Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

Finished reading Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding. A pessimistic adventure story many read in school. I remember seeing it in the catalogue in high school, but managed to be on a different English course track, and so missed it. But it came to mind again when a friend on this platform posted a colorized clip from the 1963 black and white film, available to watch here https://www.bitchute.com/video/aqheSbF1Q8th, and so I devoted two or three days to reading a copy I picked up a year or two ago. Or perhaps missed is the wrong word? Spared? While Lord of the Flies kept my interest, it is rather purposefully unpleasant, and in the vein of Stephen King’s The Stand, attempts a big and blatant moral message, but mostly fails to deliver, even with the novelist’s complete control of events conveniently on his side. First, the narrative shortcomings as survival literature, which occurred to me again and again as I read. Did none of the perhaps thirty schoolboys aboard this evacuation plane carry a wristwatch or pocket watch (like the adult at the end of the movie)? They could have used the time difference from Greenwich to the island to figure out the approximate longitude, and guessed at where they are. Weren’t British boys around this period still thoroughly schooled in geography? Perhaps more importantly for the story, does anyone think it would really be this hard to keep a fire going? The thing seemed to go out on the hour, even when they brought in whole logs. There is no way a large class-sized group of boys couldn’t do that and still do everything else they desired. The main narrative beef, or rather the bacon, is, why are Jack Merridew (pictured) and his band of huntsmen taken as embodying a fall back into evil and savagery? The film communicates some of the realities here with it’s appealing visuals: these are just boys who relish a new, free life as hunter-gatherers. The very title, famously, refers to the biblical demon Beelzebub, Hebrew for Lord of the Flies, and at least as experienced by Simon, the head of a pig that’s placed on a pole, in offering to the beast the boys reportedly see, becomes the embodiment of the Lord of the Flies. I think we’re supposed to take this as some kind of sacrifice to a demon, but of course, the beast the boys fear isn’t supposed to be a supernatural being, but an unknown animal, and the head a gesture to placate it and encourage it to tolerate their presence, so it doesn’t really work. To really get biblical, while mankind may have been eating meat before the flood, as livestock raising had already come about (Genesis 4:4, 20), when did the Lord make it official that all the animals were for us to eat? Right after Noah leaves the ark, in Genesis 9:2-5. Given that the next foible humanity fell into was the Tower of Babel, I suspect the God’s reason was partly to encourage more free and independent association. Agriculture requires settled life, and no sooner comes about than centralized government and major building projects. Hunter gatherers, however, can subsist in small groups wherever there is game, and move on if the neighbors become oppressive or offensive. It seems like this is what Jack was trying to recreate. In the book, how tiring the plea, “I’ve got the conch! I’ve got the conch!” got. Ralph quickly proved unable to lead, but tried to tie the others down with an agreement they’d entered into after hardly thinking it over. If one thing could have prevented the tragic elements in the story, it would be having smashed the conch, that farcical symbol of legal pretension, earlier on, and Ralph voluntarily stepping down. As it is, Lord of the Flies, so often assigned in school, and almost universally disliked, reads like an inept attempt to associate meat-eating and the joys of the hunt with barbarism, as many left-liberals do, rather than freedom and growth in manliness, as the movie can hardly help but do. The cover of this edition features Simon, the eccentric, in turmoil after finding out what the “beast“ apparently was (the corpse of a parachutist, downed in the war the adults are fighting, and caught in a tree). Really something multiple boys will mistake for a beast? Can only think, were I there, would have my head in my hands too, thinking: Why, oh why, didn’t I lose the other boys at the airport, and sneak aboard the plane evacuating an all-girls boarding school in the confusion? Which presumably crashed on another paradise island somehwere in the Pacific. That would be nice. Come to think of it, realistically Jack would likely have kept “Piggy” around (really, he never gives his real name? About as likely as them never counting how many boys are there). He’d recognize the island’s shortcomings, i.e., how he couldn’t create a lasting society with just boys, and ask him to engineer a raft they could take to sea, in hopes of bringing back some Sabines from Polynesia. Are any of Golding’s later works worth reading? Please tell me, as this may be a good effort at a first novel, but I don’t feel inclined to read more as is. #WilliamGolding #LordOfTheFlies #survival #adventure #hunting #meateating #meat #stateofnature #savagery #barbarism #boys #school #curriculum #films #movies #BitChute #novels #literature #books