Homer, Odyssey

Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen

Mary Renault, The King Must Die

Henry Treece, Electra

Tom Holt, Olympiad

Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

Gore Vidal, Creation

Hilary Bailey , Cassandra, Princess of Troy

William Golding, The Double Tongue

Robert Graves, I, Claudius

(the fourth Roman Emperor's 'memoirs' of his bloodthirsty forebears)

Ancient Rome

Peter Vansittart, Three Six Seven  (twilight of Roman Britain, late 4th century)

John Arden, Silence Among the Weapons  ("memoirs" of actor"s agent mixed up with Roman dictator Sulla in 1st century BC)

Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March

Anthony Burgess, The Kingdom of the Wicked  (Luke, Paul,and other early Christian missionaries)

"Memoirs"

Joseph Heller, God Knows  ("memoirs" of Old Testament King David)

Mary Renault, The King Must Die  ("memoirs" of King Theseus of Athens)

Gore Vidal, Creation  ("memoirs" of Persian diplomat who knew Socrates, Buddha and Confucius)

Stephen Marlowe, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus  (early disappointments and ironic triumph of unscrupulous adventurer-explorer)

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian  (reflections of 14th Roman Emperor and philosopher)

Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra  ("memoirs" of Philip II of Spain, in deranged old age)

Augusto Roa Bastos, I, The Supreme  ("memoirs" of Francia, 19th-century dictator of Paraguay)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch  (deathbed monologue of fanatical, deranged South American dictator)

People of the Past (powerful historical novels)

Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World  (19th-century South American religious community, communist, waiting for the Apocalypse)

William Golding, The Spire

Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard  (12-th century Paris: a monk falls in love with beautiful pupil)

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

Nicholas Monsarrat, Running Proud  (one of Columbus" sailors shipwrecked in New World, is taken for a God)

The Ancient World

Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo  ("memoirs" of actor-spy in 4th-century BC Greece)

Peter Green, Alcibiades His Armour  (Alcibiades, the Oscar Wilde of ancient Athens)

Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings  (memories of chief minister of warrior-pharaih Rameses II)

Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh  (Grant describes her own previous existence in ancient Egypt)

Henry Treece, Medea  (powerful evocation of myth-witch, scorned wife who murdered her children)

British novelist (1911-1993)

Golding worked in the theatre and served in the Royal Navy in World War II. He worked as a schoolmaster until Lord of the Flies brought him international fame in 1954. The story of that book (about choirboys reverting to savagery after being marooned on a desert island) is typical of all his work: an exploration of the dark side of human nature. He believed that homo sapiens is corrupt, that we destroy more than we create, that we are devilish without redemption. But instead of baldly stating this philosophy, he dressed it in allegories of the most unusual and fantastical kind. He pictured the devil engulfing not only choirboys on an island, but also (in other novels) a drowning sailor, a tribe of neanderthal people, the dean of a medieval cathedral, a boy growing up in 1960s Britain, and a group of 18th-century people sailing towards Australia. He evoked each of these situations with absolute conviction: few writers were better at suggesting the feel, taste, smell and sound of things, the texture of experience.

THE SPIRE  (1964) Inspired by a vision, medieval Dean Jocelin commissions for his cathedral a 400-foot spire. He intends it as proof of human aspirations towards God; his enemies see it as a symbol of vanity, the devil's work; the master-builder points out that as the cathedral's foundations are inadequate, the tower will bring the whole building crashing down. Jocelin overrides all objections, the work proceeds -- Golding gives fascinating, vertigo-inducing detail of medieval building techniques -- and the higher the spire rises the more people are destroyed. In the end the struggle between God and the devil takes over Jocelin's own self. In truly medieval manner, his brain and body become a battleground, and the issue moves from the tower to questions of his own moral integrity and saintliness.

Golding's novels are Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire, The Pyramid, Darkness Visible, the trilogy (about an ill-assorted cargo of passengers on a voyage to 18th-century Australia) Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, and The Paper Men. The Scorpion God is a collection of three long stories, one based on his stage-comedy The Brass Butterfly, about a crazy inventor trying to interest a decadent Roman ruler of Egypt in steam power.

READ ON

Lord of the Flies (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

The Inheritors (a brilliantly imagined story of the coming of Homo sapiens, seen from the standpoint of the gentle ape-people they exterminate)

To The Spire : John Barth, Giles Goat-boy (a fantasy, partly satirical, about a professor who brings a child up with no company but goats, trying to avoid contamintating him with human original sin) Peter Benson, Odo's Hanging (brilliant novel about the clash between Bishop Odo, commissioning a wall-hanging to commemorate the accession of William the Conqueror, and Tuvold, the genius-craftsman who wants to do things his way) Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldsmund (which parallels both the good/evil theme and the medieval craft-background of The Spire)

To Lord of the Flies : Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

To the Australian trilogy : Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

(choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

Evil and Children (childish innocence an ideal vessel for evil - and sometimes, the children themselves are not so innocent)

Susan Hill, I"m the King of the Castle  (devil-child, jealous of rival, torments the life fronm him)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw  (neurotic governess tries to protect two innocent charges against half-sensed, wholly evil ghosts)

Stephen King, Carrie  (bullied girl in junior high school uses Devil"s power to take revenge)

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos  (alien race seeks to capture England by breeding race of hyper-intelligent, soulless children)

Surviving (shipwreck or desertion the door to new adventure)

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout  (English children marooned in Australian outback, taught survival by Aboriginal boy)

Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe  (18th-century shipwrecked sailor builds new life on desert island)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver"s Travels  (18th-century sailor tries to teach Europena "culture" in fantasy lands he visits)

Jim Crace, Signals of Distress

The Devil (takes many forms and can"t be resisted - or can he?)

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

James Blish, Black Easter  (nuclear scientists enlists Devil"s help in bringing about Armageddon)

Fay Weldon, The Heart of England  (evil forces in Glastonbury countryside interfere with yuppie lives)

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick  (bored Connecticut housewives play with witchcraft - and raise the Devil)

The Wilderness (surviving the most inhospitable areas of Earth)

Brian Moore, Black Robe  (17th-century Jesuit among 17th-century Indians: bloody, hopeless culture-clash)

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra  (battle for survival - and against unrelenting evil - on the empty planet Venus)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (African jungle used as metaphor for the evil in humanity)

Patrick White, Voss  (half-crazy explorer leads doomed 19th-century expedition into heart of Australia)

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)