Lord of the Flies
November 11th, 2009
It was one of those moments of lucidity when you abruptly realize that most of the time during the last 10 days that you did not spend sitting in front of the computer screen in the lab were spent sitting in front of the computer screen at home. And then you read a bit of Calvin and Hobbes in which Watterson talks about 'letting the pandering idiocy of television liquefy our brains' and you realize that the prominent differentiator between our generation and the last is the mode of 'passive entertainment' it offers. So I decided to shut down my laptop and pick up a book.
I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury but do not exactly have a lot of good things to say about it. When you have read dystopia of the level of 'Brave New World', and '1984', 451 seems lacking in a lot of respects; but I don't intend to talk about this book anyway so we'll leave it right here. I read some stories by Kafka and if you want to read what creations a brilliant, messed up mind can create, it's hard to find anything better than 'Metamorphosis', 'In the Penal Colony', 'First Sorrow' etc. And then I read William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' and my dear god, what a brilliant book it is!
It's a story of some British school boys who get stranded on an island amidst an unnamed nuclear war raging in other parts. They begin by trying to make sense of their deserted new home and bringing some order to the chaos which has ensued after their plane crashed on this island. There are no elders to maintain decorum so they end up forming a loose organisation with a chief and sketchy roles for everybody. It's a story of how the initial attempts at civilization fail completely and anarchy sets in. It's a story of how humans are invariably cruel when not bound by social mores. It's a story of the essential darkness of human nature and all that is scary and despicable about it. And like Orwell's 'Animal Farm', the brilliance of the book lies in how believable the descent into chaos is. While reading it, the most prominent emotion I felt was, 'My God, I know where this is going. There is no other way a normal human being is going to behave.' Because I am aware of how humans have behaved in history when the thin veneer of civilization was taken off their restless, twitching souls. Because I'm aware of Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments, and our inevitable roots in animality.
The fact that it's a story about children only makes it more believable. What they have in innocence is more than amply balanced by shaky morals and a pliable, fluid sense of right and wrong - ideas which can be easily molded for better or for worse. I think that a normal human being living in normal peaceful times comes across the cruelest peers during childhood. It's not surprising then that the subject of this book is children.
The language is beautiful and imaginative and so realistic and urgent that it's actually a terrifying, uneasy read. Fear grips you like closing foliage of the dark deserted island, and speaks to you in the very voice of the lord of the flies himself.
Very highly recommended. But you might want to read a bit of Wodehouse after that, just to feel good about humanity :).
One of my all time favorites. Brilliant.
I read this book at well. The book continuously goes towards a higher and higher crescendo and then suddenly comes to an abrupt end as if not complete. Quite an unsatisfying end however a good story line that may ring with the imagination of every child almost Huckleberry Finnesque but imagine darker!
Lord of the Flies was one of my favorite reads as an adolescent; I think I read it first in junior high and again in high school for English class. It was rather fascinating and yet unnervingly freaky to see sullied human nature descending into anarchy within a children's universe. I mean, the characters were probably like my classmates--didn't we all know at least one Piggy? I think the fact that Golding uses kids--in their rawness and realness--makes it easier for him to portray the chaos in a way that is maybe simpler but more shocking. At least for me, reading it as a kid raised in structured society, it was pretty chilling to see tenuous law and order disintegrate with no redemption in sight. That said, my recollections are probably pretty laughable since I don't think I've actually touched the book since high school. I appreciated your take on it...now I'm curious now what I'd get from reading it as an adult.