Lord of the Flies
William Golding, 1954
Young adult Science fictionLiterary fictionContemporary fiction
Twelve boys, one island, no adults: a school story that becomes an inquiry into how quickly people build rules, and how easily they drop them. A bright island adventure curdles into unease, with lyrical descriptions and a steady pull of dread.
Feels like dread and unease. About freedom, power and home.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy school stories that turn into sharp questions about rules, power and group behavior. Be aware that the dread and grim view of people can make it a heavy, unsettling read.
Why read it
It gives you a compact, dramatic way to think about how rules hold and slip, and why groups can turn on themselves.
A page from the book
Dread arrives on the beach in step, wearing a silver cross.
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. William Golding.Golding taught boys at a Salisbury school for years and commanded a rocket-firing landing craft on D-Day; both the schoolboys and the war fed this book.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Lord of the Flies for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy school stories that turn into sharp questions about rules, power and group behavior. Be aware that the dread and grim view of people can make it a heavy, unsettling read.
- What is Lord of the Flies like?
- A bright island adventure curdles into unease, with lyrical descriptions and a steady pull of dread. Feels like dread and unease. About freedom, power and home.
- What should I read after Lord of the Flies?
- If you liked Lord of the Flies, try Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell).
A taste of the feed
What if self-knowledge always arrives one step too late?
Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
Heart of Darkness · Joseph Conrad
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
The word for disappearance that sounds like household cleaning.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell
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