Lord of the Flies

I read this when I was about 11 or 12 and I've read it a couple of times since - apart from anything by Jane Austen - this has to have been one of the most significant and influential books of my youth alongwith 1984 and Animal Farm - this is human nature at its rawest - maybe in these hardened times it won't have the same shock value but at the time it was deeply shocking and a lot of children will shudder at the depiction of bullying that becomes humiliation and in Piggy's case death and how Jack becomes an outcast - I suppose The Beach is like Lord of the Flies but they think they are grown-ups and Leo di Caprio plays the regular good guy who becomes mental case outcast and fugitive just like 'good egg' Ralph (it is Ralph isn't it) and Jack is the bad boy turned crazed tribal leader and chief pig sticker!!!!!!

This is a total classic! Showing how our underlying savegery overcomes our civilised behaviour when put to the test. Kinda reminds me of the show "Survivor" (ha ha ha)

terribly disturbing...i read this when i was in school, much like Kate T.

I read this when I was very young, around about the same time I read Henry James's Turn of the Screw. I just remember being horribly, thrillingly chilled by the books, I guess because they both investigate the potential for evil in children, which - as a child reader - I found both intriguing and unsettling. They haunt me still - both of them, as do the brilliant film versions by Peter Brook (Lord of the Flies) and Jack Clayton (Turn of the Screw, retitled The Innocents).

Hi Kate T is that film The innocents the one with Deborah Kerr because that is haunting and scary - there have been more modern versions but I think the Deborah Kerr film version is the best

Lord Of The Flies was a turning point book for me - the idea that a book could be 'about' something - i.e. what happens in it - but also be 'about' something - i.e. have underlying themes. Golding's prose is, in places, some of the best I've ever read. He keeps his vocabulary fairly simple yet the island is evoked with dizzying power.
As an allegory or fictional social experiment it has flaws, the least of which is that there are no girls on the island, so it doesn't mirror the real world. (although the ending implies that Golding very much wants his readers to infer that it does)

It started to improve towards the end. It was ... ok. I don't really like how the kids cartwheel all the time. For some reason that really annoyed me. I've very seldom, perhaps never, seen a child cartwheel out of joy. I appreciate what Golding was doing with the entire Heart of Darkness type thing, but at times he was a bit heavy-handed and clumsy with the leitmotif. Another interesting reading of this, which I haven't seen anyone talk about, was the Nazi Germany correlation. The book was written right after WWII and there seems to be a couple of occasions where you could shoehorn the story into an allegory. Nevertheless, it is not one of the books that I didn't "get", when I was young. I got it.

C'mon bkoplitz! You can "shoehorn" the whole lot into an allegory and not specifically because of Nazi Germany, look at human behavior in general. As tcook says, it's completely iconic.
I don't remember cartwheeling kids.

It's just such an iconic book. As far as I'm aware Golding didn't write anything else of note - but this one is magnificent.

OK veobey123 you are not aware of the truly outstanding 'To the Ends of the Earth' trilogy he wrote in the 80s which I fread at the time and thought astonishing - the BBC made it into a 3 part drama in 2006 and did it extraordinarily well. Highly recommended

Golding didn't write anything else of note? He won the pigging Nobel prize for literature in 1983! Freefall and The Spire are terrific books.

The point of the cartwheels is that you're seeing the action from the kid's point of view, so you have their understanding of what's happening, rather than an adult one. There's loads of bits where Ralph nearly grasps something, or has the beginnings of an adult thought and can't follow it up.

What's often overlooked is that Lord of the Flies is a post-apocalyptic book. Golding fought long and hard with his editors at Faber to keep the first few pages in the book that imply that there has been some sort of atomic war / international conflict.

Lord of the Flies works because it's a great book about children, seen from their subjective point of view, and a great book about civilisation.

Lord of the Flies is one of the least clumsy books I have ever read. I'd suggest that you go back to it, bkop.

Could not have put this better myself agree with every word billyfisher1977 so how is space?

I heard that the book was almost halved by the publishers. The apocalyptic war was actually to be described in great detail until it was cut. I'd say it functions perfectly well as it is. Another half would have been laborious.