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 – ‘We’ve met the beast and he is us’

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

***

Living without grownups isn’t turning out to be as much fun as the marooned schoolboys of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies had first imagined. After crash landing on an uninhabited tropical island, 12-year-old Ralph at first turns cartwheels as the “delight of a realized ambition” overcomes him: the ambition of being free of adult supervision.

But as the weeks pass, and no ship arrives to rescue the boys, delight turns to horror. Ralph is elected chief of the boys, but he has a vicious rival in Jack Merridew, who’s more interested in trying to hunt the island’s wild pigs than in tending a signal fire. The youngsters are homesick, and often physically ill as well from their diet of fruit from the island’s trees. Ralph’s best friend Piggy’s glasses have been broken in a squabble over relighting the neglected signal fire. And then there’s the strange being the youngest boys believe haunts the island, the Beast. Because although the older boys, Ralph and Piggy and Jack, deride the fears of the “littluns,” they secretly fear the island’s dark loneliness. Can the Beast be the reason things are falling apart in their microcosm of society?

And the boys begin to long for the return of the grownups.

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

“If only (the grownups) could get a message to us,” Ralph “If only they could send us. . . a sign or something.”

That same night, while Ralph and his friends sleep, a sign does come. “There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars,” Golding writes. “There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs.”

This sign, a dead pilot from an air battle fought high over the island, crashes onto the mountainous island. His parachute tangles in the trees whose movements in the wind give him a false semblance of life, a sign of the “beast” the boys try to propitiate with an offering from their first successful hunt – the head of a pig.

Only shy, epileptic Simon realizes the true nature of this “beast” – that it is only a pathetic corpse whose presence belies all their trust in the wisdom and infallibility of “grownups.” But before he can convey his epiphany to the rest, he encounters the fly-encrusted head of the dead pig, and meets the true Beast, the Lord of the Flies.

“‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. . . . ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are. . . so don’t try to escape!”

Simon arrives back at the boys’ camp at night, during a sudden storm. In his absence, Jack has instigated a blood-based cult to cement his coup over Ralph’s leadership and as the boys scream “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” Simon stumbles unrecognized into their midst.

“The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill.” And in the small post-apocalyptic world of the island, the voice of reason dies, the boys fall in a spiritual decay as certain as the physical decay of the pilot’s body, and the Lord of the Flies claims his own.

(Can things possibly get any worse? Next Friday Adventure classics concludes a September of young adventures with the final chapter of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.)

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.)