Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies is English author William Golding’s first novel which was published in 1954. Lord of the Flies is William Golding’s best-known book, but he has wrote many others too and has won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. At the time when Lord of the Flies was published it wasn’t a great success but later it became a best-seller. Two films have been done based on the book, in 1963 and 1990. The name ”Lord of the Flies” is a literal translation of Beelzebub which means Satan.

Lord of the Flies is a story about a group of English school boys who end up on an uninhabited island when their airplane crashes there. The world is in war and the plane was in evacuation mission. The only survivors of the plane crash are smaller and older schoolboys, ”biguns” and ”littluns” as book calls them, but there is no adults. At first boys enjoy the situation and the fact that there isn’t any grown-ups bossing them. But then boys understand that they need a leader to keep order and they have to decide a chief among them. A boy named Ralph comes elected but Jack, other bigun, isn’t happy about that because he would have liked to be in charge too, which later leads to rebellion. In the beginning boys’ life in the island is pretty easy and they all live in agreement. They develop a social system on their own, where others are hunters and others take care of the fire or drinking water. However, things start to change and little by little those innocent schoolboys began to behave like savages and they forget how to behave in civilization. Killing pigs for dinner becomes a routine for hunters and nobody follows the rules they have settled. I won’t tell you if the boys get rescued from the island or not, you can find out that by yourself by reading the book, which I highly recommend.

I admire the way Golding describes the thoughts of the boys; he knows precisely what is in boys’ heads. There is some quite horrible events in the book, too, and Golding tells about them very realistically. It’s interesting to see how boys turn from sophisticated citizens to animalistic savages in raw nature and in such a short time. The book hooks the reader to continue reading; you have to know what happens next.

Lord of the Flies is absorbing description about how dramatically people can change in a new and strange environment and all the learned norms are forgotten just like that. Man is capable to do terrible things in lust of power and it’s shocking to see how even little kids are so greedy for power.

Lord of the Flies was published over 60 years ago and its language is a bit difficult. Reading the book took a lot of time because there were so many unfamiliar words and phrases and I had to use translator pretty often. I think the book was very interesting and well done but I might have gotten more out of it if I had read it in Finnish some other time. I liked the book very much and it was instructive and thought-provoking.