Lord of the Flies

"William Golding imbues some of these children with wisdom that would read, in the hands of a lesser author, as implausibly knowing. In the context, in the way that the novel strips these boys of known civilisation to create their own, which is a facsimile of what they are used to, it is believable. That kind of thing that Simon says, for example, about the beast being in all of them, I think can be tied to what I am trying to say. I think our sense of good and bad—the idea of a civilised person—tends to depend on community. So what happens when you are thrown into a desert on your own? When you become Robinson Crusoe, for example, what do you do? That is when your integrity is tested, when nobody is looking."

"Right. I think that a lot of people might not have read it, but think they know the story. During an atomic war, a plane-load of boys are being evacuated across Asia and the Pacific, where the plane is shot down. It lands on a coral island, and the plane itself—after the children have climbed out—is dragged off to sea in a storm, presumably with a few kids, as one of the characters surmises. Then there are just children, no adults. At first this seems wonderful to them. They try to create a society, to behave well and organise things, and decide things by vote. It’s worth pointing out that they do make a good attempt at that. And for various reasons—my father said it was because they are suffering from the terrible disease of being human—it comes to grief, becomes factional, and one faction is overwhelmingly more successful than the other. People are killed. Finally, the hero—the point-of-view character in the book—is running for his life. I won’t say how it ends. I think that’s only part of the story. That’s why I stressed that they did make that real attempt. And, I mean… we could hardly claim that the human race is doing brilliantly at the moment. He knew that people, given half a chance, could be really terrible. He’d just been through the Second World War. He’d killed people himself, had definitely been instrumental in killing people. Then there had been the news about the concentration camps and the Holocaust generally. He said, ‘I’d seen what one man could do to another.’ So from that point of view, yes, it’s about human savagery. But he also said somewhere, I think in his journal, that when people say he’s a pessimist, they forget about the good things in Lord of the Flies . They forget about Simon, they forget about Ralph and Piggy standing up to the character who becomes a demogogue. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I should expand. Simon is a mystic who is brave enough to confront the terrifying figure of what they think is a beast come to haunt and possibly kill them. Simon goes up the mountain to confront the beast. So there are very good and brave people in Lord of the Flies . Also, it’s about children. Pre-pubescent children. At the most, they are 12 or 13, and there are a whole bunch of younger children as well. There’s the question of how they should have been protected, they should have had adults in their lives. Schools set this as a question: what happens to the characters after Lord of the Flies? They will have been traumatised. So I don’t think it’s just about human savagery. It’s about tragedy, that we can’t get away from it. That’s what it’s really about. That’s a wonderful introduction, a tremendous piece of work. And yes, I agree. I think his imagination was terrible to him, because it was so vivid and he could not escape. He described the intensity of it. Sometimes he said he had to externalise this imagination in order to deal with it because he just couldn’t keep it in. Just as an example: One of the other novels I thought of choosing was his third novel, Pincher Martin . I didn’t, for various reasons, but Pincher Martin begins with the description of somebody starting to drown. That description is so brilliant, but to do that, he must have had to imagine what it feels like. He was prepared to take that step, which I am not prepared to do. The two qualities that are most admired in his writing are the intensity—which is very, very true—and also the immersive quality of his writing, which is really remarkable. You come out of his novels almost as though you have been in a dream. That is a very powerful, powerful thing."