Review of Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies

Author: William Golding

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Publication date: September 1954

    Yes, I am reviewing a book that was published before my parents were born. But for all of the thousands of kids, like me, who might be required to read Lord of the Flies in school, it’s new. And I’m reviewing it because, even if our teachers don’t make us read this book, it really deserves to be read.

    If we’re being fancy (or trying to impress a teacher) we can call Lord of the Flies an allegory. What that really means is a lesson wrapped in a story. The good news is that the lesson is relevant and powerful and that the story is a believable page-turner. As simply as I can put it, Lord of the Flies is an engrossingly horrifying story about the horrible aspects of being human.  But it’s an awfully good story about awfully bad stuff.

    The story begins with a group of British schoolboys who have crashed on an uninhabited island. William Golding doesn’t hold back on symbolism and irony, and it’s significant that we find out later the boys were being evacuated from a war zone. All adults accompanying the marooned boys died in the crash, and the boys have to decide how to govern themselves. They quickly find out that grown up decisions are more than a matter of “meet and have tea and discuss” (as one of the boys says). Two boys begin to fight over the position of “chief.” As the story progresses, they represent more and more the tension between restraint and savagery, and the fragile line between the two.

    Through the boys, Golding conveys a dark and disturbing perspective of humanity’s true nature. The inevitability of savagery - how much it may be an inseparable part of our nature - is one of many questions left for the reader to consider.

    At first, the boys do what we might hope they would do - form a simple, democratic society with fair rules and functional roles. But that just makes it worse when that society crumbles into discord and brutality. And the reason it crumbles is because some choose to give in to their baser desires.

    The brilliant thing about Lord of the Flies is that Golding picked children. Children on an idyllic tropical island with plenty of room and plenty of food and resources. We can’t blame adults or society or hunger or cold or anything else for what the boys become. By isolating the children in such a place, Golding is telling us something. He’s telling us that what the boys become isn’t taught to them or forced on them. What they become is simply what was inside them already.

    Lord of the Flies is certainly not an enticing fantasy with a happy ending. But it is a story that makes you want to keep turning pages, even if only because you keep hoping for better choices from the characters and a better vision of ourselves. To all you kids out there who get assigned this book, don’t be bored of the flies. To all you adults out there, be careful how you treat us; apparently we can be very mean.

- D. K. Nuray