Lord of the
Flies, by William Golding
The Coral
Island, by R.M. Ballantyne
“Until the grownups come
to fetch us we’ll have fun. . . (but) if a ship comes near the island they may
not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a
fire.”
So spoke Ralph, duly
elected leader at age “twelve years and a few months” of the marooned, doomed
youngsters in William Golding’s 1954 novel,
Lord of the Flies. Golding consciously followed the premise of R. M.
Ballantyne’s 1858 boys’ adventure story,
The Coral Island, and then stood it on its head.
When Ballantyne marooned
three young British sailors – Ralph, Jack and Peterkin – on an uninhabited
tropical isle, he was careful to set up a clear hierarchy among them. Jack was
the oldest at 18, and already an experienced sailor. Ralph was 15, and on his
first voyage, as was 14-year-old Peterkin Gay. The world they came from was an
ordered one. Their country was the leader of a worldwide empire, most of whose
possessions were at peace and where everyone from Queen Victoria on down knew
his or her place. And because Ballantyne’s book was meant to set an uplifting
example for its readers, young Ralph and Peterkin accepted Jack’s authority without
question.
Almost exactly a century
later, in 1954, and in a world so changed Ballantyne would hardly have
recognized it, William Golding also marooned a group of British boys on an
uninhabited island. Unlike Ballantyne’s castaways, shipwrecked in a storm while
on a peaceful voyage, Golding’s were fleeing a world torn by war. Great
Britain’s empire was dissolving in the aftermath of the second world war of the
century. And over the entire globe hung the threat of worldwide nuclear
annihilation.
For better or worse,
unthinking acceptance of authority was no longer an option for these new castaways.
Golding’s Ralph and Jack were closer in age, more nearly balanced in size and
experience than Ballantyne’s. And their Peterkin stand-in, the short, fat,
asthmatic, lower class boy nicknamed Piggy, has only his glasses and a
misplaced faith in rationality to set against their power stalemate.
Right, glasses. Because
although Ralph hopes to attract rescuers with a signal fire, and the island has
plenty of wood for fuel, the only way the boys have to start a fire is by using
Piggy’s spectacles as a burning glass.
In The Coral Island, Peterkin suggested the same experiment, using the
lens of a spy glass, a suggestion derided by the others at the time because the
sun had set. Ballantyne’s Jack starts the fire by the time honored method of
friction, a low-tech suggestion the boys’ in Golding’s book deride.
Ralph tells Piggy to keep
track of the youngest boys, age six or so, collectively referred to as the “littluns.”
Among the youngsters is one with a mulberry birthmarked face, “a shrimp of a
boy.” He is the first to voice fear of a “beastie” in the woods, the first
mention of menace on the apparently idyllic island. But the older boys deride
his fears and the rest, wildly excited by the prospect of a bonfire, break free
of Piggy’s feeble attempts to control them.
As the youngsters pile on
fuel, the fire quickly rages as out of the control as Golding feared the
nuclear weapons of the age would do to the world. When the first at last burns
itself out, the boy with the marked face is not among the group. The genii in
the bottle technology of Piggy’s glasses has claimed its first victim.
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics continues a September of young adventurers with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island.)
