Lord Of The Flies: Survival Of The Fittest

The Book Club

In this episode of The Book Club, hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett explore William Golding's seminal novel 'Lord of the Flies,' ex

Key takeaways

• The novel was deeply influenced by Golding's experiences during WWII and the Holocaust, reflecting a post-war reckoning with humanity's capacity for evil.
• Golding used the premise of stranded schoolboys to strip away societal constraints and expose primal instincts, making the story more shocking because it involves children rather than adults.

Main topics

• The influence of WWII and the Holocaust on Golding's writing
• The theme of civilization versus savagery in human nature

Notable quotes

"That scene is a terrifying preview of all the bloodshed to come and an unnerving glimpse at the primitive savagery that lurks beneath the surface of these boys and perhaps beneath the surface of all of us."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that 'Lord of the Flies' remains a powerful, unsettling exploration of human nature's

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by Klarna. Tabby, as I was Speaker 2 (0:04) saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it? You Speaker 1 (0:17) know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for. But Speaker 2 (0:24) you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real-world money. admin. And that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books. Because Speaker 1 (0:34) their app lets you view all your finances in one place. You can set budgets, stay on top of reminders and manage your payments so you don't have to worry about any plot holes. Speaker 2 (0:46) And you know the other thing about the app, when you shop through the app, you unlock exclusive deals and you can get cash back on things that you are going to buy anyway. Speaker 1 (0:55) Download the Klarna app so you can stay on top of your money and think about... Well, anything else. Klarna Balance account required to receive cash back points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. Speaker 1 (1:16) Jack shouted, Make Speaker 2 (1:18) a ring! The Speaker 1 (1:19) circle moved in and around. Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain. Ow! Stop it! You're hurting! They got his arms and legs. Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it. Kill him! Kill him! All at once, Robert was screaming and struggling with the strength of frenzy. Jack had him by the hair and was brandishing his knife. Behind him was Roger, fighting to get close. The chant rose ritually, as at the last moment of a dance or a hunt. Speaker 2 (1:52) Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in! Speaker 1 (1:56) Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering. Jack's arm came down. The heaving circle cheered and made pig-dying noises. Then they lay quiet. panting, listening to Robert's frightened snivels. He wiped his face with a dirty arm and made an effort to retrieve his status. Ow, my bum! He rubbed his rump ruefully. Jack rolled over. Speaker 2 (2:23) That was a good game. Speaker 1 (2:25) Just a game, said Ralph uneasily. That was William Golding's Lord of the Flies, published in September 1954. That scene comes about halfway through the book, and it's when these... boys, a group of British schoolboys who have been marooned on a desert island following a plane crash are playing what appears to be a game. It's quite obvious from that reading alone that it's much more than just a playground game. There's something very sinister going on beneath the surface. That scene is a terrifying preview of all the bloodshed to come and an unnerving glimpse at the primitive savagery. that lurks beneath the surface of these boys and perhaps beneath the surface of all of us. And from that scene, you get a sense of the incredible power of Lord of the Flies. It's one of the best known novels of the last 70 years or so. And it's certainly one of those books that almost everyone has heard of. even if they haven't read it. Because, you know, the title has become something of a catchphrase. When somebody says something was very Lord of the Flies, you know, for instance, one of our famous book club planning meetings. Yeah, is that really Speaker 2 (3:35) Lord of the Flies? When Speaker 1 (3:36) Dominic strangles Nicole for the last prawn. You know what people mean, you know, even if you haven't read it, you know what it implies. And it's a book about... cruelty and violence and hierarchy and the consequences of a kind of sick tribalism, I guess. And it's definitely one of the best known literary depictions of how quickly we can let our veneer of civilization slip away and descend into the savagery and the sadism that lurks beneath the surface in all of us. Speaker 2 (4:09) Yeah. Hi, everybody. So this is a book that presents us with a very, I would say, very, very bleak. mercilessly bleak vision of human nature. Speaker 1 (4:18) Sandbrookian. Yeah, I Speaker 2 (4:19) think it's ultra Sandbrookian. I think it's no coincidence that it was written just within a few years of the Second World War and of the Holocaust, because this is actually a book about evil. It's a book about the capacity for evil. that lurks within us all, whether we're schoolboys or whether we are, you know, grownups or whatever. But Speaker 1 (4:37) actually, I mean, that's just the point is the fact that, you know, it's not prison guards. It's not fully grown men in armor or wearing uniforms. It is little boys. It's children. Goes back to what we discussed in the Hunger Games. And that's what makes it so shocking and so powerful. These are comfortable, middle-class, well-bred. British schoolboys, there's a point when someone actually says that, you know, you're British boys. Most of them aren't even teenagers yet. And they are marooned on this desert island and they slowly start to be twisted and start to transform into what, you know, maybe is their true selves. Speaker 2 (5:11) Yeah, exactly. And the premise, I mean, it's the premise of so many children's adventure stories. So a group of boys who are marooned on desert islands and they think. They're going to have adventures. I mean, that's what we're led to believe as readers. Speaker 1 (5:25) Swallows and Amazons, you know, stuff like that. You think you're in for a jolly good time. Speaker 2 (5:29) Swiss Family, Robinson, the Coral Island, exactly that. And that's part of Golding's point, as we will see. As he said to his wife before he started writing it, the point was to show what children would do, indeed, what all human beings would do if the restraints of order and civility and institutions were removed. And that reading that we did at the beginning. I mean, they're playing a game, but it gives you a sense of the tone. There's the sort of frenzy. There's the sense of mounting excitement. There's the almost sexual ecstasy as they play the game. They're getting more and more into it. And even Ralph, who is the character in the book who stands in for us, the readers, more than anybody else. In that opening reading, Golding describes him feeling a sudden thick excitement. He's overcome by the desire to squeeze and hurt. And it's one of Golding's elements of his genius is that he sees. so clearly the darkness and the desire to hurt that lies within us all so i mean you compare it with the hunger games the hunger games is quite a jolly book by comparison with this because the hunger games is a ultimately a fun book for teenagers yeah this book is a very bleak book and tabby you don't tend to like bleak books so did you like this one i Speaker 1 (6:39) think i read it at school first And it's oddly forgettable for me in my memory. I couldn't remember much about it. And actually, I spent a lot of the first half rereading it this time, wondering when all the things I remembered were going to happen. And it wasn't exactly as I remembered it. And I actually didn't find it that bleak until about halfway through. I was actually quite bored at places. Oh, my Speaker 2 (7:01) God. Unbelievable. I know. Speaker 1 (7:03) Shocking. And then the book escalates and everything starts unraveling. And I think because it's written in that slightly old fashioned 1950s prose, I didn't realize how affected I was by it. And then I started having nightmares about it. So obviously it had crept. No Speaker 2 (7:19) way, Speaker 1 (7:19) really? Yeah, genuinely. I had one. night before last. So obviously it had crept into my psyche in some strange way. And I've thought about it a lot since. But I know, Dominic, that you're quite a big fan of this book and it perfectly reflects your worldview. I Speaker 2 (7:33) read this when I was a child. I think I read it when I was about 11, which I think is far too young. Speaker 1 (7:39) Do you? Speaker 2 (7:40) Oh, definitely. Because it was the most traumatising book I think I've ever read. I mean, I remember it really vividly. I remember reading the book and feeling so unsettled and disturbed by it. To give you an indication of how disturbing I found it, I mean, I really do remember this strongly, I kept it away from my other books. So like a lot of very bookish kids, I had all my books lined up, like kind of fighting fantasy game books, the Lord of the Rings, all of this. Speaker 1 (8:04) Yeah, no contamination. Right, and I had them all, Speaker 2 (8:07) and I didn't want it to, because I felt unhappy when I thought about it. I felt really unsettled. Speaker 2 (8:13) I think I kept it under my bed or something. I couldn't even, I found it hard even to look at it. I remember the Faber and Faber book had a picture on the cover of a severed pig's head on a spike with blood dripping from it. Oh Speaker 1 (8:24) God, no wonder. Even Speaker 2 (8:25) the cover I found disturbing. And of course the reason I found it so disturbing, you know, it's not like I was reading a Stephen King horror novel that clearly wasn't meant for me. It appears to be a children's book, right? It's about a group of children on a desert island. Now, what I think of it now, I do think. Big spoiler alert, I think it's a great book. As you rightly said, everybody knows what you mean by the expression Lord of the Flies. And I think it's become, whether you've read it or not, it's become kind of embedded in our imagination as a book that says something really important about modern civilization and about human nature. Speaker 1 (9:02) It's used a lot in relation to... to reality TV shows or those kind of experimental game shows where you put people on an island and see what happens. This is what people will do. So Speaker 2 (9:12) it's Speaker 1 (9:12) really penetrated culture and society. It has Speaker 2 (9:14) completely. I'm guessing lots of people listening to this would have read it, but in case there are people who've forgotten or people who haven't and want a little preview of what happens, Tabby, why don't you remind us what goes on? Speaker 1 (9:24) So the book begins with two boys... on a beach and they're in their school uniform and actually very little is given away about how they got there, why they're there, the world that they come from. And these two boys are among the survivors of a plane crash returning from Britain's colonial outposts. And they've been shot down in what we later learn is a third world war. But again, that's very likely alluded to. And one of these boys we've already mentioned, and that is Ralph. And he becomes... this group of survivors leader. And effectively he's the hero of the book. He's the guy we're rooting for. And then the other is Piggy. And Piggy turns out to be much more intelligent than the others, but he is also kind of the scapegoat for them because he's fat, he has glasses, he's the outsider. Even Ralph is, as we'll see, quite cruel to him. And the boys realize quite quickly that they're gonna have to fend for themselves. And in the beginning, you have this scene of them all being terribly excited by this and frolicking and swimming. dream has come true paradise without parents they realize that they're going to have to set some rules and some boundaries for themselves so light a fire in order to attract planes and ships or whatever get fruit from the fruit trees build shelters but everything starts to unravel quite quickly and these factions start to form there are two factions one is loyal to ralph with piggy is his right hand man and then the other the head of it is this guy called jack and he is head chorister of a cathedral choir Speaker 2 (10:52) Yeah, he's an alpha though, isn't he, Jack? Speaker 1 (10:54) He's much more alpha than Ralph. He's more violent. He's much more impulsive. He turns his choir into a brutal hunting party and they become obsessed with hunting and killing pigs, the pigs that live on this island. And they also become fixated with the idea, not just Jack's group, all the boys, with the idea that they themselves are being hunted by some supernatural... being that they call the beast and the way that that idea grows and takes root in their minds is another part of this book I find so interesting. And then over the next 200 pages or so, the story plays out. The boys steadily become less civilized. They become crueler. They become much more feral, much more violent. They lose all sense of rules or decency or decorum. And then by the second half of the book, any illusion. of a childhood innocence, totally shattered. And the story just gets darker and darker and more disturbing. But unusually for books that we do on this show, people recognized as soon as it came out that it was something quite new and something pretty remarkable. To quote just a couple of the first reviews. from 1954 so the poet stevie smith said it was a beautiful and desperate book something quite out of the ordinary and then the novelist em forster who i love so that he wrote howard's end a passage to india for instance he named it his book of the year and said it was beautifully written tragic and provocative yeah Speaker 2 (12:20) i mean amazing reviews and those are incredible accolades for it was basically a debut novel by a writer that nobody had ever heard of. So there's a great biography of William Golding by John Carey. He's one of my heroes, former professor of English at Oxford. I Speaker 1 (12:34) love how vulnerable you're being in this episode. It's beautiful to see. Carry on, friend. Speaker 2 (12:39) I mean, I've barely started, Tabby. I bet. John Carey says of William Golding, when his book was published, he was 43 years old and a nobody. He was a schoolmaster. from a grammar school in Salisbury. He lived with his wife, Anne, and their two children in a cramped flat. And he just came out of nowhere with this masterpiece. Speaker 1 (12:57) You know, I have to say, sometimes we will do books on this show and learning about the authors, you gain not that much from it. Sometimes you gain a lot. Sometimes it can change the way you read the book. Learning about William Golding was such a pleasure because it didn't affect the way that I read Lord of the Flies or anything like that, but it just made it so interesting. He's exactly who I would have hoped a book like this would have come from. I Speaker 2 (13:19) mean, he's a remarkable man. So Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. His parents were sort of, they were lower middle class, so they weren't terribly well off, but they were sort of bookish, intellectual, left-leaning kind of people. His father, Alec. was a science teacher, a very popular science teacher, at Marlborough Grammar School in Wiltshire. So William Golding grew up in Marlborough. He and his parents live at one end of the town, and at the other end of the town is the institution that he hates more than any other, the institution that gives him this driving hatred all his life, fuels his fiction. And this is a school, it's a little-known school actually, quite an obscure minor public school called Marlborough College. As Golding was growing up, he would watch these... with what he himself described as hatred and envy. As these horrible people strutted around the town, he loathed what he saw as their arrogance. Speaker 2 (14:12) He loathed what he saw as their arrogant entitlement, Tabby, as their entitlement and condescension. And later in life, he said that what drove his whole career, my deepest unconscious desire, he said, was to show Marlborough and then piddle on them. And Tabby, for you, this is personal, isn't it? Because... as part of your very I have no flesh in this Speaker 1 (14:36) game I have no flesh in this game I just think it's sad I just think it's sad when people wish to piddle on your old school noble respectable establishments of learning well have you know they treat they train you know they train the elite Speaker 2 (14:48) it's like an intellectual podcasting elite Speaker 1 (14:53) you know, you should have a bit more respect for your future monarch. You know, this is the former house of learning of Kate Middleton. Kate Middleton. Speaker 2 (14:59) Kate Middleton. She's not the only long-haired posh girl who went to Moorishy. Speaker 1 (15:03) Well, I mean, there have been others. Speaker 2 (15:06) Golding, if he was listening to this podcast, would be seething with rage at the very mention of it now. He'd be spitting Speaker 1 (15:11) at me. Speaker 2 (15:11) He would. And actually, this is not irrelevant because you already mentioned Piggy. Piggy is from a different background to the other boys in the book. He is smarter than they are. He is more mature. He is the boy who actually really should be the leader because he's by far the smartest. But precisely because he hasn't been to this kind of school, they push him to the margins. And Piggy embodies William Golding's feelings of exclusion and resentment. Speaker 1 (15:39) Because Golding as a boy was also very, very bright. He was a great reader. He was a brilliant chess player. and also musician. And one of his first ambitions, which I think is commendable, was to be a concert pianist. But, and this is where he and I have a great deal in common, he's very superstitious and he's fascinated by myths, Egyptology, the supernatural. So also commendable in all ways, save perhaps one. He's an extremely commendable man. Of Speaker 2 (16:05) course, you were a teenager living in Marlborough, as was he, and he was very sexually driven. So there's a... A bonkers story in John Kerry's biography. You're Speaker 1 (16:16) enjoying this far too much. Speaker 2 (16:17) William Golding, his first sexual experience is when he has a prank. He climbed a flagpole on Marlborough Common and he started climbing this flagpole and the friction. aroused him so he carried on climbing saw Speaker 1 (16:30) him standing to attention he Speaker 2 (16:32) climbed to the top and when he got to the top of this flagpole he had an orgasm so actually on this note his early relations with girls are very colourful to say the least so he had a girlfriend called Dora whom he effectively tried to rape and she had to fight him off and Speaker 1 (16:44) by the way that's rape as in he that's what he termed it himself. Speaker 2 (16:49) Yeah, he wrote about it in a memoir or something, which he gave to his wife. He Speaker 1 (16:53) wrote it in a journal that he then left for his wife Speaker 2 (16:55) to read. He then picked up a girl called Sheila in the gents' toilets in St Ives, where she was interfering with some sailors. I mean, it just seemed a very strange story. And then he went out with Dora again. And by this point, Dora was seeing an older man as well, who used to whip her regularly. And Golding said afterwards he found the sight of her lacerated bottom, quote, loathsomely exciting. And he later said, it was one of those things that I just could never get out of my head. I will see that bottom basically till the day I die. You Speaker 1 (17:23) can see from all this that he's very driven by this sexual, this kind of primal sexual instinct in him. I mean, I don't know how many people managed to achieve orgasms from climbing up flagpoles. But anyway, to get back to more serious subject matters, he goes to Oxford initially to do science. and then English. But he, again, is very miserable there because he still feels excluded by public school boys who dominate the university at this time. And he said he found it unbearable. I think I read something that said he only made about three or four friends his whole time at Oxford. Speaker 2 (17:52) That's right. Yeah, just three friends. And Speaker 1 (17:54) then after Oxford, he goes into teaching, possibly quite reluctantly, and he eventually ends up at Bishop Wordsworth School in Salisbury. And there he's engaged to a girl called Molly, who was a big f***er. hit with his family. She was known to his parents and they were very fond of her. And then he ditches her and marries another girl called Anne instead. And Molly never got over it. And I think the guilt of abandoning this girl that he was very, obviously very close to, that his family was close to, possibly haunted Golding all of his life and might explain the sense of guilt that never really left him. I think maybe also there's a slight sense of guilt about, this could be kind of pop psychology, but about... his insatiable sexual appetite from a young age. Yeah, Speaker 2 (18:36) yeah, the flagpole business. Totally. I mean, we'll come on to the guilt because the guilt, the sense of his own sinfulness drives so much of Golding's fiction. And in his biography, John Kerry makes the point that the weird thing is that Golding is quite, in some ways, just quite a humdrum man. He hasn't done anything absolutely horrendous. So what is it? that makes him look into his soul and see such darkness. I Speaker 1 (19:01) think sometimes very intelligent people with a slight strain of what might be depression, anxiety or something, coupled with a superstition and awareness of, I don't know, the spiritual or whatever, maybe in his case that became Christianity. I think that can often result in this strange burden of guilt that people live with. Speaker 2 (19:21) Yeah,