Why I can’t read William Golding even though I want to
It’s not because a Nobel Prize winner is necessarily dull
When I first read Lord of the Flies at 15, I finally understood how some people could claim that ‘reading wasn’t really their thing’.
It bored me to death, this 200-page story with the intriguing if slightly worn out premise-teenage boys stranded on a deserted island, rapidly descending into brutality. The narrative should have been enough to catch the attention of someone partial to both The Call of the Wild and Lost. Instead, I found an illogical world without a hint of backstory, painfully bland dialogue (‘This is an island. At least I think it’s an island. That’s a reef out in the sea. Perhaps there aren’t any grownups anywhere.’) and the most self-consciously over the top symbolism (the conch, oh God, the conch!) I’ve ever read in a book.
The novel is a cynic’s paradise, sporting a depressively Hobbesian world-view.
Lord of the Flies reflects the perspective of a man traumatized by war, an experience that would come to both define and haunt Golding. In his unpublished memoirs, the former public school teacher reveals that the fictional plot of his acclaimed story is rooted in a ‘real-life experiment’ he conducted in class, where he pitted two groups of boys against each other. The same source also touches on Golding’s troubled youth, detailing his attempt to rape a 15-year-old when he himself was only 18. A biography published by John Carey asserts that the writer used to say that he would have been a Nazi if he had been born in Hitler’s Germany.
Strangely, these were not things that came up in any of our class discussions. If they had, I believe it would have contributed to a more nuanced reading from our side. It would have made for a good counterpoint to all that bluster on the ‘true nature of humanity’. To know that the author himself didn’t put his most famous work on a pedestal, suggesting instead that any reasonably skilled school child could have written in a better manner would certainly have cooled our tempers.
As a matter of fact, we were united in our distaste for the book, all of us probably taking offence to Golding’s assertion that humans are ‘morally diseased’. But we weren’t yet articulate enough to voice those concerns. Fortunately, John Green is.
The acclaimed YA author (Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns) points out the flaws in Golding’s philosophy. If democracy under duress is doomed to fail and people are wired to torture and kill their fellow human beings, he asks, why don’t Piggy and Ralph succumb, joining Jack and his gang in their depredations? (On a side note, if everyone in the story had been ‘evil’, it would have made a fantastic read, the literary equivalent of efforts by fantasy writers I enjoyed even back then, such as R. Scott Bakker or Joe Abercrombie. Game of Thrones being the cultural phenomenon that it now is proves that milking warped moralities for their worth certainly works.)
Green also argued that Golding’s concept of civilization as an ordering force and ‘savagery’ (conceived as a life in the wild) as equalling evil is flawed, given our knowledge of the lives of tribal communities, both past and present.
The real Lord of the Flies proves it. In 1965, a group of boys were actually stranded for fifteen months on an islet south of Tonga, an island group in the South Pacific. Over that time period, they managed to set up a food garden, build chicken pens and use hollowed-out tree trunks to collect rainwater. Unlike their fictional forebears in Lord of the Flies, they never let the fire go out during that time and never came to blows-even when one of them fell off a cliff and broke his leg. Instead, they set his leg using twigs and leaves and comforted him by saying that he should take it easy while they took care of all the work. Fights were dealt with by using time-outs, each day beginning and ending in prayer and song.
That’s not to say that one incident conclusively disproves everything about Lord of the Flies but it does show that the story should be taken with a grain of salt. Especially considering that the reason why there are no girls in Lord of the Flies is because it would, according to Golding, unnecessarily complicate the story with the ‘relative triviality’ of sexuality. To be honest, his reasoning seems murky.
Consider his exact words:
‘This has nothing to do with equality at all.I think women are foolish to pretend they’re equal to men — they’re far superior, and always have been. But one thing you can not do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, or society. That’s another reason why they aren’t little girls.’
Did he mean it wouldn’t work with girls because that wasn’t the picture on the fallout of systemic male violence that he wanted to depict? Or was Golding actually afraid of admitting that girls would descend to the same level as boys, not being ‘far superior’ after all?
At this point, I’d like to note that I have nothing against books that are male centric. Given my sympathy for Grimdark (a fantasy sub-genre characterized by amoral heroes and truly dark, ‘grim’ plotlines), as expressed by the name dropping of Bakker and Abercrombie earlier in this piece, I’d hope that much is obvious.
I’ve defended Jack Kerouac, another author who gets saddled with the nomer of ‘alpha male writer’ and have, at one point in my life, religiously read Ernest Hemingway. (The former, in my opinion, offers rapid fire prose that is both exhilarating and freeing, best enjoyed when slightly buzzed, while the latter, for all his machismo around bull fighting and rampant alcoholism, has the most profound things to say in prose that appears deceptively easy.)
It would take more than gore, violence or incendiary rhetoric to turn me off from reading a book, especially if the story requires it, being also logically consistent with the ideas, themes and philosophy the author purports to investigate. Golding fails for me because his ideas on the necessary depravity of society and his choices with regards to gender and sexuality don’t follow through on the premise he himself sets out. It’s a shame, given that Hardy’s Wessex and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawhpha County are some of my favourite haunts, two fictional locales that perfectly exemplify the heights literature can reach when it elevates bleakness to the point that it takes on a life of its own.
For all these reasons, I was determined never to read William Golding voluntarily ever again. It wasn’t hard because I was sure of not missing out on anything.
Fast forward six years later.
One day, I stumbled on the rich, mellow baritone of Benedict Cumberbatch narrating a novel called The Spire. (Anyone who remembers his rendition of Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug will concede that his voice acting is stellar.) The historical novel set in the Middle Ages tracks the obsession of Dean Jocelyn with building an immense new spire for his foundation-less cathedral, an overarching project that spells disaster for everyone connected to him. Reminiscent of Captain Ahab’s iconic quest to subdue and kill Moby Dick, the 1964 novel showcases how simple folly can escalate into full blown madness. I was spell-bound for two hours before I happened to look at the audiobook cover. The Spire, by William Golding. (I’d not registered the significance of the author’s name at the start of the recording, mentally passing over it.) I never finished it.
A few months later, I was in the mood for a story set in pre-historic times. Growing up, I’d been gifted with a book from Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series. It’s safe to say that I learned more about inter-species relationships from her than from any possible amount of time spent poring over pages in biology concerning the differences between Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Foraging for food, childbirth in the wild, sexuality across the species divide and the use of medicinal drugs-it was all there, packaged in a quest tale that doubled up as a passionate love story. Hoping for a similar read, I found a deal on Golding’s The Inheritors, his very own take on the extinction of one of the last Neanderthal tribes at the hands of modern man. ‘Is this really Golding? The man seems to have had an incredible range-I wish I’d known that before Lord of the Flies !’ is what I thought. I was set on buying The Inheritors-but didn’t.
I’ve googled Golding’s works and discovered other titles I know I’d like, such as Pincher Martin, his most complex story and decided masterpiece. Writers I admire such as Marlon James, Annie Proulx, Kate Mosse and Stephen King have written forewords to his works, testament to his capacity to inspire across the genre divide. I’m now ready to concede that the force of the vitriol that I harboured, that I see reflected in online reviews written by both prominent and non-prominent readers, is proof of Golding’s skill of touching on what matters most to people, all failure of execution (when it comes to Lord of the Flies!) aside.
Books don’t just work when they correctly reflect reality, like a mirror.
Yes, we love Station Eleven because it is the one pandemic novel (and excellent TV show!) that speaks to our times and the current human condition but we can, over time, even grow to love books like Lord of the Flies for getting it all so spectacularly wrong, like that famous magic mirror in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Snow Queen that only reflects back a person’s worst faults.
For all that humans are not automatically condemned to slaughter each other under ‘savage conditions’, it is undeniable that we fear to descend to that level. Golding would come to rectify his statement regarding Lord of the Flies, claiming he wouldn’t call humans intrinsically flawed anymore, instead maintaining that his story really is about the fact that the conflict between good and evil is ongoing and will always take precedence in life.
As long as I remember that, I believe reading Golding will be possible again for me-some day.
