Like many Dutch teenagers – like many teenagers, full stop – Aimée de Jongh first read Lord of the Flies at school. She was 14 and in an English lesson when she found herself irresistibly drawn to this ostensibly rather British book about a group of schoolboys marooned on a remote Pacific island after a plane crash. “Fourteen is an interesting age,” she says. “I was still a kid, but I thought of myself as an adult. What I liked was their independence. They were free. They had no parents to tell them what to do.” She found that she could easily picture the world William Golding had created, for all that she’d “never been anywhere hotter than Italy”. It was a matter then, as now, of contrasts. “It’s set on a brightly coloured tropical island, like [the 1980 film] The Blue Lagoon or something. But the boys are wild and dirty. They’re a bit animalistic: they have long hair, they’re running around. They’re dark.” The book became her favourite novel and has remained so ever since.
Ten years ago, De Jongh, a cartoonist, illustrator and animator, was casting around for an idea for her first book. “I’d done a comic strip in a newspaper and I wanted to move on to graphic novels,” she tells me. “But I was scared. I’d never written a book before, and I thought: ‘Maybe an adaptation is a good way to start.’” Inquiries were made. Might Faber, Golding’s publisher, allow her to turn his celebrated novel into a long-form comic? But the answer was no: the rights were not available. De Jongh had to be content with giving two characters in a story she went on to write herself the names Ralph and Simon (after two boys in Lord of the Flies). Three years later, though, she tried again, only to be knocked back for a second time. “I gave up then. I told myself: ‘OK, this will probably never happen.’”
