What, you wonder, could possibly have prompted the powers that be to commission an adaptation of a postwar allegory that throws into dreadful relief the impulse to tyranny, the fragility of democracy and the brittleness of our veneer of civilisation in this shining year of 2026? We may never know. Did I mention it takes place on an island in which all normal social rules no longer apply and the inhabitants are protected from any punishment or consequence, no matter what appetites emerge? Hmm. Well, on we go.
Here it is, Jack Thorne’s take – after his triumphant Adolescence – on William Golding’s endlessly harrowing 1954 classic and GCSE staple for the past 30 years, Lord of the Flies. It was his debut novel and born of his reaction to reading RM Ballantyne’s Victorian classic of heroic derring-do, The Coral Island, to his children in the late 40s. That paean to noble and manly virtues from the golden age of optimism hit differently by then, so Golding asked his wife if he should write a book about what would happen if a group of boys were stranded on an island together and behaved how a group of boys stranded on an island together really would behave. She encouraged him to give it a shot. He borrowed character names and made other references to Ballantyne’s book in his own, but Golding’s story is its dark counterpoint; a suggestion that if men are left to rule the world untrammelled there will soon not be many of them, or much of the world, left to dominate. I know – what an imagination, right?
