Auteur's library

William Golding

Lord of the Flies

1954

This is not the kind of book you could ever like reading: it’s not pleasant, feels as if it's not meant to be so. It’s that one necessary stone in the wall of your education. Going through each scene is like a dare, unnerving, frighteningly thrilling. You feel the next drama coming round the corner, you fervently turn the pages and tell yourself it's just to be done with it, leave that godforsaken island behind you.
The book really shook me, though I never managed to love the characters. I couldn’t help but hope they would be saved, all the while wishing those evil kids’d be dead, already. It is impossible not to hate them but it’s equally as hard, I find, to let go of them. 

As Golding blurs the lines between sanity and madness, wrongness and evil, the characters' distinctiveness is forgotten 'til they all embody the figure of 'the boy', or more simply 'the human', in its most banal, yet scariest form. This is where Golding truly nails it: this, the subdued but powerful writing whispers, this could be you.

P.S. The N-word is present around page 200. and used by a kid for a nasty comparison between disorder and order, “savages” and Englishmen.

Tags : tragedy in close quarters, dystopia, héros malmenés, superego vs. the id, study of the abstract and madness, external vs. internal evil, “maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us”, guerrillas here and there, games and adventures