Kids, an Island, a Conch, and Total Chaos

Nice British Boys, Terrible Circumstances

Here’s the setup, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple: a plane full of English schoolboys, evacuated during some unnamed war, crashes on a deserted tropical island. No adults survive. The boys, ranging from tiny six year olds (the “littluns”) to preteens like Ralph, Jack, and Piggy, have to figure out how to survive and, theoretically, get rescued.

They start out doing exactly what you’d expect well-bred British kids to do: they hold an election, they establish rules, someone finds a conch shell and it becomes a talking-stick that means order and civility. Ralph gets voted chief. Piggy, the fat asthmatic kid with glasses who is somehow the most rational person on the island, becomes his unofficial advisor. Jack, who leads the choirboys, wants to hunt.

And then, slowly, then not slowly at all, it falls apart. That’s really the whole plot. Golding is not interested in surprising you with what happens. He’s interested in showing you, in horrifying granular detail, exactly how it happens. The fire that’s supposed to signal rescue ships gets neglected because hunting pigs is more fun. The littluns start believing in a “beast” hiding in the jungle. Jack starts painting his face. And once a kid paints his face, Golding suggests, he stops being accountable to the boy underneath the paint.

I want to be clear that nothing about this premise is subtle, and Golding does not want it to be. This isn’t a mystery. It’s a countdown.

Why It Works (Mostly) and Where It Doesn’t

What actually got me, rereading this as an adult a few years back on a plane of all places, wasn’t the violence. It’s the smallness of the moments right before the violence. There’s a scene where Jack’s hunters finally kill a pig, and the description of the kill goes on long enough that you understand this isn’t hunting for food anymore, it’s something closer to worship. Then there’s the pig’s head on a stick, swarmed with flies, that gives the book its title. Simon, the quiet strange kid who might be the only truly good person on the island, has a hallucinatory conversation with that head where it basically tells him the beast isn’t out in the jungle, it’s inside every one of them. That scene is genuinely unsettling in a way that has nothing to do with gore.

And then there’s the ending with Piggy. I won’t spoil the mechanics of it for the two remaining people on earth who haven’t read this in school, but I will say that the specific object used, and the specific way Piggy’s death is described in almost clinical, distant prose, is one of the most quietly brutal passages I’ve read in a book assigned to fourteen year olds. Golding doesn’t linger. He doesn’t need to.

Here’s my actual criticism, though, because I promised myself I wouldn’t just gush: this book has basically no women in it, not one, and Golding has said in interviews that this was intentional, that he wanted to strip away what he saw as a “civilizing” female influence to isolate boys and, by extension, men, doing what he believed men naturally do. That’s a big, ugly thesis to build a whole novel on, and it hasn’t aged particularly well. The real-world event that “disproves” Golding’s whole premise, six actual Tongan boys shipwrecked in 1965 who cooperated, built a gym, and rescued each other, wasn’t discovered by the public until decades after this book was already canon. Knowing that now, some of the book’s certainty about human nature feels less like insight and more like one man’s fairly bleak, era-specific assumptions dressed up as universal truth.

Also, and I say this as someone who loves this book: some of the middle section drags. There are stretches of boys arguing about fire and shelter that read more like a thesis on group psychology than a novel. I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly, Golding was a former teacher and it shows in the didactic bones of the thing, but it means this isn’t always a page-turner in the conventional sense. It’s more like watching a car crash in extremely slow motion while someone explains physics to you.

Am I overrating this because it terrified me at thirteen and I’ve never fully recovered? Maybe. That’s a real possibility I have to sit with. But I’ve reread it twice as an adult and it still works, even knowing exactly what’s coming.

The scariest thing in this book isn’t the beast. It’s how fast “we made a rule” turns into “kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.”

About William Golding

William Golding was a Royal Navy officer during World War II before he was a novelist, and he saw actual combat at D-Day, which matters, because Lord of the Flies reads like it was written by someone who had already watched adults behave like savages and simply moved the experiment to a smaller cast. He was also a schoolteacher for years, teaching boys roughly the age of his characters, and reportedly used to let his students stage mock wars in class to observe how they’d organize. He published Lord of the Flies after it was rejected by multiple publishers (one reader famously dismissed it as “rubbish and dull”), and it went on to make him one of the most studied writers of the twentieth century, eventually winning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He seems, from interviews and letters, to have been a genuinely gloomy, self-doubting man who thought humanity’s default setting was closer to Jack than to Ralph. Whether or not you agree with him, he wrote one of the few novels that makes a convincing case for his own pessimism.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

Try The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks if you want another unsettling look at a child mind capable of real cruelty, told with a similarly cold, precise narrative voice.

Try We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver for a modern, adult-eyed exploration of whether some kids are just built wrong, or whether we build them that way.

Try 1984 by George Orwell if what got you about this book was the slow erosion of rules and language into brutality, just scaled up to an entire society.

Try Bethany’s actual book on the Tongan castaway story, The Real Lord of the Flies by Rutger Bregman’s reporting (found in his book Humankind), if you want the true story that pushes back on Golding’s whole thesis with real, documented kindness.

You can grab a copy here: Lord of the Flies on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Do you think this would have played out differently with even one adult present, or is Golding’s point precisely that adults wouldn’t have changed anything?
2. Piggy is arguably the most intelligent, most reasonable character on the island, and he’s also the most mocked and the least protected. What is Golding saying about how groups treat the people who tell them the truth?
3. Knowing that a real group of shipwrecked boys cooperated instead of descending into violence, does that change how you read Golding’s central argument, or do you think fiction gets to make its own rules about human nature?
4. Jack’s face paint seems to unlock something in him. Do you believe anonymity or disguise actually changes what people are capable of, and can you think of a modern parallel?
5. Simon’s death is arguably the most tragic because it happens in a moment of mass hysteria rather than premeditated cruelty. Does that make it more or less disturbing than what happens to Piggy?