Adventure classics: When those who should know best, don’t

Lord of the Flies

by William Golding

***

The day the child realises that all adults are imperfect,
he becomes an adolescent. . .
Alden Nowlan

Once upon a time, landing on a tropical island with no adults around seemed like a dream come true for the lost boys of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a mere interval of play like the adventure stories they had read, books such as R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, before the grownups arrive to rescue them. But as things fall apart, as the only adult who reaches their island is a dead pilot from the war high overhead, as the boys themselves break into quarreling factions, some yearn for a return of the certainties adults seemed to provide.

Among the group of pre-adolescent boys, 12-year-old Ralph has been elected chief. A second boy, known only by his nickname, Piggy, is a semi-outcast, set apart by his physical weaknesses – poor sight, asthma, and a fatness that persists despite the lean diet of fruit available to most of the group. Despite these physical failings, his greater intelligence and the fire-making technology he possesses in his eyeglasses, have made him Ralph’s ally in attempting to maintain a signal fire to guide rescuers to the island.

Now a third boy, Jack Merridew, threatens the peace of the island. Deserting the signal fire in favor of hunting the island’s native pigs, Jack challenges Ralph for leadership. It is a challenge the more urgent and chilling as Jack’s followers finally manage to kill a pig, and tempt the rest with the promise of meat.

And when the signal fire goes out, those left in darkness long for the return of the grownups.

Grownups, Piggy says, “ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right. . . .’”

He forgets, like the child he really is, that the catastrophic war ignited by those same grownups is the reason for the boy’ current abandonment. When Jack, to secure his own authority, steals the poor remains of Piggy’s already broken spectacles, Piggy loses his intellectual as well as physical vision.

“‘What’s grownups goin’ to think?’” he asks. “‘I’m going to that Jack Merridew an’ tell him, I am.’”

As Piggy pays for his blind belief in the rule of law, the remainder of Ralph’s followers desert him. Determined to eliminate any challenge to his leadership, Jack incites his faction to hunt Ralph down in a ghastly parody of their pig hunts.

With the remains of Piggy’s eyeglasses, he sets fire to the forest where Ralph hides. The uncontrolled flames threaten to overwhelm the island, just as the probably nuclear holocaust in the outside world threatens all of human civilization. As the hunters close in, a being so strange Ralph doesn’t at first recognize it for what it is, a British naval officer whose cutter has just landed.

As flames engulf the palms by the island’s beach, “the officer grinned cheerfully at Ralph. ‘We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?’. . . Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.’” And for the first time, Ralph weeps.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an October of Halloween horror with J.S. LeFanu’s short story, “Carmilla.”)

Adventure classics – A signal fire for the nuclear age

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.)

Adventure classics – Boys on an island: as they really are

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

The Coral Island, by R. M. Ballantyne

***

First, there were three boys named Ralph and Jack M. and P(eterkin) Gay, marooned on 19^th century Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. And they were all very happy.

Then one evening, as William Golding wrote in his collection of essays, Moving Target, “we had just put the children to bed after reading to the elder some adventure story or other. . . but I was tired of these islands with their paper-cutout goodies and baddies and everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I said to my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a story about boys on an island and let them behave the way they really would?'”

And so he began the story of another Ralph and another Jack M. and a . . . Piggy. They, too, were marooned on an island in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. And they were all very, very unhappy.

Considering how many “island stories” I’ve written about on this site (and if you’re an island fan like me, check out the list at the end of this post) how have I overlooked Ballantyne’s 1858 children’s classic, The Coral Island? For starters, it has overtones of racism, imperialism and classism, and it’s pretty violent to boot. (Cannibalism and child sacrifice, anybody?) But that only made it more appealing to the youthful males who were its intended audience. And as anybody who’s observed boys lately, they’re still avid consumers of violent media.

Surely if Golding had aimed his 1954 masterpiece at, say, the boys he spent years teaching, Lord of the Flies probably would have reached a wider audience than the fewer than 3,000 U.S. readers who bought its initial printing. Maybe it would have spawned a bestselling series. Instead, as a veteran naval officer in World War II, he aimed at an adult audience, fearful of what would happen to their children in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. And Lord of the Flies would become one of the most influential novels of the 20^th century as well as becoming one of the most frequently banned books, according to the American Library Association.

I found The Coral Island in the children’s section of my local library, and was so amazed to learn was adapted as a children’s TV series in 2000 that I’m devoting part of Adventure classics September of young adventurers space to it. And to a comparison of it to Lord of the Flies, which in many ways is its parody.

Can we hope (or fear) that there will be child sacrifice? Possibly even cannibalism? In setting up the world of his story, the only large animals Golding allows on his island are a herd of feral pigs. Can it be coincidence that the most intelligent human inhabitant (and virtually the only one with a moral compass) is a despised boy called Piggy? Wait and see. (Right, you’ll have to pretend you haven’t read the book or seen the movie versions.)

  

Oh, yes, the list of “island adventures” I promised earlier. Here they are, listed in order of posting. Let me know if I’ve overlooked some. “Last woman left standing,” September. 16, 2011 (Island of the Blue Dolphins); “A book made from a map,” August 29, 2012 (Treasure Island); “In the heart of the beast,” July 3, 2013; (The Island of Dr. Moreau); “Merchant, debtor, author, spy,” August 14, 2013 (Robinson Crusoe); “Becoming history’s most famous mutiny,” August 28, 2013 (Mutiny on the Bounty); “Island of refuge for the wild ponies,” February 5, 2014 (Misty of Chincoteague); “The hero who returns from the depths,” August 27, 2014 (The Mysterious Island); “Castaways’ peaceable kingdom,” September 3, 2014 (The Swiss Family Robinson); “Billions of tiny architects of the reefs,” August 28, 2015 (Voyage of HMS Beagle – because Ballantyne made use of Darwin’s descriptions).

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with Lord of the Flies and The Coral Island.)