I have nothing critical to add to this book other than I believe its origins to be woefully misunderstood. It's lauded as a dark insight into the nature of boys (or men) when left to their own devices in the absence of societal guardrails, but Golding himself (though certainly the troubled, and maligned kind of boy depicted in the novel) recollected that the critical acclaim of the book struck him as a joke.

Yet the man who wrote Lord of the Flies spent the rest of his life regretting that he had done so. Golding considered the book "boring and crude", its language "O-level stuff". Its classic status struck him as "a joke" and he disparaged his income from it as "Monopoly money".

He wrote the novel not as some sort of indictment of humanity, but rather of himself:

He abominated Lord of the Flies, he confided, because "basically I despise myself and am anxious not to be discovered, uncovered, detected, rumbled".

Recognizing that man (if not most men) are capable of rising above their base desires for the sake of one another (Hobbes wept, Hume lol'd).

He understood the Nazis, he said, because he was "of that sort by nature". His sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl has been titillatingly leaked to publicise Carey's biography. More generally, his son-in-law testifies that Golding specialised in belittling others – if that is, he recognised them at all. As Carey notes, he chronically misspelt names because he couldn't be bothered with people and their pesky claim to exist.

His worst rampages occurred when he was drunk. Once, staying at a friend's house in London, Golding awoke in panic and dismembered a Bob Dylan puppet because he thought it was Satan. Carey nervously makes light of the episode, referring to it as a '"diabolic encounter". Religion and rationality, myth and science, fight it out in Golding's books as they did in his brain; it may be that Carey is too sane or puritanical to comprehend the creative madness of his subject.

The novel's reception by the public education system is fine (it's better than most book we had to read), but the emphasis is misplaced on humanity, rather than the wretched author. Famously, 11 years after the novels publication, and probably 8 years after it had become award-winning (since it was initially released as screed for his students to revise as assignments rather than for any self-evident creative value), 6 boys were really shipwrecked after joyriding a small vessel and not only survived, but made merry, Robinson Crusoe style:

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

All this to say, rot in hell William Golding, and long live the indomitable boyish spirit.

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