Book review: The Lord of the Flies

Title: The Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Pages: 225

The Lord of the Flies is a novel about a group of schoolboys whose plane crash-lands on a deserted island. No adults survive and the boys are the only people on the island.

At first the boys all get along but then things start to go wrong and they turn violent and cruel. The tone of the book is dark and serious.

Golding’s main characters – Ralph (the elected ‘Chief’), Jack (the athletic and popular boy who wishes to be Chief) and Piggy (a fat, cerebral and asthmatic coward) are vivid and brilliantly developed.

I loved some of Golding’s dark prose:

As if this information was rooted far down in the springs of sorrow, the littlun wept. His face puckered, the tears leapt from his eyes, his mouth opened till they could see a square black hole. At first he was a silent effigy of sorrow; but then the lamentation rose out of him, loud and sustained as the conch.

Golding was a Nobel-prize winner and this is his most-famous book. I wonder if his other books are as good.

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