls of the ship, dramas of religion, class, and sex are played out in some of the most perfect prose I have read, without a single extraneous phrase. Golding uses his narrator’s formality of expression to hold the reader at arm's length, yet the action is vivid enough to cause seasickness. And occasionally it is very funny.

Golding’s ability to inhabit fully the voice of a difficult narrator is a feat he manages again and again — in The Inheritors, he brings to life one of the last remaining bands of Neanderthals, telling the story from the perspective of Lok, their leader. It is a heartbreaking novel, rich and sad and full of humanity. I can't think of any other writer who could have pulled it off.

One to read: To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy (1980-89, which includes Rites of Passage)

Meg Rosoff is a prizewinning children’s author. Born in Boston, she worked in publishing in New York and advertising in London before her first novel, How I Live Now, about a group of children learning to survive in a war-scarred future England, was published in 2004. Her second, Just in Case, won the Carnegie Medal. She has also written a picture book with Sophie Blackall, Meet Wild Boars.

More on William Golding

Read his obituary, printed in the Times on June 21, 1993

Listen to his Nobel lecture on December 7, 1983

Play a Lord of the Flies game

The William Golding website

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