Back in the days, a few years before college, when I read Lord of the Flies for the first time, it came across as an adventurous story of children abandoned on an island in an ocean. With a touch or two of a folktale, containing some potential lessons that needed to be scraped out of the plain but fast relay of the events. The boys try to produce a semblance of order, democratically elect a leader but soon slip down the slope of civic discipline, mess around, create rival camps, play sadistic games, set the island on fire and eventually, fortuitously, are rescued by the captain of a passing ship. It was then a story of frolic and fright, adventure and avarice, cowardice and callousness. All excused finally because the perpetrators are pre-adolescent kids without supervision and direction of any elder. It did not occur to me then that beyond the isolated, folk-talish story of a group of English boys, on the threshold of adolescence, left to fend for themselves, after a magical entry down on the island from an airplane, it was intended to be presented as the story of the primal instincts unleashed without the controlling agencies of the civilizational paraphernalia. The island, it turned out later, was a laboratory to examine the genesis of the evil coming out of human actions.

William Golding mapped the bourgeoning evil on the island in the backdrop of a nuclear shadow, soon after the World War II as Hiroshima and Nagasaki faced death of proportions never seen before by humanity. Today the foghorns of nuclear war are blowing. And Golding’s island, with its........

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