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 -- Animals don't judge

War Horse

by Michael Morpurgo

#

I took the picture of the 23^rd Infantry Regiment my father served in during the 1930’s to the framers. Not just, I’ll admit, because the panoramic shot included the skinny teenager who would become my dad. But because the presence of horses in the photograph fascinated me. This was a major country’s military in the twentieth century, and its officers were on horseback. Horses and mules pulled its artillery and supply wagons.

“My father was in the Army,” I said to the young man at the frame shop, who was staring at the picture in amazement. “Yes,” he said. “But what country?”

So far have we come in an age when wars are fought on television, by machines and computers as much as by flesh and blood soldiers, from the era Michael Morpurgo portrayed in his 1982 book, War Horse, a story of World War I from the viewpoint of a horse.

And although there are many well-written war stories, they’re mostly written from the viewpoint of human beings, we notoriously political animals. How to write a war story that conveys the cost of war without a political agenda? Try writing, as Morpurgo did, from the viewpoint of a nonpolitical animal.

“Animals are a good way into a story,” Morpurgo states in an interview. “Animals don’t judge.”

The book’s sentiments were probably over the heads of the children it was aimed at thirty years ago, in those few anomalously peaceful years between the war in Vietnam and that in the Balkans. Perhaps it was awaiting a new era of war as well as the sophisticated puppetry that propelled the stage and screen adaptations, to come into its own again.

It’s the story of young Joey, a member, like his nineteenth century predecessor Black
Beauty, of that equine middle class between farm horse and aristocratic thoroughbred. Like all good soldiers, Joey obeys orders. He’s a British cavalry horse. Except when he’s captured and becomes a German artillery horse. Or is quartered as a French farm horse.

Will he survive artillery fire, starvation, overwork, even a near-drowning? Not to mention the possibility of a slaughter house at war’s end? Will he be reunited with his best human friend, the boy Albert he grew up with? For every change in his fortunes, he’s an unbiased observer, reporting impartially both on the good and bad in every human being he encounters.

And sometimes, he inspires their best.

The most powerful scene in both written and dramatic forms of his story is that of his rescue from a barbed wire entanglement. I’ve seen a horse with only a hoof caught in barbed wire, and it’s one of the most terrifying experiences they can encounter. So terrifying and dangerous that even seasoned equine actor Finder in the movie version of War Horse had to be partially portrayed through puppetry. At this moment of supreme terror and peril, will soldiers from each side muster their common humanity for the sake of an innocent?

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics completes a February of animal adventures with Margery Kinnan Rawlings’ story of the bond between lonely boy and orphaned fawn, The Yearling.)