Lord of the Flies is wrong about humanity

Lord of the Flies is wrong about humanity

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, currently being dramatized on BBC television, is a novel with a hidden thesis. Like several of Golding’s other novels, it is really about the Fall. A bunch of well-mannered schoolboys end up on a remote Pacific island as the result of an air crash and gradually lapse into savagery. It’s as though the angelic little Oliver Twist were to end up as a drug trafficker. Golding was an Anglican who had been a naval …

Lord of the Flies in the age of Trump

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies remains a bleak meditation on power, fear and civilisation. In today’s politics, its allegory feels newly unsettling. Lord of the Flies, a parable for our times is now a television series – it can also be seen as an allegory for Trump’s America. William Golding’s 1954 novel was originally […]