Title: Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 225
Rating: 9/10
William Golding – Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies is an indisputable classic, and while it’s the only William Golding book that I’ve read, it’s left me wanting to read some more of his work. Without Lord of the Flies, a whole slew of modern film and literature wouldn’t exist, and Battle Royale and The Hunger Games in particular stand out as examples of the long reach of Golding’s influence.
The novel tells the story of a group of schoolchildren who find themselves stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, and their subsequent descent in to anarchy and brutality. It’s a classic tale, one that verges on both dystopian fiction and a serious sociological study, and it’s a book that everyone should read at some point in their lives, the earlier the better.
As a writer, Golding is up there with the best, and I can’t help feeling that his literary talents have been somewhat overlooked – sure, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature with this novel and it was praised by Kingsley Amis and E. M. Forster, but Golding never achieved the level of recognition that was awarded to Hemingway, Orwell and the like, who were writing with the same skill a decade earlier.
William Golding
