Lord of the Flies: Perfect book for Thorne to adapt for TV

We can all be thankful that a young editor from Northern Ireland saved William Golding’s masterpiece, Lord of the Flies, from potential obscurity when he rescued the unknown author’s debut novel from a publisher’s “slush pile”. Charles Monteith took the time to read through Golding’s yellowing, stained manuscript — which bore the original title “Strangers from Within” — even though it had already been turned down by 21 publishers and dismissed by a previous Faber editor with the words, “absurd and uninteresting fantasy. Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.”

Monteith asked Golding, then a 42-year-old English and philosophy teacher, to drop the first chapter, about an evacuation from nuclear war, and open with the moment where two schoolboys (Piggy and Ralph) meet on a desert island, after a plane crash has stranded a group of boys aged six to 13. Incidentally, Faber also ignored Golding’s other title suggestions, “A Cry of Children” or “Nightmare Island”, in favour of director Alan Pringle’s choice of Lord of the Flies, a key symbol in the book and the name by which Beelzebub is referenced in the Bible.

Lord of the Flies, which was published in September 1954, went on to sell more than 25 million copies worldwide. The title itself has become a cultural catchphrase, shorthand for the breakdown of civilisation and situations, from government rule to reality television squabbles, where factions descend into feral behaviour and lawlessness. Over the years, the novel has spawned numerous film adaptations and become required reading in schools and universities across the globe. And tonight, a new four-part BBC series created by Adolescence screenwriter Jack Thorne marks the first time the book has ever been brought to the small screen.

When Golding was handed the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf told him: “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” The offhand royal snipe about Lord of the Flies being a book pupils “had to do” may resonate with millions of young readers who were force-fed the book as part of a school curriculum; however, it does not do justice to a seismic novel that has had a massive influence on popular culture. Ian McEwan said Lord of the Flies thrilled him “with all the power a fiction can have”, while Stephen King, in a foreword to a 2024 Faber edition, hailed it as a publication that simply “blew me away”. It was also a formative book for Thorne, who said he had read it with his mother as a boy, and that it “left a scar on me like no other”.

Cornwall-born Golding explained how the book had come about, recalling: “One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.’” He succeeded. McEwan read the book at 13 at boarding school and was surprised to find that Golding “knew all about us”.

Golding’s starkly unsentimental view of boyhood was partly informed by his experiences as a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, a boys’ grammar school in Salisbury, a job he reluctantly plodded through to support his wife and two children. He was known as “Scruff” because of his unkempt jackets and scraggly beard. In 2020, his daughter Judy Golding Carver gave a video interview in which she reminisced about her father, who died on 19 June 1993, at the age of 81. She said he liked children and wanted to understand them. One of the most fascinating anecdotes was about the day he took a class out to a Neolithic hill fort in Wiltshire. “He divided the class into two groups and told the groups to fight each other,” Judy explained: “Fairly soon, and I can’t imagine why he didn’t realise this would happen, he had to separate them because he was concerned that somebody might be killed. This was not good teaching, but on the other hand was probably helpful to his writing and he may be able to point to episodes in Lord of the Flies that reflect this.” Golding’s biographer John Carey wrote: “It occurred to more than one boy that Golding stirred up antagonism between them in order to observe their reactions.”

Lord of the Flies shows how a group of supposedly angelic British schoolboys (some are robed ex-choir boys) behave when cooperation unravels and groups splinter. Golding suggests the inevitability of violence when rules are abandoned. He referred tellingly to the boys stranded on the island without adult supervision as “scaled down society”.

Golding always said he preferred to be called a storyteller rather than a novelist and at the heart of his powerful story is the battle for ascendancy between 12-year-old Ralph, who embodies the values of civilisation, and Jack Merridew, who embraces savagery. Golding (whose father and brother were also teachers) knew all about the pecking order among children and how the world of school shapes boys. He explored how children suffer miserably when they are considered weak.