book reviews of lord of the flies

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Lord of the flies, common sense media reviewers.

Gripping story of marooned schoolboys and mob mentality.

Lord of the Flies book cover: Title in white letters on red background with leaves and reaching light-skinned hands in the foreground and two light-skinned boys standing on either side of the red background

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

The book's basic premise is that some people, depr

The novel raises questions about personal choice a

Ralph is the main character who's elected leader i

The British schoolboys depicted in the novel are W

One boy is bullied. Two characters are murdered: O

A taunt includes calling a character's asthma "ass

Educational Value

The book's basic premise is that some people, deprived of the rules and restrictions of society, will revert to barbaric behavior. This central conflict between nature versus nurture when it comes to morality is found on every page. Readers will also learn something about survival on an unpopulated island.

Positive Messages

The novel raises questions about personal choice and individual humanity in appalling situations. People are capable of selflessness, even when their own lives are at stake. There are times when it's critical to put the needs of the group ahead of individual needs or wants.

Positive Role Models

Ralph is the main character who's elected leader in the name of staying "civilized." He thinks strategically and shows compassion and perseverance, but his motives are questionable, and he does not succeed in his leadership of the group. Piggy, who is brainy and logical, represents the rational side of human beings; unfortunately, he's also deeply unpopular. Only Simon, who looks after the younger boys, seems naturally kind and good, as if born that way. Jack seeks power ruthlessly, but is charismatic, so he's able to command leadership, even when it results in more chaos. Other characters represent baser, more violent human impulses or the innocence of children. The characters, and how they relate to one another, underscore the value of ethics in collaborative situations.

Diverse Representations

The British schoolboys depicted in the novel are White. Their descent into "savagery," a term used repeatedly throughout the book, relies on racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas being more violent and less civilized. The character Jack explicitly differentiates between "savages" and the English, suggesting that only the English know how to "have rules and obey them" and "are best at everything." A boy described as fat is nicknamed Piggy. He also has asthma. For those reasons, he's viewed as weak by the others. Women are not present and are only mentioned when the boys miss their mothers. The comparison to tying their hair back like "a girl" is used in a derogatory manner by the boys.

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Violence & Scariness

One boy is bullied. Two characters are murdered: One is beat to death and another falls to his death after being hit by a boulder pushed by one of the other boys. The acts are described in detail. Frequent mention of blood. Brief torture sequence. Boys hunt a pig and poke a sharp stick up its rear end while it's still alive. The setting and atmosphere are fraught with the potential for violence.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A taunt includes calling a character's asthma "ass-mar."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Lord of the Flies has been described as dark, brutal, pessimistic, and tragic. Written from the point of view of British author William Golding, the novel tells the story of a group of White British school boys who survive after their plane crash lands on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. The boys bully and eventually kill two members of their group, one in a brutal, frenzied beating, in the other murder, a character causes a boy to fall off a cliff. Both scenes are described in bloody detail. The book often compares being "civilized" with Britishness, while the boys' violent behavior is depicted as more primitive and draws on negative stereotypes of Indigenous peoples -- a false idea that was historically used to justify the colonization and oppression of people in places such as Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The story deals with a fundamental issue of humanity: Are people naturally prone to evil? This and other issues in the novel are well-suited for parent-child discussion.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

Parents say (12)
Kids say (111)

Based on 12 parent reviews

Great book for deep discussion

The classic of savagery, what's the story.

In LORD OF THE FLIES, a group of British schoolboys is marooned on a tropical island and left to fend for themselves, unsupervised by any adults. At first, the boys enjoy their freedom, playing and exploring the island. But soon the group splits into two factions: those who try to preserve the discipline and order they've learned from society, and those who choose to give in to every instinct and impulse, no matter how chaotic or cruel.

Is It Any Good?

This novel has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1954, and when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Golding was lauded for his deep concern for humanity. Today, Lord of the Flies remains a staple of school reading lists, although some of its dated views about the nature of savagery are worth reexamining and discussing. Golding's prose is unadorned and straightforward, and the result is page-turning entertainment -- as well as a highly thought-provoking work of literature.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Lord of the Flies is considered a classic and is often required reading in school. Why do you think that is? Are there aspects of the novel that seem dated now? How does the depiction of the boys' bad behavior rely on stereotypes?

The boys on the island hope to survive their ordeal. How do they persevere through their difficult circumstances? What helps them survive?

Do you think people are born "good" or "evil" -- is our behavior always the result of choice? How is it that good people are capable of bad behavior, and vice versa? How do you think you might behave under the circumstances of the novel?

Is it always best to sacrifice your own wants and needs for the common good of a community? What are some examples of when characters show compassion ? What effect does compassion have on the characters and the events of this story?

What do you think some of the prominent elements of the story -- the conch, Piggy's glasses, the sow's head, the island's "beast" -- might symbolize?

Book Details

Author : William Golding
Genre : Literary Fiction
Topics : Adventures , Friendship
Character Strengths : Compassion , Perseverance
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Perigree
Publication date : January 1, 1954
Number of pages : 304
Last updated : August 16, 2023

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Man as an Island

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By William Boyd

July 16, 2010

In the late 1960s, some 15 years after the publication of “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding confessed to a friend that he resented the novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to what he thought of as a minor book, a book that had made him a classic in his lifetime, which was “a joke,” and that the money he had gained from it was “Monopoly money” because he hadn’t really earned it. Golding was drinking heavily at the time (he had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism) and one may have to take his bitterness advisedly, but these remarks reveal an interesting artistic conundrum. What is it like to owe virtually your entire reputation as a writer to a single book? One thinks of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller — to cite only the 20th-century American exemplars — but such one-book writers are legion in all literatures. John Carey seems to allude to the category in this biography’s subtitle (even though Carey eventually disputes the implication). However, if anyone thinks of William Golding today, it is almost certain that his name will be conjoined with his extraordinary first novel.

A blessing and then a curse of some sort — though by the time the book finally appeared in 1954, Golding wouldn’t have cared about any downside. He was a 42-year-old provincial schoolteacher, desperate merely to have a novel published (it was the fourth book he had written, incidentally); renown and wealth were not even remotely considered. In fact, even “Lord of the Flies” was rejected by many publishers before an alert junior editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith, saw its potential and encouraged Golding to make changes. By 1980, sales in the United States alone had reached seven million.

Golding, to other writers, is a model of the late starter (along with Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark). You don’t need to be young to make your name, so his career asserts, and once Golding had achieved that first success it never really left him. “Lord of the Flies” was swiftly followed by “The Inheritors” (1955) and “Pincher Martin” (1956), both published to great, if not universal, acclaim. A new and highly distinctive voice seemed to have arrived in contemporary British literature. The critical reception was not always so favorable for subsequent novels ( “Free Fall,” in 1959, suffered a near-unanimous pasting), but it is fair to say that Golding’s life as a writer was forever financially secure thanks to the rock-solid, never-ending sales of “Lord of the Flies.”

Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. He was only eight years younger than Evelyn Waugh and is effectively part of that generation of English novelists (including Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley) who had reached their maturity by the time of World War II. But we never think of Golding in their company because his success as a writer was entirely postwar — he seems in some way more modern and contemporary.

Golding joined the navy a year after war broke out (he was already married with a child). At D-Day in 1944 and the Battle of Walcheren some months later, he was in command of a rocket-firing landing craft, a vessel designed to deliver a terrifying “shock and awe”-style blanket barrage of thousands of small deadly rockets. Golding, operating the firing mechanism on the bridge of his ship, clearly saw the indiscriminate, devastating effect of the wall of fire and destruction that was unleashed as his myriad rockets erupted on beachheads and coastal villages.

He survived the war unharmed and with some reluctance went back to the tedium of schoolmastering in Wiltshire. Carey makes the valid point that his war in the navy was profoundly destabilizing for him in various ways (both personally and artistically), and many of the key themes in his work can be traced to these formative and disturbing experiences.

Carey summarizes the abiding obsession in the novels as the collision of “the spiritual and the miraculous” with “science and rationality,” and it is this persistent hypersensitivity to the numinous and immaterial aspects of the world and the human condition that sets Golding apart from the broad river of social realism that so defines the 20th-century English novel. He was a kind of maverick in the way D. H. Lawrence was, or Lawrence Durrell, or John Fowles — to name but three — and I think this strangeness explains how throughout his life, after his initial success, the critical responses to his work were so violently divided. You either loved William Golding, it seemed, or you hated him.

Golding himself was abnormally thin-skinned when it came to criticism of his work. He simply could not read even the mildest reservation and on occasion left the country when his books were published. What is fascinating about “William Golding” is the portrait that emerges of a man of almost absurdly dramatic contrasts. He fought with commendable bravery at D-Day, yet in life was the most timid arachnophobe. He was married for more than 50 years, yet was probably a repressed homosexual. He was an accomplished classical musician and excellent chess player and an embarrassing, infantile drunk. He loathed and detested the stilted conventions of the British class system (particular scorn was directed at the Bloomsbury group), and yet when already a Nobel laureate and a member of the elite group to whom the queen grants the title Companion of Literature, he still frenetically lobbied his important friends to secure him a knighthood — successfully — and was a proud member of two of London’s stuffiest gentlemen’s clubs. Time and again the impression is of a man in a form of omnipresent torment of one kind or another: sometimes it would be mild and possibly amusing; at other moments, debilitating and damagingly neurotic.

John Carey has had unrestricted access to the Golding archive, and it is unlikely that this biography will ever be bettered or superseded. Moreover, Carey, an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford and one of the most respected literary critics in Britain, writes with great wit and lucidity as well as authority and compassionate insight. Perhaps because he has had the opportunity of reading the mass of Golding’s unpublished intimate journals, he brings unusual understanding to the complex and deeply troubled man who lies behind the intriguing but undeniably idiosyncratic novels.

And the fiction is highly unusual and uneven, right up to the end of Golding’s energetic working life — his last novel, “Fire Down Below,” was published in 1989, only four years before his death at the age of 81 — emblematic of the warring forces in his imagination, of a writer (in Carey’s words) “interested in ideas rather than people, and in seeing mankind in a cosmic perspective rather than an everyday social setting.” Anthony Burgess described his talent as “deep and narrow,” and Golding’s own demons often drove him to analyze the extent and limits of his achievement. After the publication of “The Inheritors,” as the acclaim flowed in, Golding remarked that he saw himself “spiraling up towards being a . . . universally admired, but unread,” novelist. This was horribly prescient. With the exception of “Lord of the Flies,” Golding’s strange, haunting, difficult novels have few readers these days, and his posthumous reputation is neglected and in decline. At the very least, Carey’s superb biography should take us back to the work again and allow us to make up our own minds, anew.

WILLIAM GOLDING

The man who wrote “lord of the flies”: a life.

By John Carey

Illustrated. 573 pp. Free Press. $32.50

William Boyd’s most recent novel, “Ordinary Thunderstorms,” was published earlier this year.

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Review: Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Lord of the Flies William Golding Penguin Books Published December 16, 2003 (Originally Published 1954)

Amazon | bookshop | goodreads, about lord of the flies.

Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, LORD OF THE FLIES is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

LORD OF THE FLIES is one of those iconic books that gets referenced all the time in our culture, but I’d never read it before. My daughter had to read it for school last year, and she had some anxiety about the content. I decided to read it first so she’d be ready for anything that might be difficult for her.

I read the book last fall as things were heating up before the presidential election here in the US. At that time, I actually wrote an initial review. But because I kept pushing back the date for posting the review, I have updated the review and added some more stuff that I’ve thought about on reflection.

Before I started reading LORD OF THE FLIES, I felt really weird reading all these big name authors talking about how pivotal this book has been for their writing. I think it’s Suzanne Collins who says that she reads LORD OF THE FLIES every year. That seemed really weird to me for a book with such a dark reputation. Every year? I mean, no offense meant. When a book resonates with you like that, I get wanting to read it every year. For a long time I had a book that I read every year, too. I guess I just found myself surprised about people feeling that way about a book that’s often referenced to describe uncontrolled violence or mayhem.

Anyway. So I went into the book with both some dread (expecting violence, which can be hard for me to read), and some, I don’t know, fascination, I guess?

The thing that still stands out to me most about the book is how easily some boys began to think of others as not human, as animals to be hunted. There’s a moment, after one boy has been killed where two boys talk around what happened. One boy comes right out and says that it was murder. The other boy recoils and tries to defend what happened as something else. He tries to explain it away as something not evil and wrong. It doesn’t work, and for a moment they’re both confronted with the horrible truth.

Watching the vigilantism and the violent language increasingly used by elected officials and repeated online while reading LORD OF THE FLIES was really creepy, y’all. Like, it seriously marked me. I would read a scene and feel like, this is awfully close to the way people are talking to each other or about each other right now. Or I’d get to a scene and think, well, surely our leaders won’t sink this low. And then. Stuff happened.

I couldn’t stop– and still can’t stop– thinking about the way the story explores the power of fear. The collapse of reason that happens when people are afraid and respond with that fear and anger. The steady shift toward things that once seemed unimaginable. I knew what was coming because I’d heard enough about the book that I basically knew what to expect. And yet, the violence of it and the dehumanization of it still shocked and shook me.

Reading this book, I can see not only from the story why it endures, but also from the writing. Like, I felt genuinely pulled into the tale. Even when I wasn’t reading, I thought about it. I wanted to know what would happen. Even though I already pretty much knew what was coming, I couldn’t look away from what was happening. It gripped me and paralyzed me with horror. (Much the way I felt weeks later watching the coverage of the January 6 insurrection.)

Honestly, I won’t say I enjoyed it– not like, celebrated reading it. But it really moved me. I think I would read it again. I think I NEED to read it again.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Representation All the boys are British private school students.

Profanity/Crude Language Content Mild profanity used infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content None.

Spiritual Content The boys fear a mysterious evil they call the Beast. They leave food sacrifices for it, hoping that this will keep the Beast away from them.

Violent Content At least one racist comment equating Indians with savages. Multiple violent descriptions of hunting and killing pigs. Boys beat another boy to death. A boy falls to his death after being hit with a rock.

Drug Content None.

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About Kasey

2 responses to review: lord of the flies by william golding.

My interest is piqued to give the book another chance. I read it a while back, while I was I in middle school, and at that time I had little idea about what was happening (I lost my way about halfway through), and I hadn’t heard much about the story like you had before diving into the text, so I suspect that the full impact (philosophical, political, psychological, social) wasn’t felt.

Yay! Yeah, I have definitely had that experience with books that I read in school before and then again later. I hope that if you read it again, you are able to connect with it a lot more. 🙂 Thanks, Abigail!

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International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

A scene from Matthew Bourne's 2014 dance version of Lord of the Flies.

The 100 best novels: No 74 – Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

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. 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. 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).

By 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 wife, Ann, who played a crucial role in his creative life, suggested RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island as a source of inspiration. The upshot: a post-apocalyptic, dystopian survivor-fantasy about a bunch of pre-teen and teenage boys on a remote tropical island. But this is a far cry from the world of Robinson Crusoe or Long John Silver.

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. First, it’s a brilliantly observed study of adolescents untethered from rules and conventions. The main players – Ralph, Jack and Piggy – represent archetypes of English schoolboy, but Golding gets under their skin and makes them real. He knows how they tick, and draws on his own experience to explore the terrifying breakdown of their community.

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. Bleak and specific, but universal, fusing rage and grief, Lord of the Flies is both a novel of the 1950s, and for all time. A strange kind of Eden becomes a desolate portrait of life in a post-nuclear world. 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 Note on the Text

Before completing this novel, William Golding had been “Scruff”, the shy, oddball English teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s school in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies , written during 1952-53, suffered successive rejections before its triumphant publication in 1954. At first titled Strangers from Within , the novel not only endured almost universal disdain, it was also the desperate last throw of an awkward schoolmaster who had struggled for years to find an audience.

His daughter, Judy, born at the end of the war, was too young to remember her father writing Lord of the Flies but she told me in an interview some years ago: “I do remember the parcels [of manuscript] going off and coming back. We lived on a very tight budget, so the postage must have been a significant expense.”

The legend of this iconic postwar novel has become hoary with many tellings. When it first arrived at Faber & Faber (its eventual publisher), it was a dog-eared manuscript that had obviously done the rounds. Its first in-house reader, a certain Miss Perkins, famously dismissed it as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” However, a newly recruited young Faber editor, Charles Monteith, disagreed. He saw that the first chapter (about the aftermath of the bomb) could be dropped, fought for the book, and then, having persuaded Golding to cut and rewrite, steered it through to publication. Monteith, whom I came to know well, and admire, was doing what Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe or Gordon Lish for Raymond Carver. It’s a skill that is rarely found in publishing today.

Eventually, the novel would sell more than 10m copies, but fame and success did not come overnight. The first printing of about 3,000 copies sold slowly. Gradually, the book’s qualities won serious attention. A turning-point occurred when EM Forster chose Lord of the Flies as his “outstanding novel of the year.” Other reviews described it as “not only a first-rate adventure but a parable of our times”. Judy Golding told me it was only “five years later, after the film came out [directed by Peter Brook], that I noticed parents of my friends suddenly becoming interested in Daddy”.

Thereafter, the novel became cult reading. When I worked at Faber in the 1980s, we used to reprint it, 100,000 copies at a time, year after year. I believe this still goes on. That’s one definition of classic, a book which even when we read it for the first time gives us the sense of re-reading something we have read before. In the words of Italo Calvino, “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.”

Lord of the Flies has had a wide influence on many English and American writers, including Alex Garland, whose The Beach pays homage to Golding’s original. Nigel Williams also adapted Lord of the Flies for the stage in a strikingly powerful version that has helped sustain the novel’s afterlife.

Three more From William Golding

The Inheritors (1955); The Spire (1964); Rites of Passage (1980)

Kate Mosse will be talking to Robert McCrum about the selection process for his 100 best novels series at Kings Place, London on 18 February, 7-8.30pm (£10). See membership.theguardian.com/events for details . Lord of the Flies is available in paperback from Faber, £7.99. Click here to buy it for £6.39

William Golding
The 100 best novels

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Book Review

Lord of the flies.

William Golding
Coming-of-Age

Readability Age Range

Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group

Year Published

This coming-of-age book by William Golding is published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group and is written for ages 13 and up. The age range reflects readability and not necessarily content appropriateness.

Plot Summary

When a plane wreck strands a group of British boys on a tropical island without adults, the children initially revel in their freedom and try to develop a society by holding assemblies, appointing hunters, and tending a signal fire to alert passing ships. It isn’t long before their “savage natures” take over; they argue, paint their faces and hunt bloodthirstily, eventually even killing some of their own. They fear and stalk “the Beast,” whom they believe to be a dangerous creature on the island. In fact, there is no such animal — their anxiety about the Beast symbolizes their fear of the emerging monster within each of them. In the end, they are rescued and returned to the “civilized” world — a world in the throes of a war.

Christian Beliefs

Literary critics consider Simon a “Christ figure.” He demonstrates compassion for his fellow man and looks for goodness in a rapidly-declining civilization. His conversation with The Lord of the Flies (which is a rotting pig’s head the boys have left as an offering to the Beast) is likened to the temptation Christ experienced during his fasting in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). The loss of innocence the boys experience is sometimes compared to the fall of man (Genesis 3:1-21).

Other Belief Systems

Lord of the Flies contrasts democracy and anarchy.

Authority Roles

The boys initially elect Ralph as their chief; he chooses Jack and Simon to assist him. Ralph’s primary concern is to keep a signal fire going in case a ship passes; he tries to maintain order and structure within the group. As Jack’s lust for hunting and blood increases, he convinces most of the boys to join a new tribe under his leadership. He is dominating and brutal, rousing the boys to kill pigs and, eventually, other humans for sport.

Profanity & Violence

Ralph makes fun of Piggy’s asthma ( a—-mar ). Characters use God’s name in vain, and d–n you once or twice. Violence intensifies as the characters become less civilized: First they kill pigs with spears, enjoying the pigs’ squealing and blood. They often dance and chant, “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood. Bash her in.” They even spear the head of one pig, leaving it as an offering for the Beast. By the end, boys are killing other boys by mobbing and hunting them, simply because they “get caught up” in the frenzy of their savage rituals.

Sexual Content

Discussion topics.

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at ThrivingFamily.com/discuss-books .

Additional Comments

Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in literature.

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

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The Literary Edit

Review: Lord of the Flies – William Golding

When I was about fourteen, one of my best friends Sian and I gate crashed a year-ten drama trip to a near by theatre to watch Lord of the Flies. I remember little of the play itself other than the deeply unsettling feeling I was left with when the curtains closed. Thus upon discovering that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was featured on the BBC’s Big Read, I was somewhat reluctant to read it. However, having been recommended it by my cousin Hal, and upon finding a battered copy in a book shop near my work, I decided to give it a go.

Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is a dystopian novel by nobel-prize winning English author William Golding, about a group of boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. When it was first published, Golding’s debut novel suffered from poor sales but when re-released in the 1960s it went on to be a best-seller, and soon became required reading in many schools and colleges.

The main protagonists are Ralph, Piggy, Roger, Jack and Simon all of whom are vividly portrayed throughout the novel. Ralph is chief of the group; Piggy, poor-sighted and overweight is his side-kick, Roger is one of the first to develop animalistic tendencies, Jack epitomises the worst aspects of human nature while Simon is a representation of peace and tranquility.

The novel follows the boys as they try to survive on the island by implementing a set of rules and regulations to follow. However, as the rules disintegrate, Jack forms his own tribe of terror, and events in the book progress from simple bullying to stylised animal rape and eventually murder. Golding effectively uses these episodes to explore the darkness of man’s heart, and the novel can show us what we are capable of in a similar situation.

A chilling yet compelling read with stunning imagery and great use of symbolism, Lord of the Flies is both a great piece of literature and a dire warning about humanity.

About Lord of the Flies

At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued. Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable tale about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

About William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his 1954 novel Lord of the Flies.

Golding spent two years in Oxford focusing on sciences; however, he changed his educational emphasis to English literature, especially Anglo-Saxon. During World War II, he was part of the Royal Navy which he left five years later. His bellic experience strongly influenced his future novels. Later, he became a teacher and focused on writing.

Some of his influences are classical Greek literature, such as Euripides, and The Battle of Maldon , an Anglo-Saxon oeuvre whose author is unknown. The attention given to Lord of the Flies , Golding’s first novel, by college students in the 1950s and 1960s drove literary critics’ attention to it.

He was awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.

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2 comments on “Review: Lord of the Flies – William Golding”

the story shows us the Brutal Truth of life. Normally people blame the society, that because of the society they became evil. But the story tells us that There is evil inside us, sooner or later, we all have to face it.

Book review – “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

When I announced that this book was May’s choice for my Facebook reading challenge (theme, a 20 th century classic), there were mixed feelings – it seems a few of our participants had studied it at school for their ‘O’ level English Literature (predecessor to the GCSE for anyone young enough not to know!). Some were delighted…others less so! I did not study this at school, but I read it at University (I did an English degree). My childhood home was not one filled with books, though I spent a great deal of time at my local library, so when I went to University I had a lot of catching up to do on many of the classics. Golding’s book is one of those and is widely considered to be one of the all-time great novels.

Lord of the Flies was Golding’s first novel, published in 1954. I doubt many people could name any of his other works (I couldn’t!), although he won the Booker Prize in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage , and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He died in 1993 at the age of 81. Lord of the Flies has been adapted three times for the big screen, and several times for stage and radio.

The basic plot is that a group of boys (thought to number about thirty, but it’s not entirely clear) are marooned on a Pacific island following a wartime evacuation attempt that ends in a plane crash. There are no adult survivors and the boys, ranging in age from perhaps nine to thirteen years, must learn quickly to survive. Three main characters emerge: Ralph and Jack are the two alpha-males of the group, but have very different instincts about the priorities, and Piggy, an overweight, severely near-sighted boy, probably of lower class than Ralph and Jack, who proves to be the most thoughtful, sensible and self-aware but who lacks the leadership skills to wield any power.

Initially, the boys attempt to organise, with Ralph at the helm. His primary concern is that they should get rescued and stay alive and safe until then. He meets resistance in the form of Jack, who is less keen on the rules and disciplines that Ralph wants to impose. His priorities are “fun” and hunting animals so that they can eat meat. As the days and weeks pass morale drops, particularly among the younger boys, many of whom are clearly terrified. They fear the darkness and the heavy forest on the island and what may be lurking within it – they imagine a terrible beast. Order begins to break down and powerful instincts surface. There is a terrible power struggle between Jack and Ralph which intensifies as the novel progresses. Factions form around the two leaders and the behaviours become increasingly reckless. Simon, one of the other older boys, and a sensitive soul, is killed in a case of mistaken identity, the now savage and adrenalin-fuelled group around Jack believing in his night-time approach to the camp, that he is in fact the much-feared “beast” they imagine stalks them.

Simon’s death at the hands of those who were once his schoolmates, unleashes further savagery, like the genie is out of the bottle. There is also, however, a kind of denial; it seems only Piggy recognises and is able to articulate the danger they are in – from themselves! It seems inevitable that Piggy should also die, brutally; Roger crashes a boulder onto him during a fight between Ralph and Jack in which Piggy is trying to intervene. Jack’s group would have killed Ralph too had it not been for the timely arrival of a rescue ship.

Although it was written in the early 1950s, this is very much a post-war book for me in which the author is reflecting on the base levels human beings can reach. If you simply scratch the surface of society you will find some instincts most of us would rather not admit to. A modern reading of the novel might also see the hazards of excessive masculinity and how lust for power can easily corrupt. You can also look at how easy it is for followers to forget their own moral codes and normal standards of behaviour when seduced by charismatic or persuasive leadership. The younger boys are unable to face the reality of their situation, stranded on a remote island, with an unknown chance of rescue, and the picture of excitement that Jack offers, playing at hunting, escapism from their problems, leads them to follow him down a dangerous path.

Whilst re-reading this book, I couldn’t help thinking about the current political turmoil we are in, both in the UK and globally. Some social norms seem to me to be breaking down. And when it came to the Jack/Ralph power struggle the Conservative party leadership contest came to mind! The only thing I couldn’t decide – who in our current crop of politicians is Piggy?!

A must-read for anyone wanting to gain a serious understanding of English literature.

Did you read Lord of the Flies as a teenager – can you remember what you thought of it?

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6 thoughts on “Book review – “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding”

Wonderful review. I have my stack of Golding’s books (13, in total!) waiting for me. Your review reminded me that I must get to them soon.

Thank you. Yes, I’m ashamed not to have read any of Golding’s other work….

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This is one, as you say, everyone groaned over being assigned to read in school. But I’ve never known anyone who did read it that wasn’t completely captivated by it. It would be interesting to read again now, to see what I’d get from it now as an adult.

I agree. You also get a different perspective from being at a different stage in life.

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LORD OF THE FLIES

by William Golding ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1954

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1954

ISBN: 0399501487

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Coward-McCann

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1955

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT GENERAL TEEN

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ZERO O'CLOCK

by C.J. Farley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

Commendable ambition that may help readers look forward.

Already reeling from loss, a Black high school senior brings her OCD, anxiety, and depression into March 2020.

In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gethsemane Montego is a musical-theater–loving, BTS-fangirling, 16-year-old senior at New Rochelle High School. She and her two best friends—Jewish Korean valedictorian Tovah and Cuban American star quarterback Diego—attend the same high school where Geth’s security guard father died tragically three years ago during a shooting. Geth resents how quickly her mother has moved on—with a White man, at that—but, as best they can, her friends help her manage the increases in her anxiety and compulsions as well as her stifling grief. Awaiting admission results from Columbia is an added stressor, but as the coronavirus case numbers quickly shoot up, Geth faces multiple burdens and traumas. Police violence, racial inequity, hyperpartisanship, immigration, economic anxieties, and a complicated coming-out story all pile on top of the pandemic’s hefty body count. Geth is a likable, smart Gen Z protagonist in this modern epistolary work that combines diary entries, text messages, news reports, emails, and English lit essays to immersive effect. Wringing so much content, so much hurt, into a YA novel is a tall order that yields very mixed results. Still, whether through cutting humor or disparate political perspectives, Farley offers readers undeniable value in this retelling of recent, unforgettable history.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-61775-975-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Black Sheep Press

Review Posted Online: June 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | LITERARY FICTION

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by C.J. Farley

by C.J. Farley ; illustrated by Yongjin Im

by Elana K. Arnold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2020

A timely and unabashedly feminist twist on a classic fairy tale.

Sixteen-year-old Bisou Martel’s life takes a profound turn after encountering an aggressive wolf.

Following an embarrassing incident between Bisou and her boyfriend, James, after the homecoming dance, a humiliated Bisou runs into the Pacific Northwest woods. There, she kills a giant wolf who viciously attacks her, upending the quiet life she’s lived with her Mémé, a poet, since her mother’s violent death. The next day it’s revealed that her classmate Tucker— who drunkenly came on to her at the dance—was found dead in the woods with wounds identical to the ones Bisou inflicted on the wolf. When she rescues Keisha, an outspoken journalist for the school paper, from a similar wolf attack, Bisou gains an ally, and her Mémé reveals her bloody and brave legacy, which is inextricably tied to the moon and her menstrual cycle. Bisou needs her new powers in the coming days, as more wolves lie in wait. Arnold ( Damsel , 2018, etc.) uses an intriguing blend of magic realism, lyrical prose, and imagery that evokes intimate physical and emotional aspects of young womanhood. Bisou’s loving relationship with gentle, kind James contrasts with the frank exploration of male entitlement and the disturbing incel phenomenon. Bisou and Mémé seem to be white, Keisha is cued as black, James has light-brown skin and black eyes, and there is diversity in the supporting cast.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-274235-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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by Elana K. Arnold ; illustrated by Dung Ho

by Elana K. Arnold ; illustrated by Magdalena Mora

by Elana K. Arnold

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Book Review: The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

By: Author Laura

Posted on Published: 27th April 2022 - Last updated: 12th April 2024

Categories Book Reviews , Books

Wondering whether Lord of the Flies by William Golding is worth your time? This Lord of the Flies book review explains why you should read this short classic!

Lord of the Flies Summary

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a dystopian classic. When a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island, what could go wrong?

A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they discover fantastic wildlife and dazzling beaches, learning to survive; at night, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast.

Orphaned by society, it isn’t long before their innocent childhood games devolve into a savage, murderous hunt …

Lord of the Flies Book Review

Lord of the Flies is a book that had been on my TBR (to-be-read pile) forever. I first read this in my mid-twenties and wish I had studied this at school, which is where most readers encounter this.

It’s all about a group of schoolboys who become stranded on a desert island. But don’t let the young ensemble lead you into thinking this is a children’s book. Lord of the Flies is a lot darker than I imagined and I was horrified at some of the events and scenes that took place.

At first, the young boys attempt to mimic an orderly adult society on the island. They group together to keep a fire lit so that any passing ships will see the smoke from the island.

But without any adults to supervise them, the boys begin to become violent, cruel and brutal in their bid to survive.

The small society they have attempted to build on this remote island eventually descends into chaos, prompting the reader to question the capacity for supposedly civilised humans to be savage.

And trust me when I say the ending really is just that – savage.

Although Lord of the Flies is a relatively simple tale, Golding’s writing is rich and the symbolism is clever. This story aims to show how savage humans can be when left to their own devices and there’s no order or morals.

Although Golding uses the island setting to demonstrate this point, this book leaves you feeling uncomfortable as you start to realise that man in a “civilised” society may not be any better.

Golding reminds us that we all have the capacity for darkness and cruelty. This story stays with readers long after they have turned the last page because it is so haunting. And it’s haunting because it’s clear that this could so easily happen in the society we live in today.

It also poses the interesting political question of democracy vs authoritarianism. Should we be forced to follow someone who is deemed to be a “rational” or “moral” leader, or be allowed to follow whoever presents a view that most aligns with our desires, whatever they may be.

Lord of the Flies is a classic for a reason. It’s well worth a read and really quite readable as classics go. If you’re looking for an short classic book to get yourself into reading classics then Lord of the Flies is a great book to start with.

Reading this book is also important so that you understand some Lord of the Flies references that get bandied about in conversation on occasion. Who are Ralph and Piggy? And what is a conch?

If you haven’t read this classic book yet then add this to your book wishlist ASAP. It’s chilling, but well-written and a good read.

Lord of the Flies Quotes

“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”

“The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.”

“We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

“The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

Buy Lord of the Flies now: Amazon | Waterstones | Blackwells

If you liked this post, check out these: Books Like The Hunger Games Books Like The Handmaid’s Tale Young Adult Dystopian Books for Teens 15 Gothic Books to Read

Editor of What’s Hot?

FAVBOOKSHELF

Tuesday 30th of August 2022

absolutely adored the review! got convinced to pick it up by the end of the review and the quotes were definitely a cherry on top.

matthew atkinson

Tuesday 3rd of May 2022

What a great review...exactly what i was thinking but was unable to put that into writing! I didn't study this book at school either, i was i had, quite a strange and brutal read and setting.

Themes and Analysis

Lord of the flies, by william golding.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a powerful novel. It's filled with interesting themes, thoughtful symbols, and a particular style of writing that has made it a classic of British literature.

Article written by Lee-James Bovey

P.G.C.E degree.

Several key themes are prevalent throughout the book. It is sometimes referred to as a “book of ideas” and these ideas are explored as the plot unfolds.

Lord of the Flies Themes

The impact of humankind on nature.

This is evident from the first chapter when the plane crashing leaves what Golding describes as a “scar” across the island. This idea is explored further in the early chapters the boys light a fire that escapes their control and yet further diminishes what might be considered an unspoiled island. Some interpret the island almost as a Garden of Eden with the children giving in to temptation by slaughtering the animals there. The final chapter furthers the destruction of nature by mankind as the whole island appears to have been ruined thanks to the effects of the boy’s presence on the island.

Civilization versus savagery

This can be seen throughout as the boys struggle with being removed from organized society. To begin with, they cope well. They construct a form of government represented by the conch that theoretically draws them together and gives them all a voice. As they break away from society this adherence to the rules they have constructed is evident. Golding’s ideas of what savagery is might be outdated and rooted in colonial stereotypes but they are evident for all to see as the boys use masks to dehumanize themselves and their increasing obsession with hunting leads to an increasingly animalistic nature.

Nature of humanity

Perhaps the biggest underlying theme is the idea of the true nature of mankind. Golding explores the idea that mankind is innately evil and that it is only the contrast between society and civilization that prevents that nature from being prevalent. Of course, this overlooks that civilization is a human construct and if all men’s biggest motivation were their inner evil, then that construct would never have existed. Golding’s views largely spring from his role in the navy where he was witness to the atrocities of war but are also informed by his work as a teacher.

Analysis of Key Moments in Lord of the Flies

There are many key moments in ‘ Lord of the Flies ‘ that highlight the boy’s descent into savagery.

Blowing the conch – this introduces us to the conch which acts as a symbol of society and civilization throughout the novel. It is both the device that brings the children together and in theory the object which allows them all to have a say and therefore run a democratic society.
The fire gets out of control – This shows the effects that the boys are already having on the island. It also demonstrates how lost the boys are without adults there to guide them as they lose one of the boys and nobody even knows his name.
Jack fails to kill the pig/Roger throws stones – both of these events show how the boys are currently constrained by the expectations of society. We see as time passes these restraints are lifted and that firstly, Jack can kill a pig and finally, and perhaps more dramatically, Roger is not only okay with hitting somebody with a stone but taking their life with one.
The hunters put on masks – By covering up their faces, they seem to become free from the constraints of society. It is if it liberates them from humanity and allows them to act on more primal, animalistic urges.
Sam and Eric find “the beast” – When Sam and Eric feel they have discovered the beast it sets a ripple of panic throughout. This fear sways the boys towards Jack’s leadership as he continues to manipulate the situation to his advantage. If not for this then Simon might never be murdered.
Creating of the Lord of the Flies – Successfully killing the pig is itself an iconic moment but then leaving a pigs head on a pole is both a gruesome image (one worthy of the book’s title) and also plays a pivotal role in Simon’s story arc.
Simon’s death – Simon is the one character who never seems to succumb to primal urges and therefore his death if looked at symbolically could be seen as the death of hope for boys.
Piggy’s death – Piggy’s character represents order and reason. With his death, any chance of resolving the issues between Jack and Ralph vanishes. The conch being smashed at the same time is also symbolic and represents the complete destruction of society.
The rescue – This is not the happy ending that one might expect with all the boys crying due to their loss of innocence. There is an irony as well as the boys will not be rescued and taken to a Utopia but rather to a civilization plagued by a war that mirrors the war zone they have just left.

Style, Literary Devices, and Tone in Lord of the Flies

Throughout this novel, Golding’s style is straightforward and easy to read. There are no lengthy passages nor does he choose particularly poetic words to describe the events. His writing is powerful without these stylistic devices. The same can be said for his use of literary devices. When used, they are direct. For example, the use of symbolism (see below) and metaphor is very thoughtful but not hard to interpret.

William Golding also employs an aloof or distant tone throughout the book. This reflects the way that the boys treat one another.

Symbols in Lord of the Flies

The conch shell.

The conch shell is one of the major symbols of this novel. It’s used from the beginning of the novel to call the boys together for meetings on the beach. It’s a symbol of civilization and government. But, as the boys lose touch with their civilized sides, the conch shell is discarded.

The Signal Fire

The signal fire is a very important symbol in the novel. It’s first lit on the mountain and then later on the beach with the intent of attracting the attention of passion ships. The fire is maintained diligently at first but as the book progresses and the boys slip farther from civilization, their concentration on the fire wanes. They eventually lose their desire to be rescued. Therefore, as one is making their way through the book, gauging the boys’ concentration on the fire is a great way to understand how “civilized” they are.

The beast is an imaginary creature who frightens the boys. It stands in for their savage instincts and is eventually revealed to be a personification of their dark impulses. It’s only through the boy’s behaviour that the beast exists at all.

What are three themes in Lord of the Flies ?

Three themes in ‘ Lord of the Flies ‘ are civilization vs. savagery, the impact of humankind on nature, and the nature of humanity.

What is the main message of the Lord of the Flies ?

The main message is that if left without rules, society devolves and loses its grasp on what is the morally right thing to do. this is even the case with kids.

How does Ralph lose his innocence in Lord of the Flies ?

He loses his innocence when he witnesses the deaths of Simon and Piggy. These losses in addition to the broader darkness of the island change him.

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About Lee-James Bovey

Lee-James, a.k.a. LJ, has been a Book Analysis team member since it was first created. During the day, he's an English Teacher. During the night, he provides in-depth analysis and summary of books.

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Lord of the Flies: A Critical History

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Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Northern Illinois University
M.A., English, California State University–Long Beach
B.A., English, Northern Illinois University

“The boy with the fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of head. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another. ‘Hi!’ it said. ‘Wait a minute’” (1).

William Golding published his most famous novel, Lord of the Flies , in 1954. This book was the first serious challenge to the popularity of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) . Golding explores the lives of a group of schoolboys who are stranded after their airplane crashes on a deserted island. How have people perceived this literary work since its release sixty years ago?

The History of Lord of the Flies

Ten years after the release of Lord of the Flies, James Baker published an article discussing why the book is more true to human nature than any other story about stranded men, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Swiss Family Robinson (1812) . He believes that Golding wrote his book as a parody of Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) . Whereas Ballantyne expressed his belief in the goodness of man, the idea that man would overcome adversity in a civilized way, Golding believed that men were inherently savage. Baker believes that “life on the island has only imitated the larger tragedy in which the adults of the outside world attempted to govern themselves reasonably but ended in the same game of hunt and kill” (294). Ballantyne believes, then, that Golding’s intent was to shine a light on “the defects of society” through his Lord of the Flies (296).

While most critics were discussing Golding as a Christian moralist, Baker rejects the idea and focuses on the sanitization of Christianity and rationalism in Lord of the Flies. Baker concedes that the book does flow in “parallel with the prophecies of the Biblical Apocalypse” but he also suggests that “the making of history and the making of myth are [ . . . ] the same process” (304). In “Why Its No Go,” Baker concludes that the effects of World War II have given Golding the ability to write in a way he never had. Baker notes, “[Golding] observed first hand the expenditure of human ingenuity in the old ritual of war” (305). This suggests that the underlying theme in Lord of the Flies is war and that, in the decade or so following the release of the book, critics turned to religion to understand the story, just as people consistently turn to religion to recover from such devastation as war creates.

By 1970, Baker writes, “[most literate people [ . . . ] are familiar with the story” (446). Thus, only fourteen years after its release, Lord of the Flies became one of the most popular books on the market. The novel had become a “modern classic” (446). However, Baker states that, in 1970, Lord of the Flies was on the decline. Whereas, in 1962, Golding was considered “Lord of the Campus” by Time magazine, eight years later no one seemed to be paying it much notice. Why is this? How did such an explosive book suddenly drop off after less than two decades? Baker argues that it is in human nature to tire of familiar things and to go on new discoveries; however, the decline of Lord of the Flies , he writes, is also due to something more (447). In simple terms, the decline in popularity of Lord of the Flies can be attributed to the desire for academia to “keep up, to be avant-garde” (448). This boredom, however, was not the main factor in the decline of Golding’s novel.

In 1970 America, the public was “distracted by the noise and color of [ . . . ] protests, marches, strikes, and riots, by the ready articulation and immediate politicization of nearly all [ . . . ] problems and anxieties” (447). 1970 was the year of the infamous Kent State shootings and all talk was on the Vietnam War, the destruction of the world. Baker believes that, with such destruction and terror ripping apart at people’s everyday lives, one hardly saw fit to entertain themselves with a book that parallels that same destruction. Lord of the Flies would force the public “to recognize the likelihood of apocalyptic war as well as the wanton abuse and destruction of environmental resources [ . . . ]” (447).

Baker writes, “[t]he main reason for the decline of Lord of the Flies is that it no longer suits the temper of the times” (448). Baker believes that the academic and political worlds finally pushed out Golding by 1970 because of their unjust belief in themselves. The intellectuals felt that the world had surpassed the point in which any person would behave the way that the boys of the island did; therefore, the story held little relevance or significance at this time (448).

These beliefs, that the youth of the time could master the challenges of those boys on the island, are expressed by the reactions of school boards and libraries from 1960 through 1970. “ Lord of the Flies was put under lock and key” (448). Politicians on both sides of the spectrum, liberal and conservative, viewed the book as “subversive and obscene” and believed that Golding was out-of-date (449). The idea of the time was that evil spurred from disorganized societies rather than being present in every human mind (449). Golding is criticized once again as being too heavily influenced by Christian ideals. The only possible explanation for the story is that Golding “undermines the confidence of the young in the American Way of Life” (449).

All of this criticism was based on the idea of the time that all human “evils” could be corrected by proper social structure and social adjustments. Golding believed, as is demonstrated in Lord of the Flies , that “[s]ocial and economic adjustments [ . . . ] treat only the symptoms instead of the disease” (449). This clash of ideals is the main cause of the fall-off in popularity of Golding’s most famous novel. As Baker puts it, “we perceive in [the book] only a vehement negativism which we now wish to reject because it seems a crippling burden to carry through the daily task of living with crisis mounting upon crisis” (453).

Between 1972 and the early-2000s, there was relatively little critical work done on Lord of the Flies . Perhaps this is due to the fact that readers simply moved on. The novel has been around for 60 years, now, so why read it? Or, this lack of study could be due to another factor that Baker raises: the fact that there is so much destruction present in everyday life, no one wanted to deal with it in their fantasy time. The mentality in 1972 was still that Golding wrote his book from a Christian point of view. Perhaps, the people of the Vietnam War generation were sick of the religious undertones of an out-of-date book.

It is possible, also, that the academic world felt belittled by Lord of the Flies . The only truly intelligent character in Golding’s novel is Piggy. The intellectuals may have felt threatened by the abuse that Piggy has to endure throughout the book and by his eventual demise. A.C. Capey writes, “the falling Piggy, representative of intelligence and the rule of law, is an unsatisfactory symbol of fallen man ” (146).

In the late 1980s, Golding’s work is examined from a different angle. Ian McEwan analyzes Lord of the Flies from the perspective of a man who endured boarding school. He writes that “as far as [McEwan] was concerned, Golding’s island was a thinly disguised boarding school” (Swisher 103). His account of the parallels between the boys on the island and the boys of his boarding school is disturbing yet entirely believable. He writes: “I was uneasy when I came to the last chapters and read of the death of Piggy and the boys hunting Ralph down in a mindless pack. Only that year we had turned on two of our number in a vaguely similar way. A collective and unconscious decision was made, the victims were singled out and as their lives became more miserable by the day, so the exhilarating, righteous urge to punish grew in the rest of us.”

Whereas in the book, Piggy is killed and Ralph and the boys are eventually rescued, in McEwan’s biographical account, the two ostracized boys are taken out of school by their parents. McEwan mentions that he can never let go of the memory of his first reading of Lord of the Flies . He even fashioned a character after one of Golding’s in his own first story (106). Perhaps it is this mentality, the release of religion from the pages and the acceptance that all men were once boys, that re-birthed Lord of the Flies in the late 1980s.

In 1993, Lord of the Flies again comes under religious scrutiny . Lawrence Friedman writes, “Golding’s murderous boys, the products of centuries of Christianity and Western civilization, explode the hope of Christ’s sacrifice by repeating the pattern of crucifixion” (Swisher 71). Simon is viewed as a Christ-like character who represents truth and enlightenment but who is brought down by his ignorant peers, sacrificed as the very evil he is trying to protect them from. It is apparent that Friedman believes the human conscience is at stake again, as Baker argued in 1970.

Friedman locates “the fall of reason” not in Piggy’s death but in his loss of sight (Swisher 72). It is clear that Friedman believes this time period, the early 1990s, to be one where religion and reason are once again lacking: “the failure of adult morality, and the final absence of God create the spiritual vacuum of Golding’s novel . . . God’s absence leads only to despair and human freedom is but license” (Swisher 74).

Finally, in 1997, E. M. Forster writes a forward for the re-release of Lord of the Flies . The characters, as he describes them, are representational to individuals in everyday life. Ralph, the inexperienced believer, and hopeful leader. Piggy, the loyal right-hand man; the man with the brains but not the confidence. And Jack, the outgoing brute. The charismatic, powerful one with little idea of how to take care of anyone but who thinks he should have the job anyway (Swisher 98). Society’s ideals have changed from generation-to-generation, each one responding to Lord of the Flies depending on the cultural, religious, and political realities of the respective periods.

Perhaps part of Golding’s intention was for the reader to learn, from his book, how to begin to understand people, human nature, to respect others and to think with one’s own mind rather than being sucked into a mob-mentality. It is Forster’s contention that the book “may help a few grown-ups to be less complacent, and more compassionate, to support Ralph, respect Piggy, control Jack, and lighten a little the darkness of man’s heart” (Swisher 102). He also believes that “it is respect for Piggy that seems needed most. I do not find it in our leaders” (Swisher 102).

Lord of the Flies is a book that, despite some critical lulls, has stood the test of time. Written after World War II , Lord of the Flies has fought its way through social upheavals, through wars and political changes. The book and its author have been scrutinized by religious standards as well as by social and political standards. Each generation has had its interpretations of what Golding was trying to say in his novel.

While some will read Simon as a fallen Christ who sacrificed himself to bring us truth, others might find the book asking us to appreciate one another, to recognize the positive and negative characteristics in each person and to judge carefully how best to incorporate our strengths into a sustainable society. Of course, didactic aside, Lord of the Flies is simply a good story worth reading, or re-reading, for its entertainment value alone.

'Lord of the Flies' Overview
'Lord of the Flies' Summary
Memorable Quotes From 'Lord of the Flies'
'Lord of the Flies' Themes, Symbols, and Literary Devices
Lord of the Flies Book Profile
'Lord of the Flies' Quotes Explained
'Lord of the Flies' Characters: Descriptions and Significance
Why Is 'Lord of the Flies' Challenged and Banned?
'Lord of the Flies' Questions for Study and Discussion
9 Must-Read Books If You Like 'Lord of the Flies'
Biography of William Golding, British Novelist
10 Classic Novels for Teens
'Lord of the Flies' Vocabulary
The Most Commonly Read Books in High School
The 10 Most-Banned Classic Novels
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Lord of the Flies Mass Market Paperback – December 16, 2003

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Print length 224 pages
Language English
Lexile measure 770L
Dimensions 4.31 x 0.59 x 7.5 inches
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication date December 16, 2003
ISBN-10 0399501487
ISBN-13 978-0399501487
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Lord of the Flies: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

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THE BOY WITH FAIR HAIR LOWERED HIMSELF down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witchlike cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

"Hi!" it said. "Wait a minute!"

The undergrowth at the side of the scar was shaken and a multitude of raindrops fell pattering.

"Wait a minute," the voice said. "I got caught up."

The fair boy stopped and jerked his stockings with an automatic gesture that made the jungle seem for a moment like the Home Counties.

The voice spoke again.

"I can't hardly move with all these creeper things."

The owner of the voice came backing out of the undergrowth so that twigs scratched on a greasy wind-breaker. The naked crooks of his knees were plump, caught and scratched by thorns. He bent down, removed the thorns carefully, and turned around. He was shorter than the fair boy and very fat. He came forward, searching out safe lodgments for his feet, and then looked up through thick spectacles.

"Where's the man with the megaphone?"

The fair boy shook his head.

"This is an island. At least I think it's an island. That's a reef out in the sea. Perhaps there aren't any grownups anywhere."

The fat boy looked startled.

"There was that pilot. But he wasn't in the passenger cabin, he was up in front."

The fair boy was peering at the reef through screwed-up eyes.

"All them other kids," the fat boy went on. "Some of them must have got out. They must have, mustn't they?"

The fair boy began to pick his way as casually as possible toward the water. He tried to be offhand and not too obviously uninterested, but the fat boy hurried after him.

"Aren't there any grownups at all?"

"I don't think so."

The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realized ambition overcame him. In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy.

"No grownups!"

The fat boy thought for a moment.

"That pilot."

The fair boy allowed his feet to come down and sat on the steamy earth.

"He must have flown off after he dropped us. He couldn't land here. Not in a place with wheels."

"We was attacked!"

"He'll be back all right."

The fat boy shook his head.

"When we was coming down I looked through one of them windows. I saw the other part of the plane. There were flames coming out of it."

He looked up and down the scar.

"And this is what the cabin done."

The fair boy reached out and touched the jagged end of a trunk. For a moment he looked interested.

"What happened to it?" he asked. "Where's it got to now?"

"That storm dragged it out to sea. It wasn't half dangerous with all them tree trunks falling. There must have been some kids still in it."

He hesitated for a moment, then spoke again.

"What's your name?"

"Ralph."

The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made; the fair boy called Ralph smiled vaguely, stood up, and began to make his way once more toward the lagoon. The fat boy hung steadily at his shoulder.

"I expect there's a lot more of us scattered about. You haven't seen any others, have you?"

Ralph shook his head and increased his speed. Then he tripped over a branch and came down with a crash.

The fat boy stood by him, breathing hard.

"My auntie told me not to run," he explained, "on account of my asthma."

"Ass-mar?"

"That's right. Can't catch my breath. I was the only boy in our school what had asthma," said the fat boy with a touch of pride. "And I've been wearing specs since I was three."

He took off his glasses and held them out to Ralph, blinking and smiling, and then started to wipe them against his grubby wind-breaker. An expression of pain and inward concentration altered the pale contours of his face. He smeared the sweat from his cheeks and quickly adjusted the spectacles on his nose.

"Them fruit."

He glanced round the scar.

"Them fruit," he said, "I expect—"

He put on his glasses, waded away from Ralph, and crouched down among the tangled foliage.

"I'll be out again in just a minute—"

Ralph disentangled himself cautiously and stole away through the branches. In a few seconds the fat boy's grunts were behind him and he was hurrying toward the screen that still lay between him and the lagoon. He climbed over a broken trunk and was out of the jungle.

The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings. Behind this was the darkness of the forest proper and the open space of the scar. Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk, and screwed up his eyes against the shimmering water. Out there, perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lake—blue of all shades and shadowy green and purple. The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph's left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the heat.

He jumped down from the terrace. The sand was thick over his black shoes and the heat hit him. He became conscious of the weight of clothes, kicked his shoes off fiercely and ripped off each stocking with its elastic garter in a single movement. Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms and the forest sliding over his skin. He undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water.

He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood and not yet old enough for adolescence to have made him awkward. You could see now that he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil. He patted the palm trunk softly, and, forced at last to believe in the reality of the island laughed delightedly again and stood on his head. He turned nearly on to his feet, jumped down to the beach, knelt and swept a double armful of sand into a pile against his chest. Then he sat back and looked at the water with bright, excited eyes.

"Ralph—"

The fat boy lowered himself over the terrace and sat down carefully, using the edge as a seat.

"I'm sorry I been such a time. Them fruit—"

He wiped his glasses and adjusted them on his button nose. The frame had made a deep, pink "V" on the bridge. He looked critically at Ralph's golden body and then down at his own clothes. He laid a hand on the end of a zipper that extended down his chest.

"My auntie—"

Then he opened the zipper with decision and pulled the whole wind-breaker over his head.

"There!"

Ralph looked at him sidelong and said nothing.

"I expect we'll want to know all their names," said the fat boy, "and make a list. We ought to have a meeting."

Ralph did not take the hint so the fat boy was forced to continue.

"I don't care what they call me," he said confidentially, "so long as they don't call me what they used to call me at school."

Ralph was faintly interested.

"What was that?"

The fat boy glanced over his shoulder, then leaned toward Ralph.

He whispered.

"They used to call me `Piggy.'"

Ralph shrieked with laughter. He jumped up.

"Piggy! Piggy!"

"Ralph—please!"

Piggy clasped his hands in apprehension.

"I said I didn't want—"

Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter-plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy.

"Sche-aa-ow!"

He dived in the sand at Piggy's feet and lay there laughing.

"Piggy!"

Piggy grinned reluctantly, pleased despite himself at even this much recognition.

"So long as you don't tell the others—"

Ralph giggled into the sand. The expression of pain and concentration returned to Piggy's face.

"Half a sec'."

He hastened back into the forest. Ralph stood up and trotted along to the right.

Here the beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high. The top of this was covered with a thin layer of soil and coarse grass and shaded with young palm trees. There was not enough soil for them to grow to any height and when they reached perhaps twenty feet they fell and dried, forming a criss-cross pattern of trunks, very convenient to sit on. The palms that still stood made a green roof, covered on the underside with a quivering tangle of reflections from the lagoon. Ralph hauled himself onto this platform, noted the coolness and shade, shut one eye, and decided that the shadows on his body were really green. He picked his way to the seaward edge of the platform and stood looking down into the water. It was clear to the bottom and bright with the efflorescence of tropical weed and coral. A school of tiny, glittering fish flicked hither and thither. Ralph spoke to himself, sounding the bass strings of delight.

"Whizzoh!"

Beyond the platform there was more enchantment. Some act of God—a typhoon perhaps, or the storm that had accompanied his own arrival—had banked sand inside the lagoon so that there was a long, deep pool in the beach with a high ledge of pink granite at the further end. Ralph had been deceived before now by the specious appearance of depth in a beach pool and he approached this one preparing to be disappointed. But the island ran true to form and the incredible pool, which clearly was only invaded by the sea at high tide, was so deep at one end as to be dark green. Ralph inspected the whole thirty yards carefully and then plunged in. The water was warmer than his blood and he might have been swimming in a huge bath.

Piggy appeared again, sat on the rocky ledge, and watched Ralph's green and white body enviously.

"You can't half swim."

"Piggy."

Piggy took off his shoes and socks, ranged them carefully on the ledge, and tested the water with one toe.

"It's hot!"

"What did you expect?"

"I didn't expect nothing. My auntie—"

"Sucks to your auntie!"

Ralph did a surface dive and swam under water with his eyes open; the sandy edge of the pool loomed up like a hillside. He turned over, holding his nose, and a golden light danced and shattered just over his face. Piggy was looking determined and began to take off his shorts. Presently he was palely and fatly naked. He tiptoed down the sandy side of the pool, and sat there up to his neck in water smiling proudly at Ralph.

"Aren't you going to swim?"

Piggy shook his head.

"I can't swim. I wasn't allowed. My asthma—"

"Sucks to your ass-mar!"

Piggy bore this with a sort of humble patience.

"You can't half swim well."

Ralph paddled backwards down the slope, immersed his mouth and blew a jet of water into the air. Then he lifted his chin and spoke.

"I could swim when I was five. Daddy taught me. He's a commander in the Navy. When he gets leave he'll come and rescue us. What's your father?"

Piggy flushed suddenly.

"My dad's dead," he said quickly, "and my mum—"

He took off his glasses and looked vainly for something with which to clean them.

"I used to live with my auntie. She kept a candy store. I used to get ever so many candies. As many as I liked. When'll your dad rescue us?"

"Soon as he can."

Piggy rose dripping from the water and stood naked, cleaning his glasses with a sock. The only sound that reached them now through the heat of the morning was the long, grinding roar of the breakers on the reef.

"How does he know we're here?"

Ralph lolled in the water. Sleep enveloped him like the swathing mirages that were wrestling with the brilliance of the lagoon.

Because, thought Ralph, because, because. The roar from the reef became very distant.

"They'd tell him at the airport."

Piggy shook his head, put on his flashing glasses and looked down at Ralph.

"Not them. Didn't you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They're all dead."

Ralph pulled himself out of the water, stood facing Piggy, and considered this unusual problem.

Piggy persisted.

"This an island, isn't it?"

"I climbed a rock," said Ralph slowly, "and I think this is an island."

"They're all dead," said Piggy, "an' this is an island. Nobody don't know we're here. Your dad don't know, nobody don't know—"

His lips quivered and the spectacles were dimmed with mist.

"We may stay here till we die."

With that word the heat seemed to increase till it became a threatening weight and the lagoon attacked them with a blinding effulgence.

"Get my clothes," muttered Ralph. "Along there."

He trotted through the sand, enduring the sun's enmity, crossed the platform and found his scattered clothes. To put on a grey shirt once more was strangely pleasing. Then he climbed the edge of the platform and sat in the green shade on a convenient trunk. Piggy hauled himself up, carrying most of his clothes under his arms. Then he sat carefully on a fallen trunk near the little cliff that fronted the lagoon; and the tangled reflections quivered over him.

Presently he spoke.

"We got to find the others. We got to do something."

Ralph said nothing. Here was a coral island. Protected from the sun, ignoring Piggy's ill-omened talk, he dreamed pleasantly.

Piggy insisted.

"How many of us are there?"

Ralph came forward and stood by Piggy.

"I don't know."

Here and there, little breezes crept over the polished waters beneath the haze of heat. When these breezes reached the platform the palm fronds would whisper, so that spots of blurred sunlight slid over their bodies or moved like bright, winged things in the shade.

Piggy looked up at Ralph. All the shadows on Ralph's face were reversed; green above, bright below from the lagoon. A blur of sunlight was crawling across his hair.

"We got to do something."

Ralph looked through him. Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life. Ralph's lips parted in a delighted smile and Piggy, taking this smile to himself as a mark of recognition, laughed with pleasure.

"If it really is an island—"

"What's that?"

Ralph had stopped smiling and was pointing into the lagoon. Something creamy lay among the ferny weeds.

"A stone."

"No. A shell."

Suddenly Piggy was a-bubble with decorous excitement.

"S'right. It's a shell! I seen one like that before. On someone's back wall. A conch he called it. He used to blow it and then his mum would come. It's ever so valuable—"

Near to Ralph's elbow a palm sapling leaned out over the lagoon. Indeed, the weight was already pulling a lump from the poor soil and soon it would fall. He tore out the stem and began to poke about in the water, while the brilliant fish flicked away on this side and that. Piggy leaned dangerously.

"Careful! You'll break it—"

"Shut up."

Ralph spoke absently. The shell was interesting and pretty and a worthy plaything; but the vivid phantoms of his day-dream still interposed between him and Piggy, who in this context was an irrelevance. The palm sapling, bending, pushed the shell across the weeds. Ralph used one hand as a fulcrum and pressed down with the other till the shell rose, dripping, and Piggy could make a grab.

Now the shell was no longer a thing seen but not to be touched, Ralph too became excited. Piggy babbled:

"—a conch; ever so expensive. I bet if you wanted to buy one, you'd have to pay pounds and pounds and pounds—he had it on his garden wall, and my auntie—"

Ralph took the shell from Piggy and a little water ran down his arm. In color 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 eighteen inches of shell with a slight spiral twist and covered with a delicate, embossed pattern. Ralph shook sand out of the deep tube.

"—mooed like a cow," he said. "He had some white stones too, an' a bird cage with a green parrot. He didn't blow the white stones, of course, an' he said—"

Piggy paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph's hands.

"Ralph!"

Ralph looked up.

"We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting. They'll come when they hear us—"

He beamed at Ralph.

"That was what you meant, didn't you? That's why you got the conch out of the water?"

Ralph pushed back his fair hair.

"How did your friend blow the conch?"

"He kind of spat," said Piggy. "My auntie wouldn't let me blow on account of my asthma. He said you blew from down here." Piggy laid a hand on his jutting abdomen. "You try, Ralph. You'll call the others."

Doubtfully, Ralph laid the small end of the shell against his mouth and blew. There came a rushing sound from its mouth but nothing more. Ralph wiped the salt water off his lips and tried again, but the shell remained silent.

"He kind of spat."

Ralph pursed his lips and squirted air into the shell, which emitted a low, farting noise. This amused both boys so much that Ralph went on squirting for some minutes, between bouts of laughter.

"He blew from down here."

Ralph grasped the idea and hit the shell with air from his diaphragm. Immediately the thing sounded. A deep, harsh note boomed under the palms, Spread through the intricacies of the forest and echoed back from the pink granite of the mountain. Clouds of birds rose from the treetops, and something squealed and ran in the undergrowth.

Ralph took the shell away from his lips.

"Gosh!"

His ordinary voice sounded like a whisper after the harsh note of the conch. He laid the conch against his lips, took a deep breath and blew once more. The note boomed again: and then at his firmer pressure, the note, fluking up an octave, became a strident blare more penetrating than before. Piggy was shouting something, his face pleased, his glasses flashing. The birds cried, small animals scuttered. Ralph's breath failed; the note dropped the octave, became a low wubber, was a rush of air.

The conch was silent, a gleaming tusk; Ralph's face was dark with breathlessness and the air over the island was full of bird-clamor and echoes ringing.

"I bet you can hear that for miles."

Ralph found his breath and blew a series of short blasts.

Piggy exclaimed: "There's one!"

A child had appeared among the palms, about a hundred yards along the beach. He was a boy of perhaps six years, sturdy and fair, his clothes torn, his face covered with a sticky mess of fruit. His trousers had been lowered for an obvious purpose and had only been pulled back half-way. He jumped off the palm terrace into the sand and his trousers fell about his ankles; he stepped out of them and trotted to the platform. Piggy helped him up. Meanwhile Ralph continued to blow till voices shouted in the forest. The small boy squatted in front of Ralph, looking up brightly and vertically. As he received the reassurance of something purposeful being done he began to look satisfied, and his only clean digit, a pink thumb, slid into his mouth.

Piggy leaned down to him.

"What's yer name?"

"Johnny."

Piggy muttered the name to himself and then shouted it to Ralph, who was not interested because he was still blowing. His face was dark with the violent pleasure of making this stupendous noise, and his heart was making the stretched shirt shake. The shouting in the forest was nearer.

Signs of life were visible now on the beach. The sand, trembling beneath the heat haze, concealed many figures in its miles of length; boys were making their way toward the platform through the hot, dumb sand. Three small children, no older than Johnny, appeared from startlingly close at hand, where they had been gorging fruit in the forest. A dark little boy, not much younger than Piggy, parted a tangle of undergrowth, walked on to the platform, and smiled cheerfully at everybody. More and more of them came. Taking their cue from the innocent Johnny, they sat down on the fallen palm trunks and waited. Ralph continued to blow short, penetrating blasts. Piggy moved among the crowd, asking names and frowning to remember them. The children gave him the same simple obedience that they had given to the men with megaphones. Some were naked and carrying their clothes; others half-naked, or more or less dressed, in school uniforms, grey, blue, fawn, jacketed, or jerseyed. There were badges, mottoes even, stripes of color in stockings and pullovers. Their heads clustered above the trunks in the green shade; heads brown, fair, black, chestnut, sandy, mouse-colored; heads muttering, whispering, heads full of eyes that watched Ralph and speculated. Something was being done.

The children who came along the beach, singly or in twos, leapt into visibility when they crossed the line from heat haze to nearer sand. Here, the eye was first attracted to a black, bat-like creature that danced on the sand, and only later perceived the body above it. The bat was the child's shadow, shrunk by the vertical sun to a patch between the hurrying feet. Even while he blew, Ralph noticed the last pair of bodies that reached the platform above a fluttering patch of black. The two boys, bullet-headed and with hair like tow, flung themselves down and lay grinning and panting at Ralph like dogs. They were twins, and the eye was shocked and incredulous at such cheery duplication. They breathed together, they grinned together, they were chunky and vital. They raised wet lips at Ralph, for they seemed provided with not quite enough skin, so that their profiles were blurred and their mouths pulled open. Piggy bent his flashing glasses to them and could be heard between the blasts, repeating their names.

"Sam, Eric, Sam, Eric."

Then he got muddled; the twins shook their heads and pointed at each other and the crowd laughed.

At last Ralph ceased to blow and sat there, the conch trailing from one hand, his head bowed on his knees. As the echoes died away so did the laughter, and there was silence.

Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was fumbling along. Ralph saw it first, and watched till the intentness of his gaze drew all eyes that way. Then the creature stepped from mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing. The creature was a party of boys, marching approximately in step in two parallel lines and dressed in strangely eccentric clothing. Shorts, shirts, and different garments they carried in their hands; but each boy wore a square black cap with a silver badge on it. Their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black cloaks which bore a long silver cross on the left breast and each neck was finished off with a hambone frill. The heat of the tropics, the descent, the search for food, and now this sweaty march along the blazing beach had given them the complexions of newly washed plums. The boy who controlled them was dressed in the same way though his cap badge was golden. When his party was about ten yards from the platform he shouted an order and they halted, gasping, sweating, swaying in the fierce light. The boy himself came forward, vaulted on to the platform with his cloak flying, and peered into what to him was almost complete darkness.

"Where's the man with the trumpet?"

Ralph, sensing his sun-blindness, answered him.

"There's no man with a trumpet. Only me."

The boy came close and peered down at Ralph, screwing up his face as he did so. What he saw of the fair-haired boy with the creamy shell on his knees did not seem to satisfy him. He turned quickly, his black cloak circling.

"Isn't there a ship, then?"

Inside the floating cloak he was tall, thin, and bony; and his hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness. Out of this face stared two light blue eyes, frustrated now, and turning, or ready to turn, to anger.

"Isn't there a man here?"

Ralph spoke to his back.

"No. We're having a meeting. Come and join in."

The group of cloaked boys began to scatter from close line. The tall boy shouted at them.

"Choir! Stand still!"

Wearily obedient, the choir huddled into line and stood there swaying in the sun. None the less, some began to protest faintly.

"But, Merridew. Please, Merridew ... can't we?"

Then one of the boys flopped on his face in the sand and the line broke up. They heaved the fallen boy to the platform and let him lie. Merridew, his eyes staring, made the best of a bad job.

"All right then. Sit down. Let him alone."

"But Merridew."

"He's always throwing a faint," said Merridew. "He did in Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor."

This last piece of shop brought sniggers from the choir, who perched like black birds on the criss-cross trunks and examined Ralph with interest. Piggy asked no names. He was intimidated by this uniformed superiority and the offhand authority in Merridew's voice. He shrank to the other side of Ralph and busied himself with his glasses.

Merridew turned to Ralph.

"Aren't there any grownups?"

Merridew sat down on a trunk and looked round the circle.

"Then we'll have to look after ourselves."

Secure on the other side of Ralph, Piggy spoke timidly.

"That's why Ralph made a meeting. So as we can decide what to do. We've heard names. That's Johnny. Those two—they're twins, Sam 'n Eric. Which is Eric—? You? No—you're Sam—"

"I'm Sam—"

"'n I'm Eric."

"We'd better all have names," said Ralph, "so I'm Ralph."

"We got most names," said Piggy. "Got 'em just now."

"Kids' names," said Merridew. "Why should I be Jack? I'm Merridew."

Ralph turned to him quickly. This was the voice of one who knew his own mind.

"Then," went on Piggy, "that boy—I forget—"

"You're talking too much," said Jack Merridew. "Shut up, Fatty."

Laughter arose.

"He's not Fatty," cried Ralph, "his real name's Piggy!"

"Oh, Piggy!"

A storm of laughter arose and even the tiniest child joined in. For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside: he went very pink, bowed his head and cleaned his glasses again.

Finally the laughter died away and the naming continued. There was Maurice, next in size among the choir boys to Jack, but broad and grinning all the time. There was a slight, furtive boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy. He muttered that his name was Roger and was silent again. Bill, Robert, Harold, Henry; the choir boy who had fainted sat up against a palm trunk, smiled pallidly at Ralph and said that his name was Simon.

Jack spoke.

"We've got to decide about being rescued."

There was a buzz. One of the small boys, Henry, said that he wanted to go home.

"Shut up," said Ralph absently. He lifted the conch. "Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things."

"A chief! A chief!"

"I ought to be chief," said Jack with simple arrogance, "because I'm chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp."

Another buzz.

"Well then," said Jack, "I—"

He hesitated. The dark boy, Roger, stirred at last and spoke up.

"Let's have a vote."

"Vote for chief!"

"Let's vote—"

This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started to protest but the clamor changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart.

"Him with the shell."

"Ralph! Ralph!"

"Let him be chief with the trumpet-thing."

Ralph raised a hand for silence.

"All right. Who wants Jack for chief?"

With dreary obedience the choir raised their hands.

"Who wants me?"

Every hand outside the choir except Piggy's was raised immediately. Then Piggy, too, raised his hand grudgingly into the air.

Ralph counted.

"I'm chief then."

The circle of boys broke into applause. Even the choir applauded; and the freckles on Jack's face disappeared under a blush of mortification. He started up, then changed his mind and sat down again while the air rang. Ralph looked at him, eager to offer something.

"The choir belongs to you, of course."

"They could be the army—"

"Or hunters—"

"They could be—"

The suffusion drained away from Jack's face. Ralph waved again for silence.

"Jack's in charge of the choir. They can be—what do you want them to be?"

"Hunters."

Jack and Ralph smiled at each other with shy liking. The rest began to talk eagerly.

Jack stood up.

"All right, choir. Take off your togs."

As if released from class, the choir boys stood up, chattered, piled their black cloaks on the grass. Jack laid his on the trunk by Ralph. His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph glanced at them admiringly, and when Jack saw his glance he explained.

"I tried to get over that hill to see if there was water all round. But your shell called us."

Ralph smiled and held up the conch for silence.

"Listen, everybody. I've got to have time to think things out. I can't decide what to do straight off. If this isn't an island we might be rescued straight away. So we've got to decide if this is an island. Everybody must stay round here and wait and not go away. Three of us—if we take more we'd get all mixed, and lose each other—three of us will go on an expedition and find out. I'll go, and Jack, and, and...."

He looked round the circle of eager faces. There was no lack of boys to choose from.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reissue edition (December 16, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399501487
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399501487
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12+ years, from customers
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 770L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.31 x 0.59 x 7.5 inches
#2 in Teen & Young Adult Classic Literature
#29 in Classic Literature & Fiction
#119 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the authors

William golding.

Born in Cornwall, England, William Golding started writing at the age of seven. Though he studied natural sciences at Oxford to please his parents, he also studied English and published his first book, a collection of poems, before finishing college. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion. Golding's other novels include Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, The Free Fall, Pincher Martin, The Double Tongue, and Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize.

Photo by See page for author [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Jennifer Buehler

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, lord of the flies.

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William Golding's Lord of the Flies is, or used to be, a staple of everyone's teenage reading experience, a harrowing fable about how ordinary kids revert to savagery when they are marooned on a deserted island. The story is less poignant nowadays than it once was, if only because events take place every day on our mean streets that are more horrifying than anything the little monsters do to one another on Golding's island.

When Peter Brook made the first film version of the novel in 1963, most viewers no doubt identified with the character of Ralph, the little liberal humanist, instead of with Jack, the little free market economist. These days, I imagine the audiences are more evenly divided.

Of all the films that cry out to be remade, the call of Brook's "Lord of the Flies" is very faint indeed. But it has been heard by Harry Hook and Sara Schiff , who have directed and written this new and anemic Classics Illustrated version of the story.

Golding's tale is a parable, a simple one, ideal as the subject for essays in English class. Schoolboys from a private school are shipwrecked (or, in the new version, their airplane crashes into the sea), and they swim to a deserted island where they must fend for themselves. At first they stick together and act reasonably, but then they divide into two camps: followers of Ralph, who believe in decency and civilization, and followers of Jack, who paint their faces, sharpen their spears and become militarists. Despairing of ever being rescued, the boys go to war with one another, with deadly results.

The staging of this story is fairly straightforward. The kids crawl up on the sand, their clothes gradually grow more tattered, they light a signal fire and then fight over who will tend it, they fight for possession of the knife and a pair of glasses that can be used to start fires, and they draw the battle lines between their two camps.

Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, "The Kitchen Toto" (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue. The color photography tends to turn many scenes into travelogues; this is a film that needs black and white to contain the lush scenery. The "lord of the flies" itself - the rotting head of a wild boar - never becomes the focus of horror it is intended as, and the surprise ending of the film is somehow over before we have the opportunity to be surprised. The acting is workmanlike.

Because this material is so obviously constructed to bear a message, a film made from it will work best if it concentrates on the story elements and lets the symbolism take care of itself. Hook's version does neither. The symbolism is right up front and unmissable, and the story part - the events that in theory should cause our throats to tighten and our pulses to quicken - is pretty lame. Once you understand what is going to happen (and even the viewer who has never heard of the book will not take long), there are few surprises. It happens.

The reviews of Brook's 1963 film version were not glowing ("Semiprofessional . . . crude and unconvincing" - Halliwell; "Patched together" - Kauffmann). But I recall it having at least a certain force, maybe because in 1963 it was still shocking that ordinary schoolkids could be killers - that they had the seeds of evil in them, and, given the opportunity and freedom from the restraints of society, the seeds would grow.

Golding's novel is the sort of fable that could shock only those who believe in the onwardness of civilization, as some still did in those days. At the time of its publication (1954) attempts were made to find political messages in it, but today it seems more like a sad prophecy of what is happening in neighborhoods ruled by drugs. What week goes by without another story of a Ralph gunned down by a Jack?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Lord Of The Flies (1990)

Balthazar Getty as Ralph

Chris Furrh as Jack

Danuel Pipoly as Piggy

Badgett Dale as Simon

Directed and Edited by

Produced by.

Ross Milloy
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The Best Time of His Life

June 6, 2024 issue

Vinson Cunningham; illustration by Yann Kebbi

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Great Expectations

The year is 2007. Twenty-two-year-old David Hammond is adrift in New York when a certain senator from Illinois announces his run for the presidency. David, who appears biographically indistinguishable from his author—Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker —watches on TV in uptown Manhattan as a song by U 2 plays and the senator speaks. “Giving all praise and honor to God for bringing us together here today,” the senator—fine, Barack Obama—says.

At no point in Great Expectations does Cunningham mention the senator by name. The novel serves as a master class in the observation of a figure so familiar that we know the gradations of his voice like those of a parent or sibling. For David, it isn’t only the baritone that pierces through: “I recognized that black-pulpit touch immediately, and felt almost flattered by the feeling—new to me—of being pandered to so directly by someone who so nakedly wanted something in return.”

What David notices, what is so often ignored or papered over when describing the talismanic force of the former president, is his religiosity, or at least the version of it that he chose to put forward publicly. All presidential candidates evoke God. But the senator “sounded comfortable, even natural, doing it, which was becoming somewhat more rare.” Obama’s faith, much like his physical bearing—at a record producer’s house, “he’d carried his body with a controlled, respectable cool: black man on the move,” but in the company of a book publisher and her friends, “he walked with a bohemian lilt, looser in the spine and at the knees, Whitman over Brooklyn’s ‘ample hills’”—serves, for David, as a yardstick to measure himself against. From the senator he learns to “ease” his shoulders backward; he also starts to contemplate his own theology.

David—like Cunningham—is the son of a Pentecostal teacher (mother) and a Catholic school musical director (father). He spends his childhood in the pews, where a designated group of women, known as “nurses,” catch congregants who fall to the ground seized by the Holy Spirit. “Pentecostalism is a contact sport,” David deadpans. He grows up thinking that religion is a total state of being: either you are an adherent or you aren’t. Gradually he realizes that it can come with a dimmer:

When I was younger I’d lived under the misapprehension that when people described themselves as Christian in answer to questions about their religion, they were signaling some fervor—some absolute metaphysics—like the one into which I had been born. I’d learned slowly…that they often meant only that on holidays their parents had dragged them to a church instead of a mosque or a temple. They hadn’t shaped their lives—organized their guilts or sorrows or hopes—around any particular creed.

When the senator makes his announcement speech, David has recently moved back to New York, having dropped out of college after learning that he was about to become a father. A month later, David lands a job with the campaign as a junior member of the fundraising staff (as Cunningham did). The woman who recommends David to the campaign is Beverly Whitlock, the mother of a high school student whom he tutors; she also happens to be an FOC : Friend of the Candidate. The campaign had asked for her input in its recruitment of personnel. “The thought that, by asking Beverly, they had also been implicitly seeking somebody black swung athletically through my mind,” David muses. This isn’t the only time he makes an uneasy reference to the mostly white roster working on the campaign of America’s first Black president.

The novel then couch surfs along with David, from the campaign’s unmarked New York offices to a stint canvassing with volunteers in Goffstown, New Hampshire. There he meets Regina, a former public school teacher turned gifted campaigner. Before long, David goes home with her. The place has the “briny smell of softly rotting clothes, old wood, and dirty snow salt.” The bathtub is clogged by “long corkscrews of Regina’s hair.” Several “exhausted toothbrushes” lie by the sink. The house’s disarray only draws David more to its occupant.

I have always felt happy in spaces like these, those whose states of stubborn but basically benign dishevelment disclose something fundamentally earnest, well-intentioned, serenely industrious, and refreshingly self-accepting about the characters of the people who live in them.

Too much has been written on the subject of likability in fiction, but I can think of few more likable—or less ingratiating—remarks than this one.

David and Regina’s fling is short-lived. In part, one senses, this is because Cunningham is less interested in making his character “do” things than in searching the far reaches of his mind. (That may also be why his prose is less persuasive the more characters there are in a scene. A bar conversation among David, Regina, and a chatty Haitian server never quite comes alive; neither does a recollection of a childhood prank David had taken part in with several neighborhood kids.) Later in the campaign, David flies to Los Angeles for an impossibly hip event at the house of an R&B producer. He tries to hide his pounding hangover but realizes too late that according to the campaign’s unwritten rules, the worst he could do is appear to be trying too hard. “New York over here is all professional,” the producer mocks him in front of others. David says, “He was calling me a square, a fool. My attempt at concealment was a mistake. This was supposed to be fun. It was a job, but in many ways it wasn’t.” It was a job, but in many ways it wasn’t. This description could serve for an entire subgenre of memoirs about the pre-recession workplace.

Finally, in Chicago, David huddles with a quarter-million other supporters—“members of a mystical body, their bonds invisible but real”—to watch his boss at last win the presidency. The result is a coming-of-age novel in the sense of a hero gaining (more like stumbling upon) an education. It is also a delicate, inquisitive, unpretentious, and compulsively readable account of a moment in time, a hopeful time—the reliving of which comes almost like whiplash.

David turns out to be a natural at the job. He casually courts the wealthy and disarms the famous. At the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he meets Cornel West, who beams at him, “It’s an honor to meet you, Brother David.” At a Martha’s Vineyard fundraising event he is introduced to a professor, clearly modeled on Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has authored “bricklike anthologies” of Black literature. (“Black advancement was a kind of Calvinism: no such thing as a fluke,” Cunningham writes.) There David notices how the island’s moneyed atmosphere induces a visible shift in the senator:

He burst forward from his seat looking like I’d never seen him look before: his sandy face loose and untutored; his skinny frame swathed in a baggy white polo and a pair of sun-spotted chinos. His walk to the porch was almost a bop. He looked how the professor had looked: at home.

Soon, David trains himself to stare not at the senator when he speaks but at the audience, to search for those most visibly eager, whom he can squeeze for $2,300—the cap at the time on campaign donations. But something unexpected happens just as David grows comfortable collecting, in a single evening, checks worth more than he’d ever earned in his life: small-time donors begin to overtake the Hamptons-and-Vineyard crowd. Suddenly the very people David had spent his working hours cultivating become largely beside the point, a remnant of the old way of doing politics. Cunningham is excellent at noting the transformation: “Big money would now become what little money had formerly been: fully symbolic, less a practical necessity than a form of speech.”

Great Expectations refers, cheekily, to the absurdly high hopes set by Obama’s candidacy. But I choose to read it more personally. Cunningham’s novel does not belong on a shelf with West Winging It or The World as It Is —memoirs written by other former Obama staffers. Rather, it shares stylistic kinship—a certain charming, loosely worn ambition—with novels such as Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Elif Batuman’s Either/Or : writers coming into their own. One of the great pleasures of reading Cunningham is his behind-the-scenes account not of the Obama campaign (he remains frustratingly vague about it, either too far removed from its timeline or too reluctant to betray confidences) but of a critical mind being formed.

In a recent interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour , Cunningham said that he jettisoned an early draft of the novel, keeping just a single scene, in which David stares at an artwork hanging in the home of a wealthy donor. It is by the artist Jenny Holzer and depicts sentences flashing in red on a vertical LED screen. Later that night, David googles it and comes across an old review by the critic Gary Indiana. It’s the review, even more than the work itself, that stays with him. In it, Indiana expounds on a conventional wisdom in the arts that when one medium—especially writing—is incorporated into another, a work’s power is diluted. The idea that words may “override and even hijack” a work of visual art stays with David, for whom “interest in the visual arts often came down to meaning, which, for me, mostly came down to words.”

It’s telling that this is the one vignette Cunningham chose to salvage, the seed from which his novel eventually grew. It has nothing to do with the senator. It’s not about the campaign or politics. In any other novel such a scene would provide an authorial aside at best, an anecdote that may end up on the cutting-room floor. But Cunningham’s hero develops by reading and viewing art. (His name, not by accident, is awfully similar to that of David Hammons, another visual artist as well as a cipher-like Black figure.) Exegesis—grappling with texts and their possible meanings—is the novel’s deeper preoccupation.

While David’s arrival on the campaign trail may have been haphazard—though I would argue that Cunningham is shortchanging his protagonist’s obvious skills and charisma—his arrival as a writer appears preordained. David describes playing a two-line part in a school version of The Cherry Orchard and treating it as an early exercise in dramaturgy:

I wanted acting to be something more than a grade school presentation, even if that was all that was called for by the role I’d been asked to play. Surely there was something beyond volume, beyond gestures. If I couldn’t be a star, I could turn these lines into an act of compression, a little art-house interlude toward the end of a bigger, more commercial enterprise.

His literary education began with the Old and New Testaments, whose tales, read “on anxious nights,” felt real to him in a way few things had. “Only genuine agitation could make a person write like Paul,” he elegantly notes. Then, over time,

I started to resort to novels, on roughly the same grounds. Despite the fakenesses of character and plot, my antic, self-soothing style of reading—each paragraph combed quickly but repeatedly, at a sweeping diagonal angle, hoping to swallow whole each chain of thought—gave me the impression (maybe it was a delusion) that I could glimpse past the narration and see the heart, hear the voice of the novelist herself. The real person at the desk, squirming stylishly to be seen. I thought of fiction as a flexible tarp, easy to pierce and asking to be pierced, thrown over an attempt at correspondence.

Fiction—and criticism too, Cunningham seems to be saying—is essentially an invitation, a wish for “correspondence.” It’s a direct communion between author and reader. This sets forth Cunningham’s accessible style, his chiseling, on paper, of a single thought until its edge is just right. (His preferred sentence is one that makes use—liberally, prodigiously, to add, digress, or specify—of the em dash.) Nothing sails past his critical eye. Even the early preaching on which David was raised undergoes literary analysis:

Most of my dead pastor’s sermons, for example, had had a tripartite structure, and the register that corresponded with the first third—before the hoop, the holler, the speaking of otherworldly tongues—was mostly, if not all, jokes. That early part of the sermon had the texture of cultural criticism or some kinds of stand-up comedy—a constant stream of references, all pointing back to a languid, strolling exposition of the text via current events.

In describing David’s time as a small-time political aide, Cunningham fixates on language: the way campaigns appropriate the jargon of the military (volunteers are “redeployed” to the early primary states) but also that of theater (a candidate is known as the “principal”). Then there is this perfect channeling of the mind of a fundraiser: “I stood outside on the grass, watching the twenty-three hundreds settle in.” The novel also includes a description of childbirth that manages, in just two sentences, to activate all the senses:

The birth, the next afternoon, took place almost outside the stream of memory, in the same hazy, soundless dimension as grief. The dancer shat and bled and here came the baby, my daughter, an alien to narrative, so far unstoried, covered in blood that smelled like a roomful of copper coins.

What I would give to read more about David’s experience of fatherhood! Yet Cunningham keeps the subject strangely shrouded, along with his daughter’s mother, who is described with dissonant impersonality (“the dancer”). As with the vague descriptions of the campaign’s inner workings, one senses that Cunningham doesn’t fully trust the freedoms that attend fiction making. For that there is always the next novel.

A couple of years ago Cunningham wrote a brief appreciation of the spirituals of his youth. * He recalled one song in particular, “Let Us Break Bread Together,” whose simple lyrics call out:

Let us break bread together on our knees. Let us break bread together on our knees. When I fall on my knees, with my face to the rising sun, O Lord, have mercy on me.

The song had been bafflingly banned by a body of Catholic bishops two years earlier, Cunningham noted, on the grounds that it failed to properly express the process of transubstantiation. The “bread” of the song is not meant to be read as bread at all but as the body of Christ, according to the Church, just as “wine” should be Christ’s blood. Cunningham found the bishops’ ban “obtuse and unpoetic.” He movingly argued that a song’s specific history, the ways in which it is taken up by people across time and place, “can inform its meaning more than its mere lyrics ever could.” Of “Let Us Break Bread Together,” he wrote:

I can remember hearing it played at St. Benedict the African, the Black parish in which I was baptized. I’d sit listening while the adults shuffled up the aisle to receive the sacrament, keeping my eyes closed and marvelling at how the sun, even through the church’s stained glass, could warm my face and redden the insides of my eyelids. It’s the rare song whose effect on my body, via memory, I can feel as soon as it starts to play.

Unlike David, who reads the Indiana essay and thinks that “meaning” comes down to words, for Cunningham art is more elusive still, charged with the distinct and collective histories of those who consume it over time.

In the interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour , Cunningham mentioned Sentimental Education as an early inspiration for his novel (and a possible title). It’s easy to see why. An inexperienced, mostly passive protagonist returns home from his studies to lead a “languishing existence,” as Flaubert put it, then is caught in a moment of political upheaval (the 1848 Revolution, the 2008 election). For both Frédéric Moreau and David Hammond, growth is a byproduct of reading. “His ambition was to be, one day, the Walter Scott of France,” Flaubert writes, gently roasting his hero. In the role of Madame Arnoux—the knowing older woman who initiates Frédéric into adulthood—we now have Beverly Whitlock, the FOC , with whom David falls into a sexual relationship in the second half of the novel.

The two novels also share a sense of moving lightly from one setting to the next. “Gustave Flaubert rejected the idea of a central narrative line,” Émile Zola wrote admiringly of Sentimental Education in 1875. The novel features “no episodes carefully prepared and melded, but an apparently random collection of facts, an unexceptional sequence of ordinary occurrences with characters meeting, separating, meeting again, till they have said their last word.” Cunningham’s novel—much more modest in scope and generally hewing to the arc of the campaign—has a similar loose structure. This may explain the early departure of Regina just as she makes an impression or the mere outlines we get of the senator:

He was a moving statue, made to stand in a great square and eke out noise. He mattered and didn’t, just as my own history did and didn’t. Just like the fathers I knew, who were there —they cast huge shadows and never sank—but were also ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning.

That is a bold, somewhat subversive description of Obama and what he stood for: it suggests that he mattered less for his exceptional character traits than because he represented a nation’s ideal projection of itself. The issue of meaning comes up yet again, and again it slips by just as the writer attempts to jostle it into words.

Flaubert’s novel ends with Frédéric and his friend Deslauriers looking back, years later, at their younger selves. Their nostalgia may be read as sentimentalism on the part of their author or, as seems more likely, as a touch of sarcasm. It could also apply to David and his fellow campaign staffers, sitting in the donor tent at a crammed Grant Park, taking in the new president’s victory speech, blissfully unaware of all that is to come:

“That was the best time of our lives!” said Frédéric. “Yes, maybe it was. The best time of our lives!” said Deslauriers.

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Ruth Margalit is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine . Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker . (June 2024)

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‘IF’ Rises To $34M+, ‘Strangers: Chapter 1’ Strong At Near $12M, ‘Back To Black’ Goes Belly-Up At $2.8M – Sunday Box Office Update

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Gunn said at a DC Studios presser early last year that in their Supergirl “we see the difference between Superman who was sent to Earth and raised by loving parents from the time he was an infant, versus Supergirl who was raised on a rock, a chip off Krypton, and watched everyone around her die and be killed in terrible ways for the first 14 years of her life, and then came to Earth when she was a young girl. She’s much more hardcore; she’s not exactly the Supergirl we’re used to seeing.”

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‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Leading Lady Karla Sofía Gascón Electrifies in Jacques Audiard’s Mexican Redemption Musical

Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez also star in the Palme d'Or winner's exhilarating Spanish-language (half-sung) portrait of a former cartel boss's life-changing transformation.

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‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Leading Lady Karla Sofía Gascón Electrifies in Jacques Audiard’s Mexican Redemption Musical 1 day ago
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SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains some spoilers.

Like a rose blooming amid a minefield, it’s a miracle that Jacques Audiard ’s “ Emilia Pérez ” exists: a south-of-the-border pop opera about a most unlikely metamorphosis and the personal redemption it awakens in a stone-cold criminal.

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The filmmaker got the idea from Le Monde editor Boris Razon’s novel “Écoute,” wherein the character’s mission is but one of countless questions raised about identity (in the book, Manitas wants to become his first love, who was murdered years before). But primarily-Spanish-language “Emilia Pérez” isn’t an adaptation so much as a totally different interpretation of that out-there idea: What if you took the poster boy for toxic masculinity and made them a woman — not à la Griselda Blanco (“Cocaine Godmother”), but in such a way that eclipsed the aggressive original persona?

Audiard starts by introducing Saldaña’s character, Rita, a defense attorney who helps scumbags go free, justifying her misgivings through song. Overstressed and undervalued, Rita accepts a potential client’s shady proposal, which means being driven out to who-knows-where with a hood over her head. Ultra-careful in order to evade potential assassination, Manitas swears Rita to secrecy before telling her why she’s been summoned: “I want to be a woman,” growls a man who looks like he wouldn’t hesitate to have her killed. And then Manitas opens his shirt and reveals his commitment to Rita (but not the camera).

At this point in the film, my sensitivity sensors were still wary. Early on, all references to Manitas are masculine, which is true even among the gender-reassignment doctors Rita flies around the world to interview. One can easily imagine such an assignment sparking a “Some Like It Hot”-style farce about the Witness Protection Program, and the film still feels like it could go either way (toward triumph or catastrophe) during the gonzo “La Vaginoplastia” number, which suggests “Myra Breckinridge” as Busby Berkeley might have staged it. “Changing the body changes society,” Rita sings to the surgeon in Tel Aviv (played by Mark Ivanir), who finally agrees to conduct the procedure, tipping off where the story is headed.

It’s not like Manitas can tell anyone what he’s doing, counting on Rita to stage his death and relocate his family to Switzerland. In fact, when the ex-capo reunites with Rita a few years later in London — now radiant, beardless and renamed Emilia — the lawyer tenses, afraid she’s come to erase the last trace of her past. Instead, Emilia asks Rita to bring her wife/widow Jessi (Gomez) and sons back to Mexico. According to press notes, Gascón (who plays Emilia) still lives with her daughter’s mom, and a similar dynamic emerges here, as Emilia presents herself as a long-lost aunt.

The scene that played best at Cannes finds Rita watching this reunion warily, as Emilia welcomes Jessi and the kids back into her life. Will they recognize her? “You smell like Papa,” one of their sons tells Emilia in a lovely reverse lullaby. “Emilia Pérez” would have been a very different movie if Manitas had found the courage to confide in the family. Not doing so sets the stakes for the rest of the film: Can Emilia continue to serve as their guardian? What happens if Jessi, who thinks she’s dead, should run off with new flame Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez)?

Such double standards add fascinating dimensions to the film’s second half, especially after Emilia decides to start La Lucecita, an NGO designed to help grieving family members find their “disappeared” relatives. In the process, Emilia also finds love. Apart from one scene where Rita worries that Emilia’s partner (Adriana Paz) may have figured things out, Audiard doesn’t distract himself with that old trope. Again, it would have been nice to see Emilia confide in others, but the film doesn’t treat fear of discovery as a point of suspense. Instead, Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 18, 2024. Running time: 132 MIN.

Production: (France) A Why Not Prods., Page 114 production, in co-production with Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Pathé, France 2 Cinéma, in association with Library Pictures International, Logical Content Ventures, Les Films du Fleuve, The Veterans, Vixens, Casa Kafka Pictures, Pimienta Films, with the support of CNC, la Région Ile-de-France, with the participation of Ciné+, with the support of Canal+, France Télévisions. (World sales: Pathé, Paris.)
Crew: Director, writer: Jacques Audiard, freely adapted from the novel “Écoute“ by Boris Razon. Screenplay: Camera: Paul Guilhaume. Editor: Juliette Welfling. Original music and songs: Clément Ducol, Camille. Music supervisor: Pierre Marie Dru. Choreographer: Damien Jalet.
With: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir, Karla Sofía Gascón, Eduardo Aladro, Emiliano Edmundo, Hasan Jalil, Gaël Murgia-Fur, Tirso Pietriga, Jarib (Javier Zagoya), Montiel Magali Brito, Sébastien Fruit.

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COMMENTS

Lord of the Flies Book Review
Our review: Parents say ( 12 ): Kids say ( 111 ): This novel has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1954, and when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Golding was lauded for his deep concern for humanity. Today, Lord of the Flies remains a staple of school reading lists, although some of its dated views ...
Their Inner Beasts: 'Lord of the Flies' Six Decades Later
Oct. 27, 2016. "Lord of the Flies" was published in 1954, the year that I turned 17, and I read it not long after. I was in the habit then (as I still am today) of finding, in each book I read ...
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
100 books3,941 followers. Follow. Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the ...
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Book Review
The Man Who Wrote "Lord of the Flies": A Life. By John Carey. Illustrated. 573 pp. Free Press. $32.50. William Boyd's most recent novel, "Ordinary Thunderstorms," was published earlier ...
Review: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lord of the Flies William Golding Penguin Books Published December 16, 2003 (Originally Published 1954) Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads About Lord of the Flies. At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys.
LORD OF THE FLIES
A fantasy is a singular - and singularly - believable spellbinder, and within the framework of its premises achieves a tremendous impetus and impact. During an atomic war, a group of boys aged from about six to twelve crash-land on an uninhabited tropical island. There Ralph, a responsible boy, is chosen chief and a certain routine established; a fire is made and to be kept going as a signal ...
Lord Of The Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Flies - It's the name given to the sow's head that Jack's gang transfixes on spear as an offering to the "beast.". The Lord of the Flies comes to symbolize the primeval instincts of power and barbaric nature that take control of Jack's tribe. Littluns- The littlest boys, around ages six and up.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
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. His ...
Lord of the Flies Review: Golding's Inner Savage
3.4. Lord of the Flies Review. 'Lord of the Flies' is an interesting novel, despite the fact that in today's world it may be considered problematic. In some areas, the dialogue appears forced and stilted. The plot may feel stilted at some points but, most of the descriptions are wonderful. Pros.
A Summary and Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies: plot summary. The novel begins with a plane carrying a group of British schoolboys being shot down; the boys land on a desert island. Two of them, Ralph and Piggy, find a conch shell on the beach, and they use it to signal to the rest of the schoolboys, who then start to form their own 'society', with a leader elected among them.
Lord of the Flies
His conversation with The Lord of the Flies (which is a rotting pig's head the boys have left as an offering to the Beast) is likened to the temptation Christ experienced during his fasting in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). ... Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip ...
Review: Lord of the Flies
Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is a dystopian novel by nobel-prize winning English author William Golding, about a group of boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. When it was first published, Golding's debut novel suffered from poor sales but when re-released in the 1960s it went on to ...
Book review
Golding's book is one of those and is widely considered to be one of the all-time great novels. My lovely 1965 edition of Lord of the Flies is older than me and has a cover price of three shillings and sixpence! Lord of the Flies was Golding's first novel, published in 1954.
LORD OF THE FLIES
A fantasy is a singular - and singularly - believable spellbinder, and within the framework of its premises achieves a tremendous impetus and impact. During an atomic war, a group of boys aged from about six to twelve crash-land on an uninhabited tropical island. There Ralph, a responsible boy, is chosen chief and a certain routine established; a fire is made and to be kept going as a signal ...
Lord of the Flies Book Review: A Short But Punchy Classic
Lord of the Flies Book Review. Lord of the Flies is a book that had been on my TBR (to-be-read pile) forever. I first read this in my mid-twenties and wish I had studied this at school, which is where most readers encounter this. It's all about a group of schoolboys who become stranded on a desert island. But don't let the young ensemble ...
Lord of the Flies Themes and Analysis
Analysis of Key Moments in Lord of the Flies. There are many key moments in ' Lord of the Flies ' that highlight the boy's descent into savagery. Blowing the conch - this introduces us to the conch which acts as a symbol of society and civilization throughout the novel. It is both the device that brings the children together and in ...
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. ... and it was described in one review as "not only a first-rate adventure but a parable of our times". ... There have been three film adaptations based on the book: Lord of the Flies (1963), directed by Peter Brook; Alkitrang Dugo (1975), a Filipino film, ...
Lord of the Flies: A Critical History
The History of Lord of the Flies. Ten years after the release of Lord of the Flies, James Baker published an article discussing why the book is more true to human nature than any other story about stranded men, such as Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson (1812). He believes that Golding wrote his book as a parody of Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858).
Lord of the Flies: William Golding, E. L. Epstein: 9780399501487
Lord of the Flies. Mass Market Paperback - December 16, 2003. Golding's iconic 1954 novel, now with a new foreword by Lois Lowry, remains one of the greatest books ever written for young adults and an unforgettable classic for readers of any age. This edition includes a new Suggestions for Further Reading by Jennifer Buehler.
Lord Of The Flies movie review (1990)
The "lord of the flies" itself - the rotting head of a wild boar - never becomes the focus of horror it is intended as, and the surprise ending of the film is somehow over before we have the opportunity to be surprised. The acting is workmanlike. Because this material is so obviously constructed to bear a message, a film made from it will work ...
Lord of the Flies vs the Andes tragedy : r/SocietyOfTheSnow
Differences with the Andes tragedy: I think the two main differences are that in LotF the boys are really young children, while in the Andes tragedy there are young adults, which makes them wiser, more controlled and able to make better decisions. And the other main difference is that in the Andes nowone wanted to be an "official" leader, there ...
The Best Time of His Life
The Best Time of His Life. Vinson Cunningham's novel Great Expectations is nominally about the experiences of an Obama campaign staffer but is really a glimpse into the formation of a critical mind. The year is 2007. Twenty-two-year-old David Hammond is adrift in New York when a certain senator from Illinois announces his run for the presidency.
The 10 Most Powerful Langston Hughes Poems to Read in 2024
Lookin' for a box car. To roll me to de South. Homesick blues, Lawd, 'S a terrible thing to have. Homesick blues is. A terrible thing to have. To keep from cryin'. I opens my mouth an ...
'Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow' Gets June 2026 Theatrical Release
The Craig Gillespie directed, Milly Alcock starring adaptation of Tom King's 2022 comic book series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which Bilquis Evely illustrated, is the second feature title ...
'Emilia Pérez' Review: Leading Lady Karla Sofía Gascón ...
SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains some spoilers. Like a rose blooming amid a minefield, it's a miracle that Jacques Audiard 's " Emilia Pérez " exists: a south-of-the-border ...