The story goes that William Golding thought of his breakthrough novel, Lord of the Flies , first in ‘two pictures’. “One was of a little boy standing on his head in the sand, delighted to be at last on a real coral island, and the other was of the same little boy being hunted down like a pig by the savages the children had turned into.”
John Carey mentions this in his biography of Golding (titled The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies ) and says the writer felt that if he joined the two pictures the story would “flow naturally.”
Descent into chaos
First published in 1954, it is a story of survival, a haunting tale of a group of young boys stranded on a desert island. When a plane crashes on a remote island, Ralph and ‘Piggy’ are coming to terms with the situation, happy they are alive, and amazed that they are without grown-ups.
But as each of the boys tries to wrest control of the situation, things descend into chaos — and savagery. With no boundaries earmarked and no rules to follow, the boys, initially delighted, soon struggle to cope.
Golding peels off their covers to show what they are and can be: sometimes empathetic, at other times monstrous. As the darkest recesses of the mind are revealed, it gives us a glimpse of human behaviour, its capacity for good and evil, for instance.
A teacher, Golding was an astute observer of students in the classroom and beyond. When one of the boys, the prophetic Simon, comes across the severed head of a pig stuck in a pole, it seems to him, “the half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life...They assured Simon that everything was a bad business.”
The Golding centenary edition (he was born in 1911) of the book has a brilliant introduction by Stephen King. Growing up in a small farming community in New England, King writes that he went to the local library, looking for good books, and asked, “Do you have any stories about how kids really are?”
The librarian picked out a book from the adults’ section and told him to try it but to never tell who had given it to him. For King, Lord of the Flies was one of the first books with hands — “strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, ‘This is not just entertainment; it’s life or death.”’
Golding himself would write an interpretative essay, Fable , explaining the book’s primary theme of human frailty. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983 “for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today.”
This holds particularly true for Lord of the Flies , which he found so difficult to publish.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
