31. Lord Of The Flies: Survival Of The Fittest

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0:04Dominic Sandbrook: Tabi, as I was 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 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 you know how you can get that time back, Tabi? 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.

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3:12Jack shouted.

3:14Dominic Sandbrook: Make a ring. The 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. Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in! Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh.

3:57The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering. 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.

4:19Dominic Sandbrook: That was a good game. 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.

5:03And 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. Is that really Lord of the Flies? When 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.

5:40And 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 ascend into the savagery and the sadism that lurks beneath the surface in

6:04Dominic Sandbrook: all of us yeah hi everybody so this is a book that presents us with a very i would say a very very bleak mercilessly bleak vision of human nature sambrookian yeah i think it's ultra sambrookian 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 grownups or whatever. But actually, I mean, that's just the point. It's the fact that, you know, it's not prison guards. It's not fully grown men in armor or wearing uniforms.

6:41It 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.

7:07Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Swallows and Amazons, you know, stuff like that. You think you're in for a jolly good time. 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 you know 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 you know 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 think i read it at school first and it's oddly 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 god i know i know shocking and then the book escalates and 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 no way really yeah genuinely i had one the 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.

9:29Dominic Sandbrook: I read this when I was a child. I think I read it when I was about 11, which I think is far too young. Do you? 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 yeah no contamination right and I had them all and I didn't want it to get because I felt unhappy when I thought about it I felt really unsettled and 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 the spike with blood dripping from it oh god no wonder even 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 under desert island now what i think of it now i do think big spoiler alert i think it's a great book you 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 some a book that says something really important about modern civilization and about human nature it's used a lot in relation to to reality tv shows or those kind of experimental game shows of course where you put people on island and see what happens this is what people really penetrated culture and society it has completely i'm guessing lots of people listening to this would have read it but in case there are people who've forgotten or basically people who happens and wants a little preview what happens tabby why don't you remind us what goes on 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.

11:46And 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 going to 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 and their 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 piggies his right hand man and then the other the head of it is this guy called jack and he is head chorister of a

12:46Dominic Sandbrook: cathedral choir yeah yeah he's an alpha though isn't he jack 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 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.

13:21The 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 is 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 E.M.

14:07Forster 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

14:15Dominic Sandbrook: and provocative yeah 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 love how vulnerable you're being in this episode. It's beautiful to see. Carry on, friend. I mean, I've barely started, Tubby. 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.

14:49Dominic Sandbrook: And he just came out of nowhere with this with this masterpiece 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 but learning about william golding was such a pleasure because it didn't affect the way that i read all 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 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.

15:28Dominic Sandbrook: His father Alec was a science teacher, very popular science teacher, a 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 that 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.

16:05Dominic Sandbrook: He loathed what he saw as their arrogant... 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 um as part of your very i have no flesh in this 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 noble, respectable establishments of learning. Well, have you known, they train the elite. It's like an intellectual podcasting elite.

16:48You 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.

16:55Dominic Sandbrook: Kate Middleton. She's not the only long-haired posh girl who went to Moora, is she? Well, I mean, there have been others. Anyway, Golding, if he was listening to this podcast, would be seething with rage at the very mention of it now. He'd be spitting at me. 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.

17:29Dominic Sandbrook: And Piggy embodies William Golding's feelings of exclusion and resentment. 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 course, you were a teenager living in Marlborough, as was he. And he was very sexually driven.

18:07Dominic Sandbrook: So there's a bonkers story in John Kerry's biography. You're enjoying this far too much. William Golding, his first sexual experience is when he is 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 him standing to attention. He 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.

18:40And by the way, that's rape, as in he, that's what he termed it himself.

18:44Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, he wrote about it in a memoir or something, which he gave to his wife. He wrote it in a journal that he then left for his wife 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.

19:15Dominic Sandbrook: I will see that bottom basically till the day I die. You 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.

19:48Dominic Sandbrook: That's right. Yeah, just three friends. And 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 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 a sense of guilt that never really left him.

20:22I 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.

20:32Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, 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 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 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.

21:12I think that can often result in this strange burden of guilt that people live with.

21:17Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, there's sort of slightly morbid fascination with your own darker impulses. Fallen state. Yeah, your own fallen state, exactly. Anyway, actually a key influence in this is probably the war. So it goes after the war in 1940, just months after the birth of his first child. He's in the Navy. He hunts the battleship, the Bismarck. Then he commands a rocket ship. He's involved at D-Day. And then the biggest thing is there's an Allied attack on a place called Valkoron in 1944. And the Allied ships took massive casualties, so 20 out of 27 of them were crippled or destroyed, and this had a massive effect on him.

21:56Dominic Sandbrook: So later on he wrote of what he called memories that dim the sunlight, ships mined, ships blowing up into a Christmas tree of exploding ammunition, ships burning, sinking, smoke everywhere, slashed by sudden spats of tracer over the shell fountains and the broken, drowning men. Now that makes it sound like it's the images of suffering and stuff that are seared into his memory. But actually I think the thing from the war that he really takes away is his own capacity for inflicting violence. Because he says afterwards, the war revealed to me, he says, my own viciousness and cruelty. He says, I understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.

22:33Dominic Sandbrook: What a thing to say about yourself. Unsparingly candid, you might say, that he is somebody who looks into himself and says, yeah, I probably would have been a Nazi. The sadism, the cruelty that they showed, I know I have that in me. And in the 1960s, he wrote, you know, when he was a big name, and his novels were being widely reviewed across the English-speaking world. He gave all these interviews. One of them, he said, Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectibility of social man. But after the war, I did not, because I was unable to. I discovered what one man could do to another.

23:06Dominic Sandbrook: I'm not talking of a man killing another with a gun or dropping a bomb of him. I'm talking of the vileness beyond all words that went on year after year in the totalitarian states. And then Golding says, look, this wasn't done by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. This was educated men, doctors, lawyers, people with civilization. And then this line, which I think is very telling. anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head you know that really struck a chord with me because i've never ever thought about maybe because you learn about it in classrooms and it means that you slightly step away from the horror i've never thought about the second world war in that way that kind of heart heart of darkness element to it because that's how you think about the Vietnam War or whatever, but never really the...

23:55Dominic Sandbrook: Well, because the Second World War is a good war. Yeah, exactly. It's a European war, you know. And so that was quite eye-opening for me. There is something very honest about William Goulding. Even now people resist. They do, because you want it to be good and bad, don't you? Of course. Anthony Bieber wrote a book about D-Day, I think it was, that was quite controversial, because he was describing things like Canadian soldiers cutting off German soldiers' ears and keeping them as mementos. And some people didn't like that because they're like, we're the good guys. We're the good guys. We're the people from Saving Private Ryan.

24:25Dominic Sandbrook: We don't do that kind of thing. But, you know, anybody who knows anything about the history of wars knows that you can be the good guys and you still behave in unbelievably cruel and violent ways because that's part of the job, frankly. Yeah, of course. Inevitably. But anyway, after the war, he goes back to Bishop Wordsworth and there he's teaching English and RE, Religious Education. and the boys call him scruff because he's got this beard i would encourage people to look him up online because he looks just as you'd imagine he's got this beard shabby dress he looks quite bohemian he worries a lot that he's a terrible teacher but actually it this doesn't really seem to be in the case he seems to be fine but i did read a couple of things where people wrote that he was certainly very reluctant to mark he got very bored by marking and was primarily absorbed by his own writing and this is obviously relates directly to lord of the flies he's clearly fascinated by the boys and would almost treat them like some sort of an experiment.

25:23So he said, I gave them more liberty and I gave them more liberty and more and more and more. I drew further away. My eyes came out like organ stops as I watched what was happening. Makes you wonder what was happening, bullying, violence. I know that at one point he got two groups of boys together and got them to fight to see if they actually would fight or, you know, if they'd be reluctant to throw the first stone, so to speak. But he's not happy teaching. He is struggling to get back to civilian life he has a very strange relationship with his young son david who was born in 1940 and he later feels tremendously guilty about kind of similar experiments with david teasing him

25:59Dominic Sandbrook: punishing him although i don't think he was actually a terrible father i don't think he was at all i listened to an interview with his daughter um and she was actually adoring she said that you know the night that he died and stuff was just terrible and spoke about him his love of stories and stuff like that because he did eventually of course try his hand at becoming a writer and he writes three books in the late 1940s and early 1950s boat adventures in a school story all three of them were turned down and they've never been published yeah so his career is going nowhere really i mean he's 43 years old so he's not a young man and then in early 1951 he gets this brilliant idea and he and his wife Anne have been reading children's stories to their two children to David who was 10 and Judy who's five and you know anyone who reads yeah children's stories there's only about 10 children's stories and people just keep rewriting them and one of the most common ones is kids on an island so a very famous example the Coral Island Victorian story 1857 R.M.

26:59Dominic Sandbrook: Ballantyne was a great classic not really read now but that would have definitely been read in the 1950s three boys they're marooned after a shipwreck on a south pacific island and they have tremendous adventures now people see it as a sort of metaphor for colonialism or something but to readers at the time it just seems like tremendous japery and fun anyway they've been reading this story and one winter evening golding and ann they've they've they've read to the kids the kids are in bed anyone who's had small children knows that basically when you've done all the reading you're absolutely knackered sit by the fire he says to ann he says wouldn't it be Imagine if you wrote a book about what children would really be like on an island.

27:37Dominic Sandbrook: Children who behave in the way children really would behave. And Anne said to him, that is a genius idea. Why don't you have a go at it? And he was enthused. And he said later that he had two images in his mind. So one image was a little boy standing on his head in the sand, thrilled to be on a real coral island. You know, the image of excitement. And then the other, he said, the other image I had was that same little boy being hunted by what appear to be a kind of tribe of savages or something. But in reality, they're his classmates or the other boys on the island. And he said, my job in Lord of the Flies was just to join up those two images.

28:19Dominic Sandbrook: So he starts writing the book. I mean, you mentioned him as the school teacher. He'd basically go into teaching English and he'd say, get a weather exercise. And then beneath the table, he'd have this battered old book where he'd be writing down the story. His family have still got that exact book. The story is that he finished writing it at the school Founders Day celebrations and he hid the book under his gown and was writing the final words of the story. That's an excellent mythology behind it. That's the school's own legend, by the way. Yeah, of course it is. But the story of the book's eventual publication is actually just as famous and I think hopefully very inspirational to all aspiring novelists.

29:01I say that pointedly. So early in 1953, he starts sending the manuscript to agents and publishers under the title Strangers from Within, but also the title This is My Island. And apparently he used to joke about how bad he was at coming up with titles. So anyway, they all turn it down, possibly 21 rejections. And then in September, he sends it to Faber and Faber. And the typescript by this point is battered from all the rejection. So apparently he could tell the pages would be dogged up till about the second chapter and then it would be pristine.

29:36Dominic Sandbrook: Then they give up. Yes, exactly. And the professional reader, Faber and Faber, hates it. And it's a very celebrated rejection because she wrote, absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atom bomb on the colonies. A group of children who land in jungle country near New Guinea, rubbish and dull, pointless, reject. And half of that description, you would not know had anything to do with the Lord of the Flies as it is. Then there's an amazing stroke of luck because Faber has this young, ambitious editor called Charles Monteith at the very beginning of his career. He's only 32 and he sees the typescript on the reject pile late one afternoon.

30:12He digs it out, starts flicking through it idly, and he agrees that the start is rubbish. All these descriptions of nuclear war and there's this long description of the tube of an aeroplane exploding and all that is later cut. But he finds the stuff with the boys totally gripping. And he especially empathises with the character of Piggy because he himself is a kind of chubby man with glasses. And so he has an instant connection that I suppose the professional reader didn't. So he writes to Golding and he asks him to tea in London.

30:45Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and he suggests a couple of changes, doesn't he? So he says the nuclear war stuff, which basically is the reason that everyone's rejected it because that's the bit they've read. he says it is rubbish and it's got to you know you need to trim it down at the very least and actually what golding went further than he expected and said well i'll cut all that completely which is why people who may be puzzled by that reader's verdict it's not there golding took it all out and then the other thing which we will come back to in the second half in the original manuscript it is much more overtly supernatural and indeed religious and there was a character called simon who is clearly a christ-like figure he remains in the book yeah he's still in the book he has in the original version he has these kind of visions of divinity and he ends up becoming a kind of jesus-like martyr to the beast and monteith just thought this is all tosh you're going to have to change this now we'll come back to this again just to be very brief golding agreed to lose a lot of it but there are vestiges of it left in the text anyway they did the deal and Faber paid Golding an advance of£60, which is about£5 ,000 today.

31:51Dominic Sandbrook: So not a huge advance by any means. But then why would they? Because they just think, you know, he's an unknown writer. We've given him a chance. Yeah, we're giving him a chance. Exactly. And then there's the, I mean, you already mentioned the title. The title is a big problem, isn't it? Big problem. And again, this is something that comes up time and time again in our episodes on the book club. The fact that the first titles that authors come up with for their books are rubbish you know think about wind in the willows that always sticks out in my mind oh god yeah what was that originally i can't even remember the wind that shakes the reeds or something but monteith hates this title strangers from within and then he suggests the island's mine which is the other one or beast in the jungle or beast in the jungle again wouldn't it's it's so i think that's such a literal take on the book and that wouldn't work nearly as well would it yeah um and then the the aisle is full of noises well that's shakespeare i guess that's okay but the worst one come on tell us the worst one fun and games fun and games shits and gigs fun and games if this book was called fun games anyway but then finally another editor suggests lord of the flies and it's such an immortal title now as we said it stands for so much more now than just this book so it's just brilliant i i commend that individual and golden agrees and then there's a final change and monteith suggests that the book the chapters in the books have titles and he chooses those himself yeah they're quite generic actually i was looking at them so goldie did they're called like fire on the mountain huts on the beach beast from the air do you not think as well that i mean i've never read a book and found that my reading of it has been shaped by the chapter titles maybe harry potter a little bit do you know what when i did adventures in time i put so much effort into choosing the chapter titles i imagine that for the chapter titles you We go with the kind of titles that we go for on our podcasts.

33:39Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. Really extreme, melodramatic, lurid titles that make the book sound more fun than it is. The vicious brutality within. No, it's all like the battle begins. Yeah, the road to war. Exactly. The storm clouds of war are gathering. Anyway, he publishes the book. Yeah, so he publishes it on the 17th September 1954 and straight away it gets fabulous reviews. So the Daily Mail, I fell under the terrible spell of this book and so were many others. than all the other papers too. Extraordinarily. And the sales aren't amazing at first, but they're steady. And then it really takes off in the early 1960s, especially in America, thanks partly to the film version, which I have to say, I watched a couple of clips from it.

34:19It does look good.

34:20Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's good. Peter Brook made the film, who's a great Shakespearean director. It's very, it's very 60s, but it is strong. It's a good film. You know, what's very good is the BBC adaptation. And interestingly, it's directed by this guy called Jack Thorne, and he directed adolescence. So again, obviously fascinated by that same thing that Golding was fascinated by, which is the capacity for darkness in seeming innocent children and teenagers. But it became a big kind of cultural touchstone, didn't it, in the 60s, Lord of the Flies? It became, I think people saw it as the book above all that reflected this new awareness after the war and after the Holocaust of the darkness of the human soul and our capacity for evil.

35:00Dominic Sandbrook: So by the end of the 60s, the sales were pretty extraordinary. a million copies in britain two and a half million in america and it became this kind of staple of school courses and university courses and things and it set golding up he wrote some some excellent books we're only talking before we started about a book called the inheritors which is about neanderthals which i think is actually even better than the lord of the flies and he won the nobel prize in 1983 very contentiously though apparently was it contentious really yeah i read i read something that said that a lot of people didn't think it was the right call but maybe that's just true of every single one of these big awards because it's always going to be polarizing.

35:36Dominic Sandbrook: I think he's a deserving winner. I think he's deserving. Yeah. He was knighted in 1988. And when the Times did a big thing in 2008 about the best British writers since the war, they named Larkin as number one, Philip Larkin, George Orwell as number two and William Golding as number three. So why? What's the secret of the book's success? And actually, is Golding's vision as quite as dark as we have suggested. We will find out, Tabby, after the break. Exciting.

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39:18Dominic Sandbrook: welcome back everybody to the book club now a quick reminder if you want to be part of a wider community of apparently civilized but ultimately savage and sadistic choristers then you should sign up to book club notes at the book club hq.com so that's our newsletter it's every saturday it's completely free you'll have more thoughts about the book there are angles for discussion stuff about further reading loads of suggestions from other listeners tabby gives insights into her teenage years at marlborough so more flagpole action and it is so much flagpole action and it is much better than the alternative which is of course beating a pig to death talking of which let's get into lord of the flies so tell me where do you want to where do you want to kick off i think let's kick off with some of the boys themselves let's start with the boy who the book starts off with and this is Ralph we meet him in the first sentence the boy with fair hair and he is the guy that Golding was imagining you know when he was trying to put those two images together the boy being chased through the jungle and the boy doing a headstand and this is Ralph he's the son of a naval officer and he sees himself right from the start as a natural leader actually he's something of an everyman and he is ultimately quite weak but we'll discover more on that.

40:34Golding later called him the rather more than average man of goodwill and common sense. And in a typical children's book, this character, Ralph, would be the hero. He's the calmest. He's the most measured. He clearly assumes, and he assumes throughout, by the way, that the other boys will defer to him. His priority is to create order right from the start. He's sensible. He's pretty sensible, isn't he? Yeah, exactly. So he wants to get the fire going. This is his big preoccupation keep the fire going so that we can catch the attention of a passing ship because he is convinced his father will rescue him and return to normality so he represents this old world of authority civilization rules you know you can tell that he's a boy that's thrived in institutions yes totally so he's trying to create his own institution out here in the wilderness and he tells the other children we can't have everybody talking at once we'll have to have hands up like

41:27Dominic Sandbrook: at school so he's not about throwing off the fetters is he no not at all but he at first he delights in this freedom you know a paradise without adults as i said but he also then it tries to mimic adulthood in a funny way in his boyish way hence the conch which ralph and piggy find at the beginning and they take it very seriously and ralph by virtue of the fact that he can blow on it and summon all the other boys this makes him the leader and you can only speak if you're holding the conch. And it comes to kind of be a symbol of civilization and hope and the goodness of mankind, which will gradually be kind of shattered, literally.

42:07Dominic Sandbrook: When John Kerry writes about this, John Kerry points out, he says, the thing about Ralph is, Ralph is not a natural leader, even though he thinks he is. He is a conformist and a dependent. So he is somebody who, his initial, I mean, after the fun of exploring the island, his first thought is, well, How do we set up some rules? How do we rebuild the institution? Basically, I guess, of school and a sense of order and everybody talking in a regimented way. The feeling stick. Yeah, it's very telling. So his authority, such as it is, this is actually, in many ways, it's a brilliant book about political authority.

42:41Dominic Sandbrook: His authority comes from, not from his personal charisma, but from institutions and what he represents. But also from one individual, and that's Piggy. Piggy has this unwavering faith in Ralph. Yeah, and Piggy basically gives him his ideas, exactly. So it's really telling that when he has this great breach with Jack, his rival, he shouts at Jack and he shouts at the other children. What are we, humans or animals? And then, so, I mean, that you might think is a very telling line, but then arguably an even more telling one for Ralph's psychology. What are the grown-ups going to think? So he cares immensely what everyone thinks.

43:16Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, he does. And then in the same round with Jack, he says, I was chief, I was chosen. the rules you're breaking the rules and jack says who cares ralph the rules are the only things we've got and you know the man who i thought of yeah i was reading this book tell me i must be the first person in human history to have thought of this man we're reading the book to make this comparison ralph is basically keir starmer oh no that is harsh that is harsh on ralph you know i'll be very clear yeah to be fair ralph is ralph is disproportionately preoccupied with where everyone is going to go to the loo that's the kind of thing keir starmer would love well of course but they're Going to the loo is very important.

43:52Dominic Sandbrook: Like, you know, you need to dig the latrines and stuff. Yeah, of course. Yeah, the boring, bureaucratic side of society. Ralph doesn't realise that the way to reach the other boys is not by lecturing them about the rules. That actually there has to be a degree of personal charisma, but also telling them what they want to hear and meeting them halfway. And actually the person who is much better at this is his rival, Jack. Yeah, and Jack is actually a natural leader. There's something very fascistic about Jack. He knows what the crowd wants. He's someone that would buy into gold braid and salutes in order to win over the people.

44:26Because he's very charismatic. He's actually a very dark character, though, Jack. I find Jack quite upsetting. We will have made clear by this point, he is the villain of the story. He's arrogant. He's entitled. He's spiteful. He's sulky. I think it's no coincidence that the guy that played him in the recent adaptation is going on to play Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, because he is quite a Malfoy character. He says, I ought to be chief because I'm chief chorister and head boy. So he's still buying into the institutions. He's pulling out the right threads. He's pulling out the glamour. And although he's less reasonable and less responsible than Ralph, this actually makes him more attractive.

45:02This means he has a greater appeal to the others because he's bolder. He's more aggressive. When Ralph is banging on about his father and the Navy and where everyone should be pooing, Jack is, you know, throwing himself into life on the island. and he goes in for all the glamorous pursuits. So he says, right, I'm in charge of the hunters. What little boy doesn't want to be a hunter? I'm in charge of keeping the fire alight. Which just a boy isn't a paramaniac, you know?

45:27Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, completely. I would follow Jack to the ends of the earth. Yeah, right. The parliamentary side of it has no appeal to him. And he realises that the other boys don't care about that either. What they want to do is pretend to be tribespeople and to have war paint and all of that kind of thing. He's that politician who has great rhetoric and is quite inspiring but has absolutely no practical concerns or policies whatsoever. We're all very familiar with politicians like that. We're never going to degenerate into rest as politics, banter. That really would be a primordial regeneration. A descent into total savagery.

46:05Dominic Sandbrook: But of course when Golding is writing this in the 1950s, what's on his mind is what's happened in the last 20 years. So Ralph, with his addiction to the rules, his sort of obsession, he's a stickler for the done thing. What are the grownups going to think? He is like the weak democratic politicians of the 1930s, the weakness of democracy more broadly. And Jack, who actually shouts at him at one point, he shouts bollocks to the rules. And Jack clearly is the prototype for, I mean, you said it yourself, he's a fascist. He is a authoritarian populist dictator. He'd love to say things like, we were betrayed.

46:41Let's rediscover our identities. Let's rediscover who we really are.

46:45Dominic Sandbrook: Jack offers them scapegoats. He offers them the enemies. He offers them the thrill of violence through the hunting and whatnot. But also he offers them parades, the rituals, tribal dances, dressing up. His hunters become a kind of paramilitary group. Bread and circuses. He gives them a feast. Totally. So we've got Ralph and Jack. and you've already mentioned the character who I think probably is the most memorable character, the one who sticks in your mind, and that is Piggy. Piggy's such an interesting character, isn't he? He's such an interesting character. He has all the characteristics of being, you know, in inverted commas, the loser.

47:19He's a bit of an outsider. He looks different. He sounds different. But then the realisation grows on the reader as it does on Ralph, almost tragically too late, how brilliant Piggy is. He's kind of the heart of the novel as well because he truly believes in the power of the conch to maintain civilisation and solidarity.

47:40Dominic Sandbrook: But he's a sort of repository, isn't he, of a lot of biographical influences. He's quite a sort of enlightenment figure. You know, there's nothing, he pulls out all of the mysticism and the spiritualism and he's very rational and scientific and almost too much so and certainly too much for a group of young boys looking for excitement and the thrill of the chase. Yeah, so he does things like he says, let's make lists of names to keep track of everybody he says let's make a sundial and everybody laughs at him and says how can we make a sundial we might as well make a tv or something but he knows actually you could make a sundial you just need to stick and he's the kind of the last bastion holding out against um the idea of the beast because when the little ones and it starts with the little ones you know the spread of an idea is a fascinating captivating concept so the little ones start to say you know we saw this beast we dreamed of this beast and Piggy tries to fight this fear that captures everyone with scientific rationality so he says life is scientific that's what it is in a year or two when the war's over they'll be traveling to Mars and back I know there isn't no beast not with claws and all that yeah exactly exactly and in his biography of Golding I think it is John Kerry says Piggy is basically Golding's father So we already said his Golding's father taught science and he made his own equipment because the school didn't have enough money to buy equipment.

48:59Dominic Sandbrook: And not like some schools in Warburtepe. Or Malvern. So we're only talking about one school here. Come on. I think we should invite more to the table. I think. So anyway, Alec, Golding's father, was a rationalist. He was a man of science. He was an atheist. William Golding is not, by any means, by any stretch of the imagination, an atheist, nor is his worldview rooted in rationality and science. He loves the supernatural. He believes in the supernatural, in ghosts, in Christianity. So perhaps he's using Piggy to show actually the limits of his father's scientific rationalism. There are things and there are forces, not on the island, but within the other boys that are beyond Piggy.

49:43He just can't cope with them and he can't tame them and he can't order them.

49:47Dominic Sandbrook: One reason he can't order them takes us back to William Golding's hatred of your old school. Because one of the reasons that basically the other boys don't like Piggy and they don't listen to Piggy is that even though his ideas are so sensible, is that he is a social outsider because he's from the wrong class and he went to the wrong school. Golding says at one point in the narrator, they had grown up tacitly among the biggons. The idea that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat and by asthma. that is his asthma that he's always going on about and specs and a certain disinclination for manual labor but the biggest thing i think john carrey talks about this because it's something that john carrey cared a lot about is his class and that's given away not just by his accent but by what he says so right at the beginning he says to ralph he keeps going about his auntie who brought him up he's an orphan his auntie brought him up and she ran a sweet shop that is a massive class giveaway The use of the word auntie rather than aunt, but also your auntie ran a sweet shop.

50:49Dominic Sandbrook: In other words, you're not the same class as the boys who went to the cathedral school during the choir. And this given away by the way he speaks, he says all their mother kids. And then later on, I was the only boy in our school what had asthma. Like he's using things that in his milieu would be fine, but the other boys see them as class indicators. And you don't really notice it as a reader. You know, it just seems completely natural. But the other boys notice it and it marks Piggy out as not one of them. And they do things like when Jack and Ralph go off on a walk to explore the island at the beginning.

51:24Dominic Sandbrook: Piggy wants to come and they say, not you, we don't want to walk with you because you're not one of us, basically. Yeah, because also they feel like the elites. They feel like top dogs, which is why Jack and Ralph are almost friends for a portion of the novel, because they see each themselves as equals. But actually, Piggy is used as an indicator, as a foreshadowing of where the book is going to go. because right from the start, even when the books are being civilised and well behaved, and they're creating a sort of utopian society, everyone is mean to Piggy. And it's awful. Even Ralph, even, you know, the everyman.

51:54Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so Ralph does two things. Ralph does one really revealing thing. When Piggy first tells him his name, Ralph reacts by pretending to be an aeroplane and machine gunning Piggy. And that kind of foreshadows the fact that Piggy is going to be the victim of violence. I think you're dead right that much of the story of this book is ralph's blindness to the reality of what's happening and it's only at the end when he cries ralph at the very end of the book he cries for the why the true wise friend called piggy piggy tugs at my heartstrings the whole way through this book because i'm always unnerved by i mean take away all the true horrible and you know dramatic violence i hate children being mean to one another always raises the hair on my arms there's something so I don't know intensely malevolent about it Of course there is something sadistic about it So anyway Piggy just in case there's people who haven't read the book we won't give away his fate completely but his fate ends up being intertwined with that of another really interesting character probably the most unsettling character and this is a little boy called Roger So Roger when we first meet him he's described as a slight furtive boy whom no one knew who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy and Golding uses him for two things And the first thing, now my surprise people, why we were, they might be thinking, gosh, that was a very self-indulgent detour about the flagpole and about the whipped girl's bottom or whatever earlier on.

53:14Dominic Sandbrook: But sexual sadism is a huge part of Golding's oeuvre. And you might think, well, there's none of that in The Lord of the Flies. John Kerry points to one scene in particular. And once you see, you can't unsee it. It's when the boys are hunting this pig. They're obsessed with hunting this pig. and the pig is a sow and they find the pig suckling her young and they attack the pig and they wound her and they chase her and they're described Golding says they were quote wedded to her in lust excited by the long chase and the dropped blood and then the climax if I just read this scene you'll see it in the prose pun intended pun intended climax exactly struck down by the heat the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves at her this dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear wherever pig flesh appeared.

54:05Dominic Sandbrook: Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push until he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. And then the sow collapses, she's dead, and we are told by the narrator they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. and just after that if that's not explicit enough another boy called robert he sees where roger stuck his spear and he shouts right up her ass and they all start shouting it almost chanting it and actually that is such a dark and disturbing scene because effectively it's a gang rape scene it's deeply disturbing when read from that if you read it as part of the whole and i don't know just another scene in the book.

54:56You can skim over the connotations, but God, when you read it there like that, it really hit home.

55:01Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And Golding is so aware of all that. I think that's the fact that he's so hyper aware of that is what gives him the guilt. He feels guilty about it because I think that passage, maybe I'm reading too much into this, that passage is written by a man who is conscious of how exciting that would be. Yeah. Of his own primitive instincts. Exactly. And that's, But that's another disturbing thing about Roger, because he, more than any of the other characters, aside from maybe Jack, but actually maybe even more than Jack, understands and comprehends the possibilities of the breakdown of order and the rise of Jack's dictatorship.

55:36So another boy, so Robert again, he tells him that Jack has tied up Wilfred and is going to beat him for no reason whatsoever. Roger hears this news as an illumination. He sees the possibilities of irresponsible authority. and then when we next meet him he's become jack's executioner and torturer he's like the muscle you know the boys call him a terror and he sharpens a stick at both ends because he's going to stick ralph like a pig and then mount his severed head on the stick like they did the pigs so if jack is a 1930s fascistic dictator or demagogue then roger's the sort of person who enables him you know one of hitters torturers or executioners you know gering or something the big unpleasant muscle who just the violence is so close to the surface that that is almost their identity rather than the sand hidden beneath their identity roger would be a violent person i think in most arenas of life whereas that's not true of all of them i'm not sure about i think that's i think roger is a

56:41Dominic Sandbrook: there's something weird about roger and unsettling he's a boy apart and he's described as furtive and Don't you think he'd torture mice or something? Yes, I do think that, actually. I don't think he'd be overtly... I don't think he's the kind of person who ever punched up in a pub. I think he's the person who is darker, more subtle and more sinister than that. So that's some of the boy... I mean, those are the main characters. We've got one that we'll come to later, Simon. But it's worth maybe pausing a moment to talk about what Golding's trying to say with all this. So I think the obvious thing is that this is a book about original sin, that Golding was very conscious of this as a concept.

57:11Dominic Sandbrook: He wrote it in an essay in the 60s. He said, the point about Lord of the Flies is that man is a fallen being. He's gripped by original sin. So this is the idea. You did divinity at University, didn't you? So you can explain what original sin is, Tabby. It's the idea that all people come into the world already fallen because we trespassed in the Garden of Eden because we ate the forbidden fruit. So the awareness of original sin is very much a, I think it's very much a post-war thing. I think it becomes a very popular subject for writers. So Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, I always think you can compare that with Lord of the Flies.

57:46Dominic Sandbrook: They're published something like eight years apart. Oh, I think that's a fantastic comparison point, yeah. The idea of the young people, there is a huge violence in them, although the difference is that Burgess shows at the end of A Clockwork Orange, Alex growing out of it. Or, this will surprise people, it's probably our favourite comparison, so if you're bored of it by now, you can take a shot or whatever you do. It's The Lord of the Rings, published the same year, by the way, as Lord of the Flies, 1954. People are going to start some sort of a drinking game every time we mention Lord of the Rings.

58:14Dominic Sandbrook: They will, but I don't mind that. Surely they drink like, I was about to say butterbeer, but that's the wrong fantasy genre, isn't it? Yeah, no, they drink pints from the Green Dragon. That's the Green Dragon, exactly. So in The Lord of the Rings, you know, the ring represents corruption and evil, and nobody is immune to it. Even Frodo, our hero, basically he is Gollum. by the end of the book, they become almost interchangeable. And this idea that basically there is no clear division between vice and virtue, that we all have evil within us. You can absolutely see why. If you'd lived through the 1930s and 1940s, you would be so conscious of that because you'd look at one of the most civilised and sophisticated societies in Europe that has sunk into the most terrible barbarism imaginable.

58:59Dominic Sandbrook: And, you know, Golding had made this thing, had made this point, man produces evil as a bee produces honey. This is like the time of the banality of evil and stuff. Yeah, Hannah Arendt, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I watched the Eichmann trial and they realised, you know, evil isn't deposited in figures of external physical monstrosity or of great power. Sometimes it's the weedy bureaucrats sitting in an office, which is a strange concept for people to have had to grapple with. We're familiar with it now. So it's kind of political, I think. So Lord of the Flights is, in that sense, it's a book about metaphysics and stuff, I guess.

59:33Dominic Sandbrook: But I think it's also personal. Golding said, you know, this reflects my experiences with children. He was once asked, is this more about the war or more about being a schoolteacher? He said, oh, it's much more about being a schoolteacher. You know, because I saw day to day how cruel children were to each other. I lived for many years with small boys and knew them with awful precision, he says. But also it's rooted in his own peculiar psychology. I mean, this is an amazing thing to say about yourself. One day, people will examine my life and they will come to the conclusion that I am a monster.

1:00:04Dominic Sandbrook: They will think they know all, but they won't. No matter how deep they dig, they won't reach the root that has made me a monster. Indeed, word and thought. No one but I knows that or suffers it. This is not guilt. It's self-knowledge. So funny because that's the kind of thing that you'd read in the private journal of a serial killer or something. Jack the Ripper's Diary. Jack the Ripper's Diary. Not a school teacher writing loads of books. Yeah, who had a family and a wife and children and by all accounts was a very nice man. Well, this is the interesting thing. So John Cair in his biography says, why did Golding think this?

1:00:37Dominic Sandbrook: Was it because he'd jilted that girl Molly? Was it because he'd been in the war and had, you know, obviously commanded a rocket ship that probably killed people? Was it that he, you know, he's, I mean, you know, being obsessed with whipping girls' bottoms is maybe not something you confess in polite company. But equally, it doesn't make you the worst person that's ever lived and make you, well, maybe it does. I don't know. I think sometimes people are just born with a predisposition towards guilt that just dogs you all your life. And it's impossible to shake. And if you do things in your life that buy into that guilt, killing people during the war, lusting after women in a slightly physical way, BDSM way or whatever, maybe you actually can pin your guilt to something rather than it just hanging over you for no particular reason as a form of existential dread.

1:01:32I don't know.

1:01:32Dominic Sandbrook: Even before the kids have really started behaving badly, there are clues that they're all little Rogers, that there is something evil in all of them, aren't there? particularly in as we said in ralph because ralph is the one that gives piggy's nickname away he tells everyone that at his school piggy was called piggy and so all the children start laughing at him even the tinies even the little ones yeah and and piggy had made him promise hadn't he he may yeah he said don't tell the others because it'll stick and as you mentioned piggy says to ralph and jack can i come exploring with you and they say no we don't want you you can't come and then when the little ones are playing on the beach the bigger children kick over their sandcastles and they laugh but more disturbingly one of the little ones sees this and then copies them to make the other boys cry so that's terrifying insight into the dangers of tribalism but that's what there's your teacher who's wanting to fit in who's seen kids copying little kids copying big ones and being horrible and stuff so that makes it sound really one note and really like It's all just bleak and they're all just horrible and stuff.

1:02:33Dominic Sandbrook: But that is not entirely true. So Ralph, he does betray Piggy's secret, his nickname. He is mean to Piggy. But when he realizes that Piggy is hurt and humiliated, Ralph feels torn. I think this is very well observed, actually. Ralph feels torn. He says he can't decide between apology and further insult. That is what boys are like. Boys, will I double down? Because he's made me feel bad. So will I punish him for making me feel bad or will I apologise? And actually, Ralph gives him a kind of real non-apology. He says, well, better Piggy than Fatty. Actually, talking about whether the book is quite as bleak as we think, there is one character actually, not just Piggy, who seems untainted by original sin, isn't it?

1:03:17Dominic Sandbrook: And this is Simon. Yeah, Simon's a very, very interesting character. There's something quite otherworldly in his characterisation. So he's pale, he faints a lot. He's a skinny, vivid little boy with a glance coming up from under a hut of straight hair that hang down black and coarse. And he's a strange, shy, solitary boy, but he's also kinder than the others. He does, he sticks with Piggy a lot and Ralph, and he does things like he climbs a tree to get fruit for the Littledons, and he's less swayable when it comes to the herd mentality of the group. And as the book goes on, he comes into his own as a character.

1:03:49So in the beginning, we get a clue that he's slightly different because he does this thing where he burrows into the undergrowth and just lies there by himself. and they're quite surreal, strange, trippy sequences, I think. He's a visionary. He's almost mystical. He can almost hear and see things that the other boys can't. And he's the one that denies there's a beast, but he tells the other boys, there is a beast. It's only us.

1:04:14Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so Piggy says there's no beast, end of story. Simon is like, there's no external beast, but there is something in us. It's the darkness within. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And obviously in the original version, pre-Monteith cutting all this, there's a lot more of this with Simon. He's a much more obviously linked to the supernatural. And he meets a character who seems to be God and who forbids him from eating the fruit and then dances with him. So it kind of reminded me of, I don't know, the Pan sequences in Wind of the Willows or something. This strange, ethereal, supernatural element that doesn't quite fit in there.

1:04:50And then in this original version, Simon decides to martyr himself and will offer himself to the beast as a bribe. If they'd remained in the book, it would have seemed a much more Christian novel, which it doesn't to me at all, by the way, in this final iteration. Golding actually said that he planned Simon as a Christ figure who ends up being crucified. And maybe that would have weakened its appeal. I think it definitely would have slightly declawed it of its horror. if you make something if you give something if you give darkness a message give it a moralizing element you slightly forget about the darkness and you think about the moral tone whereas this is purely primitive and actually i think of it as a very pagan book so i find that quite interesting

1:05:32Dominic Sandbrook: too yeah i can see why you'd think that because it feels like a book with no with no redemption doesn't it whereas simon well i mean there are bits of simon still in the book if there was more of him i agree with you completely i think it would be a weirder book and probably less effective as it is i think it's i think it's a perfect book the bits that remain of simon they're still quite strange aren't they they've killed the pig they put their head on the spike oh it's it's very it's very um i don't know it's very uh grotesque writing describing the flies buzzing around it the blood stripping and you know we were talking before about how i was traumatized by this this was the cover of the faber and faber edition that i had as a little boy i mean terrifying anyway the pig's head is there it's rotting simon calls it the lord of the flies because there are flies around it at one point he seems to recognize the pig's head as the devil he says he was struck by an ancient inescapable recognition when he looked at the white teeth and dim eyes the blood and then he goes into like a like a trance or he goes to sleep or something and then he wakes up and he realizes the pig's head is just a pig's head on a stick and he wanders through the jungle and he sees another site which is the body of a parachutist this is another kind of weird element isn't it it's rocking with the wind exactly caught on the trees isn't it yeah and also golding writes this very cleverly because he writes it in two ways he writes it either as a corpse rocking back and forth and he also writes it as the other boys have seen it which is this strange disembodied outline in the distance of the darkness exactly he makes it seem like it would seem to a group of little boys catching sight of it across a hill it's where he really earns his you know his medals as a writer is that he is able both to give us the external narrator's view of things but also what what the boys make of it but anyway simon realizes that um it that it's just a parachutist the beast was harmless and horrible the news must reach the others as soon as possible and then this incredible scene so basically he's going down to tell the other boys and a storm has been building and building it's got very hot and the storm is about to break and the air is crackling and the boys are having this kind of mad tribal dance on the beach aren't they where they're chanting again kill the beast cuts his throat spill his blood and i think this is such a well-written scene so powerful there's the lightning and thunder ahead there's the frenzy of the boys which is like the frenzy that we did in the intro reading or the frenzy when they killed the the pig you know mounts and mounts and then you have the climax a thing was crawling out of the forest it came darkly uncertainly the shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain the beast stumbled into the horseshoe this is the kind of line of boys kill the beast cut his throat spill his blood i once the crowd surged after it poured down the rock leapt onto the beast screamed struck bit or there were no words and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws and of course what we know but the boys don't know is that the beast as they're calling it is simon who's come to tell them um i remember reading this as a kid and it just being like so disturbing so disturbing and then also especially when because when you when when the way that the scene plays out we the reader are not witnesses we are the little boys clamoring for the flesh and screeching and seeing what is to us the beast and wanting to rend its you know rend its body or whatever but then the narrator zooms out and suddenly you see a little boy brutalized whose body is floating out to sea that contradiction between one reality versus the the true reality is it's very upsetting actually it's very it's tragic and then the way that ralph and Piggy address it because they are there they see it and they can't say it at first they can't articulate it it's a terrifying terrifying scene but then Golding follows that up with this amazing bit of writing really extraordinary I think where he pulls the camera right back and this is another vestige of his religious stuff he has this passage showing how Simon's body is carried out to sea and almost becomes part of the ecosystem so have you seen the film called The Thin Red Line by terence malick the war film i think it's a great film yeah you know how there's like all the stuff in there where they're fighting on guadal canal the americans and the japanese but there's also loads of stuff about nature there's loads of kind of the camera will pull over and be like in the rainforest and there's animals and stuff like that it's like they're part of a bigger story that transcends human affairs yeah exactly and human wars and quibbles it's all ultimately meaningless exactly compared with the story of the earth or something but that's what happens here because again it's quite pagan it is yeah simon's body is swept out to sea and he's surrounded by and i quote strange moonbeam bodied creatures with fiery eyes they kind of see see i don't know i don't know i don't really know much about marine life the water rose further and dressed simon's coarse hair with brightness the line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble and then golding pulls the camera back even further beautiful alliteration that it is exactly agreed um and this amazing passage somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling and the film of water on the earth planet was held bulging slowly on one side while the solid core turned the great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted softly surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

1:11:10That is exquisite writing, isn't it?

1:11:12Dominic Sandbrook: And it kind of comes out of nowhere, right? Because it's all been about tribal dancing and the boys. And then suddenly the camera has been pulled right back and it's the really cosmic picture, I guess. But he explains very little throughout the course of this book as well. So when he's almost literal about something, it hits home, you know, the fact that Simon's body is floating out to sea. But this isn't actually the ending. And Golding was very clear that he wanted the book not to end with a death, but rather with the loss of innocence because that is the point of the whole thing and that's why there's in the final final portion of the book there's this terrifying chase where ralph is being hunted and that's what really crept into my psyche i think so you're an eye man you were being hunted yeah no but it was a group of boys it was like a i wasn't actually in it you know when you're in a dream and it kind of plays out in front of you and then ralph is running through the undergrowth he's hiding and he sprints out onto this beach and he runs into a british naval officer of all things and a naval cruiser that's pulled up offshore and it's so weird you know because you have been existing with ralph and the other boys in this you know in this primordial chaos you think that the things that matter to the boys is what matters you keep pace with them and then all of a sudden they look ridiculous because there's this naval officer there and And it's like, why are these boys, why do they have their faces painted?

1:12:35Why aren't they wearing clothes? Why are they brandishing spears?

1:12:38Dominic Sandbrook: They look trivial and slight to him, don't they? He just sees a group of schoolboys with their faces painted. And Ralph starts crying. Yeah. Weeps for the end of innocence and the darkness of man's heart. And Golding said that was the point. That was the point of the whole book. And the fact that the naval officer doesn't get it is sort of the really dark irony. because the naval officer who still believes in all the kind of Coral Island stuff says oh I bet you've been having fun haven't you and they haven't at all and then the very well some of them have well yeah that's the tragic that's the terrifying thing actually some of them have been having fun and then the very last line when Rapp was crying it says the officer surrounded by these noises was moved and a little embarrassed he turned away to give them time to pull themselves together such a sort of British thing and waited allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance and I'd always wondered why Golding ended the image of the cruiser and not the boys and actually explained it himself in an interview in 1962 he said in the last sentence you let him the naval officer turn away and look at the cruiser and of course the cruiser the adult thing is doing exactly what the hunters do it's hunting down and destroying the enemy so that in effect you say to your reader, look, you think you've been reading about little boys, but in fact, you've been reading about the distresses and the wickedness of humanity.

1:13:58I suppose it leads you to wonder, you know, these boys are going to be men one day, right? They're going to enter into society. I doubt, you know, I bet they'll be very, you know, functional members of that society. I don't think they're going to be running around murdering each other and hunting, kill the pig. But we know what exists in them. So we now know what exists in in everyone which is why i thought it was an interesting thing that in the tv show they gave them backstories which slightly detracts from golding's message because he's saying there's no cause and effect you're not evil because things happen to you he's saying you're evil full stop you know just so jack in the tv series is sort of a very abandoned by his parents and that leaves its mark so it makes him want to be a leader and a bully whereas in this jack is just letting out what what is natural to him i think that's exactly right i think golding is would say

1:14:54Dominic Sandbrook: this is in all of us it's it's more pronounced in some of us than others so in jack's case he has a desire to be top dog and a desire to dominate and humiliate others in the case of roger roger has a sadism that perhaps ralph doesn't have to the same degree but golding would say all of us irrespective of you know where we were born how comfortable our lives were or whatever we all have a degree of cruelty and cynicism and and sadism and in the right circumstances unfettered by institutions and civilization that will come out and you see that particularly when you're a teacher he would say because the kids are not yet fully formed and they can't control themselves and so yeah it's a very it's i think it is a pretty bleak it is a bleak ending but i don't think it's wrong actually you know what i think tabby i think though i kind of think it's like as you say it the balance is different in different people but i think you know there's as much of a capacity for goodness in people as evil i think you can learn that capacity for goodness and all sort of i suppose civilized societies are trying to bring out the capacity for goodness so to speak and that you just have to behave in a certain way and you have to tap down that instinct for violence, whatever it is.

1:16:12But I would say in Lord of the Flies, there are very, very few examples of people doing good things or kind things. And I think that people can be good and kind in extreme situations. You read about them all over human history. So I could have done with a little bit of that.

1:16:28Dominic Sandbrook: There's a whole sort of genre of experiments, social experiments that people did in the 1950s, 1960s, basically to see whether this thesis was right and i think the consensus is that actually people weren't always so there were american researchers i think in the 50s an experiment at a scout camp they divided boys into two groups and tried to get them to fight and they actually found that it wasn't as easy as you would think to drive them against each other that actually a lot of the boys were quite good but i think an interesting thing though is what is what happens when i when you give people a little bit of authority you know like the stanford prison experiment thing like someone like roger would absolutely love that wouldn't he i mean the thing that i always think of is we of course have been on podcast tours and they always degenerate into very rest the very so i say rest is history which is going to give the game away yeah you've betrayed yourself into very lord of the flies type behavior and i'm happy to say that i am actually jack all right tabby yeah let's mark this i was going to mark it in pig's heads but because i'm a kind person i think we should mark it in entitled old mulburians unbelievable i was initially gonna give this six what i know and now throughout the course of this episode not because of you but because of actually having some of william golding's writing held under the magnifying glass for me i'm gonna give it seven okay well he's a very very good writer but i found the first i found like the first half often quite boring um and it was only afterwards that i realized what a massive impact it had um boring i can't believe you said it was boring and you made me read east of eden so you just want the internet to come for you so i'm okay with it i'm gonna give it nine i think it's a brilliant book i think it's one of the the canonical post-war novels i think it's one of the great cultural reckonings with the horrors of mid-20th century it has your perfect combination of of um you know the horrors of you know 20th century history uh combined with schoolboy stories yeah so true so true I think the writing is absolutely beautiful.

1:18:29Dominic Sandbrook: And actually the nature writing, as it were, and some of the strange images like the parachutist are fantastically done. I think the portraits of the children and their personalities are extremely well observed. And the way the children react to each other and the way that their cruelties and their hierarchies and stuff. And as a novel, just as a, you see, I disagree with you about it being boring. I think as a novel, it works really well. I think from kind of halfway through, it's brilliant. As in, you don't want to put it down. but just before then yeah didn't do loads for me your palate has been ruined by too much romanticy no my palate has been ruined by too much american psycho maybe so i'm going to deduct a mark why am i deducting a mark because it traumatized me as a child and i'm a capricious and cruel person and so i'm taking a mark off because i cannot forgive you're resentful of your bullies i'm exactly exactly right so a reminder to people to join our own tribe and to go to thebookclubhq.com and to sign up for the Saturday newsletter where you get more of this tremendous repartee.

1:19:33Yeah.

1:19:33Dominic Sandbrook: And Tabby, what have we got coming up? Got A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, American Psycho by Brad Easton Ellis, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Goldfinger by Ian Fleming. Lots to look forward to. Loads to look forward to. So I can't wait to get stuck in. A Month in the Country is a massive palate cleanser. Yeah, it is. Because that is not a cool book at all. Yeah, it's a bucolic dream. It is a beautiful book and we'll be talking about that next time. So, all right, I'm off to my island. Bye-bye. Bye.

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