This is an article in our Guide to the Classics series.

I first encountered William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies in my final year of primary school in the UK. A long-term staple of English and Australian classrooms, it invites debate about human nature, morality and the creeping dangers of unchecked power and herd behaviour.

The cover of the edition I read bore an ink drawing of a severed pig’s head, its eyes closed, blood streaming from its mouth. The vivid, disturbing image remains fresh in my mind decades later. It felt less like an illustration than a portent.

Set during wartime, Lord of the Flies tells the tale of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical desert island after the plane evacuating them crashes. With no adults to guide them, the boys attempt to build a makeshift social order, establishing rules and electing a leader. But the fragile system soon teeters and collapses. Fear and resentment take hold. Violence follows.

Among the younger boys, rumours circulate about a threatening presence on the island. The idea of a “beast” begins to influence behaviour, lending form to anxieties that might otherwise have remained diffuse and unspoken.

At the centre of the mounting tension is a struggle between Ralph and another boy, Jack. Ralph remains committed to rules and procedure – to the maintenance of order and the hope of rescue. Jack, on the other hand, grows increasingly impatient with the idea of restraint. Hunting becomes his priority, and with it comes a very different model of leadership, one grounded less in consent than in command.

Stuck in the middle is Piggy – an asthmatic, overweight and bespectacled boy whose real name we never learn. Intellectually alert, he grasps the symbolic importance of objects and concepts more clearly than most. But he is mocked, interrupted, and continually sidelined. In certain respects, Piggy serves as a barometer of the group’s moral health – and as a measure of Ralph’s character. To defend Piggy is to defend reason itself.

I remember our faltering discussions revolving around what I now recognise as an age-old question: nature or nurture? Were the murderous schoolboys shaped by their circumstances, or were those circumstances merely revealing something already present?

Golding, a schoolteacher........

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