![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() First, it’s a brilliantly observed study of adolescents untethered from rules and conventions. 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. But this is a far cry from the world of Robinson Crusoe or Long John Silver. The upshot: a post-apocalyptic, dystopian survivor-fantasy about a bunch of pre-teen and teenage boys on a remote tropical island. His wife, Ann, who played a crucial role in his creative life, suggested RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island as a source of inspiration. ![]() 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).īy 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 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. 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. ![]()
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