n  My 50th read of 2023!n

Recently I scanned through a list of 'classic' books that most people seem to have read, and wrote down a few that I have not read. Lord of the Flies is one of those that made me feel like I had committed a book crime, so of course I had to set out to redeem my wrongs.

Everyone knows what Lord of the Flies is about.... what children would do if left in charge of themselves. A terrifying premise. And the promise of chaos in that concept is carried out through The Lord of the Flies. The philosophical question of 'What would we do without rules?" is explored through the lens of children who crash and somehow get to an island. There are no adults remaining.

This struck a great balance with the characters and ideas it was exploring, and was certainly a very powerful read. During the final act especially, I felt a knot of suspense that mounted and mounted to a visceral ending that was shocking, despite some things seeming obvious.

A classic for a reason!

I read this book a long time ago, long enough to where I barely remembered anything past the basic premise. So I picked it up again, only to wish I hadn't. There's a reason why they teach this book in middle school--in order to enjoy this book, one's intellectual cognizance must be that of a child, because otherwise you'll spend the entire time picking out everything that's wrong with the book. And there's a lot to pick out.

From what little of the story that is actually coherent, I can see why this book has had a lasting effect on social commentary since it's initial publishing. The overlying illustration of how easily man can devolve back to his feral instincts is striking, yet could have been infinitesimally more effective in the hands of a decent writer.

See, I would have cared a bit more about the little island society of prepubescent boys and their descent into barbarism if you know, any of the characters had been developed AT ALL. Instead, we're thrown interchangeable names of interchangeable boys who are only developed enough to conform to the basic archetypes Golding requires to hobble his little story along: The Leader, The Rebel, The Fat-Kid, The Nose-Picker, etc. Were he born in this time, I believe Golding would have done brilliantly as a scriptwriter for reality TV.

And the plot? There's a plot? I'm guessing so, since things seem to happen, but it's kind of hard to tell since he spends pages describing irrelevant events that are never incorporated, characters that possibly exist yet probably don't, and using words that don't mean what he thinks they mean. And as the main characters are a bunch of kids not worth caring about, thus goes the way of the story.

And the prose? Dear God, the prose! Get it away! It burns us!

So yeah, this book sucked. It had potential. There were even a few parts I internally squealed at in hopeful anticipation. But whatever potential it did have was hopelessly squandered by a man who wrote like he'd never written anything before in his life. Don't waste your time.

Kids are evil. Don't you know?

I've just finished rereading this book for my book club but, to be honest, I've liked it ever since my class were made to read it in high school. Overall, Lord of the Flies doesn't seem to be very popular, but I've always liked the almost Hobbesian look at the state of nature and how humanity behaves when left alone without societal rules and structures. Make the characters all angel-faced kids with sadistic sides to their personality and what do you have? Just your average high school drama, but set on a desert island. With a bit more bloody murder. But not that much more.

In 1954, when this book was published, Britain was in the process of being forced to face some harsh realities that it had blissfully chosen to ignore beforehand - that it is not, in fact, the centre of the universe, and the British Empire was not a thing of national pride, but an embarrassing infringement on the freedom and rights of other human beings. Much of British colonialism had been justified as a self-righteous mission to educate and modernise foreign "savages". So when put into its historical context, alongside the decolonisation movements, this book could be said to be an interesting deconstruction of white, Western supremacy.

Of course, to a modern reader there's a lot of racism in this book. The racial aspect is a big factor. Golding establishes from the very first page that Ralph is a perfect white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, private school boy. And Piggy even asks "Which is better - to be a pack of painted n*****s like you are or to be sensible like Ralph is?" I'm not going to argue with anyone's interpretation, but I think there is actually room to see this book as a criticism of racism. For me, I always saw it as Golding challenging the notion of savages being dark-skinned, uneducated people from rural areas. With this book, he says screw that, I'll show you savages! and proceeds to show us how these private school silver spoon little jewels of the empire are no better for their fancy education and gold-plated upbringing.

I think that seemed especially clear from the ending when the officer says n  "I should have thought that a pack of British boys - you're all British, aren't you? - would have been able to put up a better show than that."n Golding's way of saying that human nature is universal and no one can escape it.

Some readers say that you have to have quite a negative view of human nature already to appreciate this book, but I don't think that's true. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with all the implications running around in the novel - namely, the failure of democracy and the pro-authority stance - but it serves as an interesting look at the dark side of human nature and how no one is beyond its reach. Plus, anyone who had a bit of a rough time in high school will probably not find the events in this book a huge leap of the imagination.

The fascinating thing about Lord of the Flies is the way many historical parallels can be drawn from the messages it carries. You could choose to view the charismatic and manipulative Jack Merridew as a kind of Hitler (or other dictator) who takes advantage of a group of people at their weakest. Dictators and radicals often find it easy to slip in when a society is in chaos... we do not have to assume that Golding believed that everyone everywhere is evil, only that we all have the capacity for it when we find ourselves in unstable situations.

Still a fascinating book after all these years.

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Arriva Thomas al tavolo. Schiaffa un fantastico foglio a A4 che titola “Stato di Natura”, sotto una spiegazione breve e concisa. Poi arriva Golding, gli ciula l’a4 e comincia a scriverci la sua storiella. Guarda caso calza tutto a pennello. Hobbes non s’incazza perché alla fine fila quasi tutto liscio secondo ciò che lui andava teorizzando. Vogliam metter poi il leggero contrasto, generato dall’inevitabile candore che la figura dell’infante si porta appresso, con la spietatezza di certe vicissitudini? E i bambini di 6 anni, fastidiosi e assolutamente “in mezzo ai coglioni”?
Il coinvolgimento, il gioco di ruolo, il desiderio e il senso d’appartenenza. Credo che nulla sia esagerato, neanche nei momenti più crudi.
Quasi riuscivo a cucirmi tutto su vecchi ricordi, come credo che ognuno di noi, dopo tanti anni, possa sentirsi in colpa per Piggy.
In qualche modo, se potesse, tornerebbe indietro di una manciata di anni per dargli un forte abbraccio e ascoltarlo un pochino di più.

Δεν μπόρεσε να με πείσει ότι αξίζει το θόρυβο που έχει προκαλέσει.
Ίσως αν το διάβαζα στα εφηβικά - φοιτητικά μου χρόνια. Ή ίσως αν το διάβαζα πιο κοντά στην εποχή στην οποία εκδόθηκε. Να έφταιγε και η μετάφραση?
Μην με παρεξηγήσετε, πρόκειται για ένα δυνατό βιβλίο, που θα το πρότεινα ως ένα γρήγορο αλλά σημαντικό ανάγνωσμα. Κυρίως γιατί καταρρίπτει τους μύθους του στυλ: "Αν τα παιδιά κυβερνούσαν τον κόσμο αυτός θα ήταν καλύτερος" και τα ηλίθια τραγουδάκια του τύπου: "Αν όλα τα παιδιά της γης πιάναν γερά τα χέρια...".
Τα παιδιά είναι σκληρά και το χάος υπάρχει μέσα τους.
Δεν μπορώ να πω κάτι περισσότερο, όμως, κυρίως γιατί όλος αυτός ο ντόρος γύρω από το βιβλίο, δημιουργεί τέτοιες προσδοκίες, που εκ των πραγμάτων είναι δύσκολο να επαληθευτούν.

I am having a hard time rating this book. It's such a huge classic and it made me think. A lot. But in the end, I'm not sure I can completely agree with Golding's bleak view on humanity. The plot is simple. A group of boys gets stranded on an uninhabited island and they need to figure out how to survive. Instead, they fall apart, violently, over differences of priorities and leadership issues. Golding's message here couldn't be any clearer. That humans, stripped of rules and customs set by civilizations, revert back to animalistic nature quite quickly, and even pre-teen kids are not immune to it. I understand that much as we hope for humans to always behave in a humane manner, our species very often fall short of it. Be it in classroom bullying or neighbors turning on each other in a riot. But at the same time, are the majority of humans innately violent enough to kill? Is it only the laws that prevent us from such behavior? If so, how would we explain all the small kindnesses, cooperation, and support that are not state-mandated and yet we receive on a daily basis from our fellow humans?

I had a difficult time accepting everything going on in Lord of the Flies. Shared difficulties often brew new friendships. Yet in a group of kids facing the worst of difficulties, we hardly saw any decent friendships forming. The central characters are all around the age of 12. These kids, with the exception of Ralph and Piggy, don't show much eagerness in going back home. They are not shown to miss their families. They are hardly shown to be scared to death until they think they saw a 'beast'. But they are concerned about establishing leadership and masculinity. Most of the kids quite literally turn into bloodthirsty savages. While reading the book, the early stages of their disputes seemed very plausible, the fast spiraling into madness in the latter part was not very convincing to me. At least based on my experience from that age, but that is based mostly on how girls that age behave. This brings me to the other problem with this story. There are no girls on this island. If this is to be taken as an extrapolation of adult human behavior, keeping the nature of half of them out of the count will hardly do justice. Golding in some interview said that he made it all boys because including girls would have added to the complexity much more. Maybe that would have made the story different, or maybe he wouldn't have been able to make his point on the one-dimensional brutality of humans. But the real society is complex, with men and women, good and bad, kind and violent, and simplifying it to achieve a particular point feels unfair.

Overall, it certainly provides food for thought. But its view on humanity is too pessimistic for my taste.

PS: Thanks to Lisa of Troy, for holding a read-along which led to some amazing discussions with fellow readers.

I just don't buy it.

This book is famous for unmasking what brutes we are, just under the surface, but, well, for all the hype, it just isn't convincing. People--even teenage boys--just aren't as savage as Golding seems to want us to believe, and nothing in this book persuades me otherwise.

Perhaps if I'd gone to English boarding school I'd feel differently--but then that's the real irony of this book, that the brutality from which the British Empire was supposed to save so many people and cultures was in fact the Brits projecting their own savagery onto others.

But the rest of us, no, we aren't monsters underneath. A little messed up, maybe, a little more raw, but nowhere near the kind of brutes that Golding wants us to believe.

1.75

In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the dark side of human nature goes unchecked. This leads to the devolution we see among the boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island. Whether or not you agree with Golding's central idea here, it is a well written and interesting novel. I'm not sure what my thoughts were at the time, but I remember having read the story sometime in junior high school. I'm perhaps a bit more cynical of this breakdown in society now (or perhaps not)! I saw parallels to JG Ballard's work, but, even if it is simply a high-rise apartment, Ballard's take on society seems more complete.

Golding's unrelenting attack on reason (and how easily it can be displaced) begins on the opening pages and continues until the boys are rescued. For me, that played not quite successfully against an engaging story. 3.25 stars

Read and enjoyed this in high school amazed how well i remember this after almost two decades! i'll skip the summary since you probably know what this is about and will skip my unqualified interpretation since I'm only a butcher from Georgia!

A group of boys of all ages crash on a island. Each boy represents a ideal or personality in society Ralph is the ideal English male. piggy is the democratic ideal. Jack is the military, Simon is the religious institution. and Roger is the violent classes. not really sure what the "littlins" represent maybe British holdings around the world. i don't know why when i read that the littin with the mark disappeared i thought he must represent India. well, probably not! I'm out of my element here ask your professor. i think this represents English society boiled down to the simplest quantity a group of boys. that being said it's still a easy story to follow. even without the symbolism. so, let's talk about it without the symbolism because this is not 9th grade English class! the boys elect ralph as leader and they begin to have meetings two things are important to ralph being rescued and having fun. but soon everything starts to unravel and civilization on the island turn to savagery. everything is really well laid out and that allows for the reader to install his own beliefs which is why it's taught is school! I'm always impressed how english authors write stories allowing you to add your beliefs. this is a great book to discuss like The Giver. so, if you have not read it do so and feel free to discuss it! but don't let anyone downgrade your views!

one random thought kept sticking me as i read this. these boys went savage and they were British. what would happen if they were american. would they have even tried to work together or split from the start. one thing for sure there would be more religious representation!

Without what the author intended to do or probably has done, it would be a 3 star, but so 1 star is the only option.

Of course, it´s completely natural to become primitive again within the shortest amounts of time, and not an unintended dark comedy, self satirizing, biased, sexual predator of an author, who finally deus ex machinas out of this mess.

„In a private journal and in a memoir for his wife, Golding said he tried to rape a 15-year-old girl when he was 18 and on his first holiday from Oxford“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

„He had met her when both were taking music lessons in Marlborough, Wiltshire, when he was about 16 and she was 13, but he tried to rape her two years later when he was home during his first year at Oxford.
Golding writes that they went for a walk to the common and he 'felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth'.
Soon they were 'wrestling like enemies' as he 'tried unhandily to rape her'.
She resisted and Golding, years later, wrote that 'he had made such a bad hand at rape' before shaking her and shouting 'I’m not going to hurt you'.“
„A later girlfriend, Mollie, was also treated badly by Golding.
She was another local from Marlborough whom he later let down by breaking off their engagement because he had found her frigid.“
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...

„The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford. Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape". It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said.“
https://www.writerswrite.com/sir-will...

„Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, three years after bagging the Booker for Rites Of Passage, admitted trying to rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he was an 18-year-old student at Oxford, according to a forthcoming biography by John Carey.
The schoolgirl put up a fierce resistance. But they had sex two years later, according to Golding, who nevertheless called her “depraved by nature” and “sexy as an ape” in his unpublished memoir, Men, Women & Now. He wrote it for Ann, his wife of 50 years, to explain his “monstrous” character.“
https://readiscovery.com/2009/08/18/w...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...

Fringe philosophy
Downgrading and unintended satirizing of kids´ language from an adult´s perspective to seem capable of writing empathic and emotional, tragic-comic dialogues and characters is a cheap trick that fails epically, if not performed right. But it´s the logical consequence of making kids act as if they were stupid animals to integrate a biased, boring, and one sided plot. If you want real philosophy on an island, read:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

More bad philosophy on an island, read:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
This one has everything, racism, glorifying religious extremism, a true, clear picture of our past.

Back to the show, as it´s often the problem with monopolies, the ones in art lead to overrated, hyped, and simply not good wanna be philosophical constructions. I mean, symbolic, metaphysical, allegory metaphor overload for young people who want to be entertained? Honestly? „Don´t try to murder each other kids.“ What a lesson! Of course, kids are so stupid that they immediately establish cultic dictatorships if they are not supervised, what else should logically happen.

If this wouldn´t be a typical forced read to torture school kids and a kind of pre pop psychology Nobel Prize higher literature with meaning drivel, I would say it´s barely average, but because of its excessive misuse, it´s just unacceptable. Possibly the ever so clever bureaucrats of the boards of education all over the world ought think a second about removing all the trash of all the lauded, boring, outdated, obsolete,… literature each country tends to accumulate in a strange mixture of patriotism, cultural imperialism (our writers, literature, tradition) and think about including the great, amazing, wonderful worlds of literature kids and young adults want to read.

The worst classic I´ve ever read
One extra star up to 2 could have been given for incompetently trying to be deep, philosophical, and critical and failing to transport the important message about the evil lurking in naked apes. Nice try, William, but just an epic fail, and total bigotry regarding your alcohol and abuse problems you loved to drivel about in your strange diaries of a molester.
I was really searching for deeper meaning, any of all the arguments seen in positive reviews, but it´s just unrealistic, the ending is a bad joke, putting as much symbolism and innuendos in it to camouflage the immense flaws doesn´t really help, and it just fuels my opinion that, just as in real life, much of what is idealized and glorified is just bad and rotten. Look at the ratings of Golding´s other books, rated by people who like to read classics! Another achievement in inability.

I know, there are many getting real pleasure out of classic literature, that´s a question of taste and I don´t force them to read my trivial literature. That´s where the tolerance ends, because the problem is that the previously mentioned kids, teens, and young adults don´t deserve to be bored with what elder generations may really enjoy, but has absolutely no worth for them. I did once make the mistake of reading a few dozen classics and most were just average, some really bad, but definitively close to none great. It´s sad, avoidable, and just plain anachronistic to violently keep extremely outdated versions of descriptions of long away pasts in the curriculum and the main reason kids and teens hate to read.

Irony time, there would be old, classic, clever books that could really tell something about human nature, not using placative over the top violence, especially in the classic and new sci-fi and social-sci-fi genre that explore many questions regarding human nature, state, politics, sexuality, economics, faith, but, they would be too extreme, progressive, and subtle. Cause bigoted conservatives don´t want their kids to read really dangerous, meta context, social criticism, stuff, they want some characters far away from any real, imminent problems playing hide and seek with a freaking pigs´ head.

It truly left me speechless, just asking why, what´s wrong with you, humanities, literary critique, Nobel prize, quality literature, higher art, snobs, modern art, don´t you realize that you are satirizing yourself by praising so many works that many avid, lifelong readers, with k reading scores deem bad, arrogant, boring, and worthless? Reminiscences of a past when bigoted, unenlightened people celebrated any trash that could distract from their incredible cognitive biases. It at least also lets me imagine a purgatory library filled with this stuff and dark angels forcing me to read it until I become insane, repair my brain, and restart the process. Forever. Mwahahaha!

Trying to find an explanation, a combination of personal drivel with the biography of a disturbed mind
The author had issues, binge drinking and alcoholism were demons haunting him, and he did exactly write this one thing that made him famous and nothing else of importance. What makes one more disgusted is the fact that he, as mentioned, tried to rape a 15 year old girl when he was 18 (how often has he been successful and didn´t write about it, because he was so completely wasted and drunk that he wouldn´t even remember it?), a reason he should at least be retrospectively condemned, as retroactive, time travel castration isn´t really an option. That´s one of the crime areas where I distance myself from restorative justice and go full metal eye for an eye, archaic retributive justice, because I am of the opinion that sex offenders should be incarcerated under terrible conditions, life imprisonment without any chance to ever see the light of the day again (and this rehabilitation thing is complete, psychologic, psychiatric (2 other partly fringe science the humanities unleashed on humanity like a plague) nonsense. Nobody would try to „cure“ someone who is heterosexual, homosexual, or has a different gender identity than physical body, because that´s completely crazy. But hey, someone who is born (seen in babies) or made a pedophile, rapist, necrophile, etc. can of course be healed. And, another very important factor, it´s cheaper for the state to release serial sex killers to save some money and wait if it takes them weeks or months until the next victim is tortured, raped, and eaten. How is it possible that psychiatrists say that they are no danger anymore before and don´t get any problems for their little oopsies?). However, such a tortured, poor soul, someone who raped as bad as he wrote, could become a celebrated highlight of highbrow s*** literature, which makes him worthy of even more fringe Nobel prizes, maybe for voodoo economics.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

4.5 stars!
I was considering giving this book 2 stars at about halfway through. I was bored. And more bored, and I just couldn’t understand why people liked this book so much. Then I read the second half and woah it took me by surprise. I had so many feelings reading this book; sadness, anger but also happiness and at many points yes, I was confused but it only made me want to read on to know more.

I’m glad I read this as it’s on the ‘fifty books to read before you die’ challenge and also as I really enjoyed the book overall even though the beginning was a bit difficult to trudge through. I highly recommend trying the classic out if you haven’t yet!