When I saw that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was turning 70, I bought myself a new copy. I hadn’t read it for a while—30 years, give or take—and I wondered what its effects would be now that I, unlike the book’s protagonists and most of us when we first read it, am a grown-up. I picked up a recent-ish paperback issued by Faber, the British publishing house that bought the manuscript from Golding in 1954, offering him an advance of £60 for his debut novel, after it had been rejected by at least six others.
The new cover was bright red and featured faux-naïf drawings of naked child warriors scattered at jaunty angles, and surrounded by butterflies, lizards and yellow tulips. Or no, perhaps those were flames. Regardless, it was a cheerier cover than the one I remembered from our bookshelf as a child, which was white and featured a grim image of a pig’s head impaled on a stick, painted in greys, blacks and, for the blood dripping from its eyes, red.
The pig’s head is important, as are the naked child warriors and the flames, as you probably remember if you studied Lord of the Flies at school, which is quite likely: it has consistently been selected as a set text in the UK—at A-level, O-level and GCSE—since its publication. The writer Ian McEwan, in an essay published in a 1986 collection celebrating Golding’s 75th birthday, recalled reading Lord of the Flies at boarding school when he was 13; he was surprised to discover that “Golding knew all about us”.
Nor is it just British children who have studied it: the book has been translated into more than 30 languages. When Golding was presented with the Nobel Prize in 1983 by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf told him: “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” (The cruelty of that “had to”!)
The book has had a long half-life in popular culture, too. It has been turned into one reasonably good film, Peter Brook’s starkly monochrome 1963 adaptation; one criminally cheesy one, Harry Hook’s 1990 take, starring Balthazar Getty; and has inspired numerous other works, from the recent TV drama Yellowjackets, which transposes the dynamic to an all-girls’ football team, to the long-running reality-TV show Survivor.
To celebrate its 70 years this autumn, Faber released a graphic-novel version and, as I write, a new four-part BBC adaptation is filming in Malaysia, written by the British screenwriter Jack Thorne. At the announcement, Thorne said that he’d read the book with his mother as a boy, and that it “left a scar on me like no other”.
In 2018, The Independent included Lord of the Flies in a list of “Seven books our English teachers tortured us with”, but for Golding’s book this was unusually and specifically true. As an English teacher himself, at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, a boys’ grammar in Salisbury—a job he stuck out to support his wife and two children, with undisguised reluctance—Golding often wrote during lessons. He would set work, then scribble away furtively in exercise books under his desk.
Nor was he afraid to experiment on his pupils: John Carey’s 2009 biography, William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, describes a school trip to a Neolithic earthworks during which “Scruff”—as Golding was known, owing to his dishevelled jackets and scraggly beard—divided his charges into two groups, one told to defend the earthworks, the other to attack it. “It occurred to more than one boy that Golding stirred up antagonism between them in order to observe their reactions,” Carey notes.
It seems perfectly reasonable that a book about children—or really, though it’s not fashionable to make the distinction, about boys—should be read at a time of life when their characteristics and behaviours, if not their particular circumstances, are most easily recognised in ourselves. Here, on page one, is handsome, fair-haired Ralph, who clambers out of the jungle after part of the plane in which he and other English schoolboys have been travelling—to an unknown destination, while being evacuated from a nuclear war—has crashed on a nameless desert island.
Before the end of this first page there’s another child, a “fat boy” whose grammar betrays the fact that he isn’t as posh as the others. He asks that Ralph does not reveal his hated nickname, “Piggy”, to the other survivors; Ralph immediately calls him Piggy, of course—but so too, with insidious callousness, does the omniscient narrator, making us immediate co-conspirators. (We never find out his real name.) Completing an uneasy triumvirate is haughty head chorister Jack.
The boys are separated from the adult world, though not, importantly, deprived of sustenance: they have fruit, water and as many pigs as they can catch and kill. Golding’s novel is resolutely not concerned with survival in its most basic terms. Rather, it is a thought experiment about how a society might function with, as Ralph enthusiastically observes, “No grown-ups!”
After he’s voted in as leader, Ralph, disdainful yet heedful of Piggy’s sensible counsel, attempts to implement a rules-based system to improve their chances of rescue. Authority is outsourced to a talismanic seashell, a conch, which Ralph uses to summon the other boys and which, it is mutually agreed, gives its bearer the licence to speak.
Jack, as the leader of a quasi-comic pack of choirboys, whom we first encounter staggering up the sun-baked beach in caps, capes and “hambone frills”, is at first compliant, though subservience makes him bristle. Later, as mania, or desperation—or perhaps it is a form of extreme boredom—sets in, Jack will lead a darker, wilder, breakaway faction and the choirboys will swap their hats and cloaks for warpaint and spears.
When we read Lord of the Flies at 12 or 13, we are told it is an allegory about power. If we want to put it bluntly—and we’re 12, so of course we do—we might say that Ralph represents democracy; Piggy is scientific rationalism; Jack, totalitarianism. I haven’t yet mentioned Simon, a small, mystical boy, prone to epileptic fits, whom you may remember (though I’ll admit I’d forgotten all about him). It is Simon who encounters the pig’s head mounted on a stick, which Jack’s choirboys-turned-hunters have left as an offering to a beast they imagine is lurking at the top of a mountain.
It is Simon, or his subconscious, who converses with the pig’s-head demon, whose name, a literal translation of the Hebrew-derived “Beelzebub”, also became that of the book itself (chosen not by Golding but by a canny editor at Faber: Golding’s submitted manuscript bore the far more humdrum title Strangers from Within). Simon, we could think, represents spirituality; naturally, and with Christ-like foresight, he meets a grisly end.
We might also have been asked, as students, to consider the biographical context, to think about how Golding’s life experiences lurk in the pages. The critic Harold Bloom, writing in 2008, called the book “essentially a period piece”, seeing it as a barely digested regurgitation of Golding’s time serving as a lieutenant in the British Navy in World War II, during which he hunted the Atlantic for the Bismarck and took part in the Normandy landings.
Golding himself connected his observations of fascism—that it is an internal force rather than an external one—to the depravities he portrayed in the book: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature,” he once wrote. Though Bloom was dismissive of the book’s quality (“no Gulliver’s Travels”, he sniffed), he at least acknowledged its fabulistic power: “Any well-told tale of a reversion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant in the early 21st century.”
It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do.
“As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)
In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults—“‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’”—McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however—and you must!—the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.
In his covering letter to the publisher Jonathan Cape, who expressed interest in taking on Lord of the Flies (though, like most of the others, went on to reject it), Golding referred to it as a book “for grown-ups”. This might have been worth stating explicitly, as he had conceived it as a response to a popular children’s book, The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, in which the three child protagonists, Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (could Piggy be a secret Peterkin?), are also shipwrecked and alone.
This trio behaves in a civilised—or rather, civilising—manner: fending off cannibals and pirates and even spreading a bit of Christianity while they’re at it. Golding is said to have turned to his wife Ann after reading it as a bedtime story one evening, and asked: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?”
Reading Lord of the Flies when you’re younger, its essential truth is undisputed: as McEwan wrote, he knew all about us. But to an adult readership, “how children really would behave” becomes something of a debate. In 2015, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sought a peculiarly literal refutation of Golding’s supposition, unearthing a 1966 newspaper story about six Tongan boys who’d been shipwrecked on an islet in the Pacific for a year, but didn’t go mad and kill each other.
“Their days began and ended with song and prayer,” Bregman wrote in The Guardian. It’s a strangely joyless thing to do to a book: yes, yes, children might very well not descend into bloodlust, but the tension comes from our fear, our suspicion—or, if we excavate deep enough—our knowledge, that they could.
Since I’ve been a parent and have had cause to observe children more closely, I’ve seen many a boy—and, only proving the rule, the odd girl—happily thwacking the heads off daffodils or casually squashing ants. In an isolated scene in Lord of the Flies, another young boy, Henry, plays with tiny sea creatures he spots in the encroaching tide, making lines and channels with a stick to determine their route through the sand. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness,” writes Golding, “as he felt himself exercising control over living things.” Who hasn’t seen, or can’t imagine, a child doing exactly that? What is the brutal conclusion of the book but this same impulse in extremis?
When I read Lord of the Flies this time, it was teeming with things I had been oblivious to, or at least less consciously aware of, as a child. First, the extent to which it simmers with a sublimated sexual energy. The boys are in prepubescence, or early puberty, and forces are operating on them that they do not yet fully understand (nor was this aspect emphasised to me or the rest of my class of equally bewildered pre-teen girls).
They study each other’s bodies, sometimes with a voyeuristic appetite, as when Ralph watches Jack: “His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph glanced at them admiringly.” Towards the end, Ralph thinks of Jack almost like a vengeful lover: “Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.”
In fact, the book is full of suggestive imagery, from the “great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly” on which Ralph builds the first meeting place, to the equally phallic “bold, pink bastion” upon which Jack builds his rival fort at the other end of the beach. The conch shell itself is… well, you decide: “In colour the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay 18 inches of shell…” Who can blame Piggy when, overcome, he “paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands”?
The whole island pulsates with the boys’ urges, like a kind of hormonally supercharged enactment of Gaia Theory (it was Golding, in fact, who suggested “Gaia”, the Greek goddess of the Earth, to his friend James Lovelock for the name of his scientific idea of organic unity, clearly having more of a knack for titles that were not his own). Oh! And yes, the Greeks. They’re easier to spot when you’re grown up too, and when you know Golding was a big fan, although the book’s stark structure, adhering to the convention of Greek tragedy by starting in media res, was not his idea at all.
In fact, it was among several improvements made by Golding’s editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, who encouraged the excision of the opening chapters that described the nuclear war from which the boys have escaped, as well as removing a whole heap of commas, “which,” as Monteith later recalled, “studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf”. It was also Monteith who got the book published at all, having famously rescued it from the slush pile as a junior editor, after a first reader had already deemed it “rubbish and dull” and “pointless”, and marked it with a circled “R” for “reject”.
But back to those Greeks: Piggy wailing and ignored, is a chubby, doomed Cassandra, the prophetess fated not to be believed; or, as he grasps for his smashed spectacles, now reduced to a single lens, he’s the three Graeae, Gaia’s granddaughters, after Perseus steals their one shared eye. Or how about Jack’s tribe stealing fire from their rivals, like Prometheus; then being condemned, like him, to a rock in the sea?
And what do we make of the boys falling on a mother pig feeding her young and stabbing her with sharpened sticks—one up her anus (how is that explained to schoolkids?)—until she “collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her”? This has echoes of Circe turning Odysseus’s sailors into swine, or Oedipus having sex with his mother, and, reading it now, it’s the book’s most shocking scene.
Particularly shocking if you’re a mother, maybe. Mothers in Lord of the Flies are dispatched, like the sow, with savage coldness. Ralph emerges from the jungle’s “scar”—the gap in the jungle left by the aeroplane’s passenger compartment, which has been swept back out to sea—like a baby from a Caesarean section, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” as Macduff had it. (If you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a baby extracted directly from your abdomen, “ripped” is very much the word.)
It’s only Piggy—the ill-fated Piggy—who displays any nascent paternal, or maternal, instincts, keeping track of the younger boys, the “littl’uns”, and thinking about their welfare. He is also the only one to refer to a woman, his aunt; one of Ralph’s first questions of him is, “What’s your father?” Naturally Piggy is ignored, causing him to wear “the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of children”. (Ah, I know it well!) In a 1985 interview with his biographer Carey, Golding said of his own mother, Mildred, “I gave her a hell of a time.” In what is perhaps the darkest of his sardonic riffs, he dedicated the book to his parents.
I’m not sure I remembered there being jokes in the book at all, to be honest. But Golding, who, despite pronounced depressive episodes, could also be something of a hoot—promoting her own memoir in 2010, his daughter Judy called him “a very warm person, and tremendously funny”—has put in plenty. There’s a peculiar outburst from Ralph about meetings that is painfully recognisable: “Don’t we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk,” he rants. “Someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they’d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.” One can only be relieved that Golding, who died in 1993 aged 81, was spared the joys of Microsoft Teams.
In the novel, the character who is most obviously comic is Jack, the head chorister who challenges Ralph for authority (in Brook’s film it’s Piggy, played by 11-year-old Hugh Edwards, in his quite deservedly one and only film role, which he got by writing a letter to the director that started, “Dear Sir, I am fat and wear spectacles”). It is Jack who speaks the ingeniously daft line, “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything,” and is there not something inherently hilarious about him suggesting he be chief because he can “sing C sharp”?
But it is also Jack who gets seized with the urge to kill, who initiates the frenzies that lead to the deaths of Simon and Piggy, and nearly to Ralph’s, and proves, when in power, the most dangerous. (Entirely unrelated to Jack’s risibly self-important boast, Donald Trump claims to have won 18 golf-club championships, Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great and Kim Jong Il, as we all know, invented the hamburger.)
Which is how we get to the most frightening aspect of Lord of the Flies. At the end of the book, the boys are rescued by a British Navy cutter, which spots the smoke rising from the island that they have set on fire. At the sight of an adult, a smartly dressed naval officer, just as Golding himself once was, the survivors start to sob, and in Ralph’s case, to weep “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”. In a kind of literary crash zoom, the reader is yanked out of the protagonists’ proximity, and they once again become “little boys”. We are back with the adults because this is, after all, “a book for grown-ups”. The naval officer is unable to deal with their outpouring and looks away.
And are we, his fellow grown-ups, any more equipped to make sense of it? Well, we know that there’s a nuclear war happening out beyond the island and that the adults have made no better a fist of things than the children. The stakes have only got higher, and the weapons more devastating. But we also know, from our own lived experience, that being an adult is as much of a construct as being a child; our psychology gets no more complex, our instincts no better. During the pandemic, as those in positions of authority sold contracts to their friends and partied through the funerals, I regularly found myself muttering, like a kind of deranged mantra, “Where are the grown-ups?” as though forgetting that, technically, I was one, too.
In 1974, Golding wrote an entry in his journal suggesting that, as the decades had passed, he’d come to see the book in even bleaker terms. “Twenty years after writing Lord of the Flies, I now see that Ralph who weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, was weeping for an age that is passing,” he wrote. “Seen from the other side, the heart of man is not dark, but flamelit and terrible. Perhaps then Jack and his hunters had the heart of the matter after all.”
The most devastating metaphor for this in the book comes in the form of the monster at the top of the mountain. The possibility of its existence has morphed from a folkloric fear into a mechanism with which Jack can ensure compliance from his subjects (weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). But the monster isn’t really a monster, but a man, or was once: it’s the rotting body of a parachutist who, like the boys, has fallen from the sky. They think he’s a living monster because the wind catches the dead man’s chute every so often, causing his head and torso to lift up and down, “so as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain-top and bowed and sank and bowed again”.
Not only are adults not going to save you, the dead pilot’s terrible dance seems to say, but they’re all but useless, spending their time performing hollow, empty gestures, like brainless marionettes. As a parody of adult civility, it is chilling and grotesque. Perhaps, this is something that, when we’re young, we also fear, suspect, or—if we dare to excavate deep enough—know. But it’s not until later in life that we recognise it as a kind of dreadful truth. Adults, as we might once have imagined them, don’t really exist; we are all no more than scared, confused, vicious children of different sizes. No grown-ups.
