All the same, I recognised Golding's terrain, which is a moral wilderness. Neither was it afloat in the Pacific, like the one on which the planeload of schoolboys was wrecked. My island, however, was cool, not tropical, scantily populated but not deserted. In the sweaty summers we were all flyblown and, like dogs infested with fleas, exhausted ourselves in brushing them off. In Tasmania, we certainly had the flies, which didn't confine themselves to swarming on putrid meat, as they do when they consume the pig's severed head in the novel. We spend our days either committing acts of violence or recoiling from them hatred surges through our undeveloped bodies like an electric current.
As children and adolescents, we have an intimate acquaintance with evil. An hour in a school playground is an education in the bestiality of young males, who instinctively form packs and taunt those who don't conform or – in a variant of the war-whooping chant repeated by the boys in William Golding's novel as they hunt wild pigs on their desert island – bash them up. That life had been short, and quite a bit of it was nasty and brutal. "As exciting, relevant, and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954.W hen I first read Lord of the Flies at school in Tasmania 50 years ago, I thought – as most boys probably do – that it was simply telling me the story of my life. Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games That was a big influence on me as a teenager, I still read it every couple of years." " Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them-the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories-and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature.
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