Unpopular
opinion alert: I don’t like Lord of the
Flies* by William Golding. At
all. Not even a little bit.
The book
opens on an island where a group of schoolboys are stranded sans grown-ups. How
did they get there? Why are they there? Where are the grown-ups? Totally
unclear. The novel is only 200 pages and I spent the first 50 stuck on the
logistics of their desertion. I’m down to suspend disbelief, but if the boys
spend most of the book trying to get rescued, throw me a contextual bone or
two.
A grown-up
free playpen? Sounds awesome. Until you need to organize and meet basic
survival needs. The novel portrays their floundering attempts to create a
civilized society. Boys. Will. Be. Boys. Soooo much arguing. Just constant
bickering that mostly leads to nowhere. Truly, the dialogue is excruciating. I
know that they’re kids, but can no one express a complete thought? Each one has
the memory of a goldfish; most of the banter consists of them wondering where
some other kid went. Seriously, stop running off every five seconds, it’s
uninteresting. Every boy seems like a dumb dumb, starting a sentence and then
forgetting what he is saying. The entire novel is littered with dashes because
a kid’s thought will inevitably be cut off.
The novel
never explicitly specifies time, but it seems that the plot is tightly packed
and therefore the boys are not on the island for very long (a month, perhaps).
Their descent into savagery is rapid, like a snowball effect. Humans are capable
of good and evil, and the setting is an allegory for humanity’s base impulses
within rule-driven society. When you’re a confused child abandoned on an island
with other confused children, your evil side might come out more than you’d
prefer. That’s perfectly fine as a premise, but many of the actions and
reactions are disproportionate and unbelievable. There isn’t much character
development, but I sincerely doubt that a bunch of children, no matter how
strange their circumstances are, have totally sociopathic responses to the
gruesome deaths of boys their age. Golding hit the nail on the head too
forcefully, and I would have appreciated more nuances.
My favorite
thing about this book is unrelated to the writing itself. I got a used copy,
and the person before me wrote “siesore” in the margins in a scene where one
kid has a seizure. Other than that, Lord
of the Flies receives 1 out of 5 camel humps.
*Golding, William. Lord
of the Flies. New York: Perigee, 1954. Print.
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