If you can determine an authors personality from their work, William Golding is not a man I would ever want to meet. I can’t imagine him being anything but a bore. If it was the 50s I’m sure he’d have something interesting to say (an interesting underlying message) but he would take too long to get to the point and offer no intrigue as to what the message actually was. That was what I felt about this book. It offered up nothing about human nature that I didn’t already know – and it was offered to me in the most tedious manner possible. I didn’t care about the characters, I wasn’t at all intrigued and the ending was so unbelievably cliche that it reminded me of finishing my stories at primary school with “and I woke up. It was all a dream”.

The good point: if you didn’t know this about human nature, you would get something out of it but it’s a dull ride to get there.