William Golding

William Golding was born in St. Columb Minor in Cornwall. He started writing at the age of 7 and in his youth he studied natural sciences and English at Brasenose College, Oxford. His first book, a collection of poems, appeared a year before Golding received his B.A. In 1983 he got a Nobel Prize for literature. His second novel the lord of the Flies became bestseller among American readers in the 1950’s and an immediate success in Britain.

Short about the story

An atomic bomb has been dropped, and a tube has been dropped over a deserted, tropical island after an evacuation that got wrong. The tube contained a bunch of kids, scattered in the idyllic environments. They evolve their own society and many complications and problems strike them.

Main Characters

Piggy is the most intelligent of them, and after my opinion he should become the leader. Piggy is a fat boy with asthma and glasses, he is not half as athletic than any other kid on the island, and he is held outside the gang. An outsider.

Ralph is the leader of the gang; the folks elected him. We don’t get a too good picture of him in the book, but I think he is slim brown-haired guy always asking Piggy for advices.

Jack, this is a really dirt bag, the leader of the hunters, and in charge of the food. He is a psychological mess, and starts to resist the small society and wants to destroy the system Ralph created, with the conch and the fire on the top of the mountain.

My Opinion

This book of 248 pages is a hard reading book; it is too much describing of the situations and environments. In the beginning I though it was a dry book, a boring and drained story. People surviving on a deserted island are old news, but after 50 pages I understood that this book had a deeper meaning and was about more than just surviving. It was about intern conflicts, fights and brutal rituals. They kind of built their own society on the island, in a different way than Robinson Cruise, because the kids in Lord of the Flies had a really hard time.

My first opinion of the book was boring, a mess of words written with no meaning neither purpose. But when I suddenly came to the point in the book where actually started to understand something I realized that “Hey, this wasn’t a really bad book after all” The action in the story builds up page after page, when suddenly at the end it slows down in a speed of light and then the book is finished. The intensity made my nails disappear, or maybe because of my biting, I had goose bombs every evening I read the book, and though for myself, “I wonder how it ends”. And when I finally reached the last page I was really disappointed, how the hell did that officer get there? But that ending was something I just had to accept, and I though that it wasn’t any reasonable explanation of what the beast was. Before I repeated some chapters, desperately to find an answer. And was rather disappointed, the beast was a person in a parachute I don’t want to describe how they couldn’t see the difference, because its very boring really. But they couldn’t.

To sum it all up, this was a fantastic book, filled with drama, tragic action and twisted minds. Everything a reader wants, but I am no expert in English, and I though that this book had too much describing.

Recommendation and Summary

I recommend this book for people in the age of 16 and up; this is no typical children book. Its heavy language and the psychological meaning is hard to understand in an age of for example 14. The book was full of adventure and horror.

Rating

“A brilliant story”