Adventure classics – ‘We’ve met the beast and he is us’

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

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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.)

Wordcraft – The ever newborn lure of the world's end

With post-apocalyptic novels everywhere, what makes a writer with a solid platform of literary novels and essays like Emily St. John Mandel write a novel (and a highly-acclaimed novel at that) about the end of the world? And why are readers drawn to these “narratives of collapse”? Those were among the questions she addressed before an audience at Southern Methodist University, where her post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, was this year’s SMU Common Reading  book for new students.

Is it a longing for redemption, the hope that “if the world is remade, perhaps (we) have a chance to remake ourselves? Do we hope that in a moment of extremity, we will express an inner nobility. . . or “do we love post-apocalyptic novels because there are no more frontiers, now that “we’ve mapped every inch of the 29 percent of the world that’s above sea level?”

The last possibility seemed particularly apt for a writer who is also an unabashed Star Trek fan, and whose theme for this latest novel, “because survival is insufficient,” is drawn from an episode of Star Trek Voyager.

In some ways, Station Eleven is also the post-apocalyptic world of Mandel’s career. After writing three literary novels with noir elements, “I realized I was in danger of getting pigeonholed as a crime writer. I just wanted to write something completely different.”

Post-apocalyptic, however, wasn’t the first thing that came to her mind. But while considering a story about a theatrical troupe, she began to think about all the things taken for granted in our modern world: things as seemingly simple as flipping a switch to bring the lights on in a building.

“It’s both fascinating and terrifying to think about the fragility of these systems. What would we miss, what would we hold on to and try to recreate if all the trappings of civilization fell away? It seemed to me that one of the things that’s best about this world is the plays of Shakespeare.”

Now with a theme that combined her original idea about acting with a post-apocalyptic take (and after running the possibilities for the end of the world past her husband, who fortunately didn’t laugh) she was left to decide how to bring the world as we know it to an end.

Nuclear war? Maybe. But her “most unexpectedly fascinating research” was in the history of pandemics.

Shakespeare work and life, filled with allusions to plagues that killed close family members and closed theaters, leaving his company of players to wander to the countryside, led her to consider an older, grimmer human fear than war, the millennia-long dread of disease. “We have a deep fear of illness, in a way we don’t fear other things that are more likely to kill us,” she said. (And as she wrote in her New Republic essay, “You’ll probably never catch Ebola – so why is the disease so terrifying?”)

And so also she opens Station Eleven with the performance onstage of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the story of an aging king who decides to end his own kingdom by dividing it among his daughters. Meanwhile, in the city outside the theater, a strange disease rages, one that will kill 99 percent of the Earth’s population, not only presidents and prime ministers, but the nameless billions who build and maintain all the infrastructure civilization depends on. But leaving a few, including a child actress who was onstage in King Lear at that moment zero, survives twenty years after the plague has run its course, to carry the continuity of pre-plague theater to the survivors. It is because “survival is insufficient?” Or because, ironically, the end of the world as we know it is never really the end? 

“With all details stripped away, what are we left with? Everything that matters.”