William Golding: Lord of the Flies

William Golding (1911-1993) - in full Sir Willam Gerald Golding

English novelist, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. The choice was unexpected, because the internationally famous novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) was considered the strongest candidate from the English writers. In many novels Golding has revealed the dark places of human heart, when isolated individuals or small groups are pushed into extreme situations. His work is characterized by exploration of "the darkness of man's heart", deep spiritual and ethical questions.

"Twenty-five years ago I accepted the label 'pessimist' thoughtlessly without realising that it was going to be tied to my tail, as it were, in something the way that, to take an example from another art, Rachmaninoff's famous Prelude in C sharp minor was tied to him. No audience would allow him off the concert platform until he played it. Similarly critics have dug into my books until they could come up with something that looked hopeless. I can't think why. I don't feel hopeless myself." (from Nobel Lecture, 1983)

William Golding was born in the village of St. Columb Minor in Cornwall. His father, Alec, was a schoolmaster, who had radical convictions in politics and a strong faith in science. Golding's mother, Mildred, was a supporter of the British suffragate movement. Golding started writing at the age of seven, but following the wishes of his parents, he studied first natural sciences and then English at Brasenose College, Oxford. Golding's first book, a collection of poems, appeared in 1934, a year before he received his B.A. in English and a diploma in education.

From 1935 to 1939, Golding worked as a writer, actor, producer, and a settlement house worker. In 1939 he moved to Salisbury, where he began teaching English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School. He married Ann Brookfield; they had two children. In his private journal Golding described how he once set two groups of boys against one another. These psychological experiments most likely inspired later his novel Lord of the Flies (1954).
During World War II, Golding served in the Royal Navy in command of a rocket ship. His active service included involvement in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in 1940 and participating in the Normandy invasion. Demobilised in 1945, Golding returned to writing and teaching, with a dark view of the European civilization. Recalling later his war experiences, he remarked that "man produces evil, as a bee produces honey."

In Salisbury Golding wrote four books, but did not get them published. Lord of the Flies, an allegorical story set in the near future during wartime, was turned down by twenty-one publishes until it finally accepted by Faber and Faber after substantial revisions. E.M. Forster named it Book of the Years and in the late 1950s it became a bestseller among American readers. At the time of its appearance, Golding was 44, but the success of the novel allowed him to give up teaching. In the gripping story a group of small British boys, stranded on a desert island, lapse into violence after they have lost all adult guidance. Ironically, the adult world is devastated by nuclear war.

Lord of the Flies was followed by The Inheritors (1955), which overturned H.G. Wells's Outline of History (1920) and depicted the extermination of Neanderthal man by Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals are portrayed compassionate and communal, and when they meet the more sophisticated Cro-Magnons, their tribe is doomed. The Finnish professor of paleontology, Björn Kurténhas offered in his novel Dance of the Tiger (1978) the explanation, that the Neanderthals disappeared because they fell fatally in love with their black and beautiful Cro-Magnon neighbours. In The Inheritors, which Golding himself considered his finest work, there is no understanding or love between these two races. First the events are perceived from the point of view of Lok, a semi-human creature, and after his death, the new protagonist is a Cro-Magnon, Tuami.

Golding's most widely read work, Lord of the Flies, has been translated into many languages and filmed in 1963 and 1990. It is an ironic comment on R.M. Ballantyne's Coral Island, using also the names of its characters. The story describes a group of children, who are evacuated from Britain because of a nuclear war. Their airplane crashes on an uninhabited island, and all the adults are killed. The boys create their own society, which gradually degenerates from democratic, rational, and moral community to tyrannical and cruel. "They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected; they were very brown, and filthily dirty." (in Lord of the Flies)

The older boys take control, a boy called Piggy, who is asthmatic and nearsighted, becomes a target of teasing and torment. Leaders emerge, two of the older boys get killed, and they begin to hunt another, just as a ship arrives. Golding's view is pessimistic: human nature is inherently corruptible and wicked. Thus the 19th century ideals of progress and education are based on false premises. Although the boys have been taught social skills, their desire to kill is unleashed when there are no strict rules of the English public-school system to control their behavior. This is the world of freedom, that is ruled by savages and the ultimate evil, the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, Prince of Devils, whom the boys worship in the form of a decapitated boar's head.

source: Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008