Perhaps it’s no surprise that it should become a cult classic of the 60s, to be read as avidly as Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mocking Bird and On the Road. A strange kind of Eden becomes a desolate portrait of life in a post-nuclear world. Bleak and specific, but universal, fusing rage and grief, Lord of the Flies is both a novel of the 1950s, and for all time. Second and third, Lord of the Flies presents a view of humanity unimaginable before the horrors of Nazi Europe, and then plunges into speculations about mankind in the state of nature. He knows how they tick, and draws on his own experience to explore the terrifying breakdown of their community. The main players – Ralph, Jack and Piggy – represent archetypes of English schoolboy, but Golding gets under their skin and makes them real. First, it’s a brilliantly observed study of adolescents untethered from rules and conventions. Lord of the Flies (whose title derives from one transcription of “Beelzebub”) is the work of an English teacher with a taste for big themes, and engages the reader at three levels. But this is a far cry from the world of Robinson Crusoe or Long John Silver. The upshot: a post-apocalyptic, dystopian survivor-fantasy about a bunch of pre-teen and teenage boys on a remote tropical island. His wife, Ann, who played a crucial role in his creative life, suggested RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island as a source of inspiration. However, Lord of the Flies remains both universal and yet profoundly English, with nods to Defoe, Stevenson and Jack London ( 2, 24 and 35 in this series).īy the 1950s, now teaching at a boys’ grammar school, Golding was struggling to make his way as a novelist, having had a volume of poems published in 1934. His experiences at Walcheren in 1944 nurtured an appetite for quasi-medieval extremes, mixing fiction and philosophy, which is not always a recipe for success in novels. L ike all the recent novels in this list (69-73), Lord of the Flies owes much of its dark power and impetus to the second world war, in which Golding served as a young naval officer.
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