Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Thoughts: Having made it through high school without confronting the book, I read Lord of the Flies in a few hours during a trip to Sault Ste Marie after finding it recently in a little library. I found the plot to be engaging even as it was unpleasant, and the whole thing to be well written. The book shows its age, with a protagonist resorting to racial slurs in a moment of high emotions. I became inordinately frustrated, at one point, at the author’s disregard for the geometry of the phases of the moon: just after the sun sets (a fact important to the plot), Golding mentions a “sliver of moon [that] had drawn clear of the horizon”. I’m glad to be a person who has had the experience of reading Lord of the Flies, but I don’t plan to do it again any time soon and wouldn’t wish it upon anyone else.

Golding, William. 1954. Lord of the Flies. Faber and Faber.