Why read this: This is cultural criticism at full pitch: a 70-year-old novel pressed into service as a lens on autocracy, masculinity, and online cruelty. For Upper C1 readers it models how a single literary work can carry an argument across three voices (novelist's daughter, professor, screenwriter), and how a careful critic withholds judgement while still building one. The reading reward is precisely the journalistic-essayistic register students need before tackling longer university prose.
What to notice: The article's load is in its layering: Golding's plot, Thorne's adaptation, and the journalist's running thesis are stacked, not sequenced. Watch for nominalised abstractions (universality, vagueness, dysfunction) that compress whole arguments into noun phrases, and for the concession-and-pivot move ("For all its universality, though...") that drives the prose. Several quotations carry irony or hedging that flat reading will miss; the gloss terms scaffold the cultural-historical shorthand (Cold War, the Reds, mushroom cloud) without pre-explaining the argument.
Skills practised: Tracking three named voices across an argumentative throughline; reading nominalisation back into the proposition it packages; distinguishing authorial intent from legitimate later interpretation (the Carver / Thorne disagreement is the central case study); and recognising when a phrase like "Lord of the Flies moment" has slipped from quotation into shorthand. These are the moves students need to reach C2-grade analytical writing about literature and culture.
Why Lord of the Flies still feels like the news
Seventy years after Golding's island first burned, Jack Thorne's Netflix adaptation argues the novel is no relic. It is a mirror for a rancorous age.
Tap any green word in the article to see its meaning.
Seventy years on, William Golding's Lord of the Flies still speaks to a rancorousrancorous: Full of rancor; bitter; unforgiving — 怨恨的；充满敌意的 world. On the surface its premisepremise: an underlying assumption or statement from which a conclusion is drawn — 前提；假设 is a boys' adventure: a plane crash, a deserted island: an island with no people living on it — 无人岛, no adults, and a savage descentdescent: The action of moving downward; a person's origin or ancestry. — 下降；血统；世系 into violence. Yet this 20th-Century classic refuses to age. Stephen King calls it foundationalfoundational: Fundamental or underlying — 根本的；起根基作用的; Matthew Bourne has staged it as dance; The Simpsons ran it as parodyparody: A work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony — 滑稽模仿作品；戏仿; Yellowjackets is, in effect, its female knockoffknockoff: An imitation of something, particularly a well-known product, usually lower in quality and price than the original — 仿冒品. Now Jack Thorne, writer of the megahit Adolescence, has adapted it for Netflix because, he tells the BBC, the resonanceresonance: Something that evokes an association, or a strong emotion — (情感或思想上的)共鸣；强烈呼应 is unmistakable: today's online life, he argues, is a place where it is easier to disparagedisparage: To dishonor by a comparison with what is inferior; to lower in rank or estimation by actions or words; to speak slightingly of; to depreciate; to undervalue — 贬低；轻视 strangers than to help them.
The book's classroom afterlife is mixed: some readers embrace it; others have balked at being force-fed it as required reading. Yet its cast endures because Golding draws each boy with such balance that the island reads as a microcosm of society: a small group or system that represents the larger world — 社会的缩影. Piggy is the bulliedbully: To act aggressively towards — 恃强欺压, bespectacled thinker; Ralph the would-be civiccivic: Relating to the duties or activities of citizens; relating to a city or town and its local government. — 公民的；市政的；城市的 leader who insists on rules; Jack his power-hungry rival, who marches the others into anarchyanarchy: [Between Two World Wars] Absence of government; lawlessness — 无政府状态; 混乱; and Simon the visionaryvisionary: Someone who has visions; a seer — 有远见者；预见者, almost sacrificialsacrificial: Relating to sacrifice — 献祭的；与祭祀有关的 figure who senses that the island's evil comes from inside the boys themselves. Golding's small island has always functioned as a microcosm of something larger.
Tim Kendall, Professor of English Literature at Exeter and editor of William Golding: The Faber Letters, argues that the novel began as a much more specific creature. The early manuscriptmanuscript: an author's original text of a book or article before publication; a handwritten document — 手稿；原稿；手抄本, he notes, opens as a World War Three: an imagined third world war (the book was conceived during fears of nuclear conflict in the 1950s) — 第三次世界大战 novel: the boys are being evacuatedevacuate: To move people from a dangerous place to a safe location. — 疏散；撤离；转移 from a nuclear age: the historical era after the atomic bomb, when nuclear weapons shaped global politics — 核时代 conflict, and a deleted passage describes the mushroom cloud: the cloud shape made by a nuclear explosion — 蘑菇云 rising behind their plane. That imageimage: Something mapped to by a function — 像;映像, Kendall says, hammers home: drives a point in forcefully so it cannot be missed — 强调到位；让人印象深刻 Golding's central ironyirony: a state of affairs or an event that seems contradictory to what one expects, or the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning — 讽刺；反语: on the island, the boys repeat in miniatureminiature: Greatly diminished size or form; reduced scale — 缩小尺寸 what the adults are doing on a planetaryplanetary: Of, or relating to the whole Earth; global — 全球性的；全球范围的 scale. In the published text only one phrase, the Reds: Cold War-era slang for the Soviets and communists — “红色分子”（冷战时期对苏联人/共产党人的俗称）, gestures at the Cold War: the long political standoff between the US-led West and the Soviet Union, roughly 1947 to 1991 — 冷战 that framed the writing. That deliberate vagueness is, paradoxicallyparadoxically: In a paradoxical manner; so as to create a paradox — 矛盾地, what has secured the novel's universalityuniversality: The property of being universal, common to all members of a class — 普遍性；通用性.
Each generation has found a different door into the book. Judy Carver, Golding's daughter, recalls that early readers treated Simon as a Christ figure: a character in a story whose role mirrors Jesus Christ: innocent, suffering, sacrificed — 基督式人物（殉道形象） and read the novel in religious terms. More recently, she observes, the environmental angle has come to the fore: become prominent or important in attention — 凸显出来；占据中心位置, prompted by the boys' burningburning: A fire — 火灾 of the island. Today, the rise of autocraticautocratic: Of or pertaining to the manner of an autocrat — 专横的；独断的 rulers makes Jack the obvious mirror, and the rules of warfarewarfare: the activity of fighting a war, especially using particular methods or weapons — 战争；作战；冲突 and of fair trial, Carver suggests, sit on a knife edge: a state of dangerous balance where things could collapse at any moment — 千钧一发. She is careful to call it anachronisticanachronistic: Erroneous in date; containing an anachronism; in a wrong time; not applicable to or not appropriate for the time — 时代错误的；不合时宜的 to claim Golding wrote a book about masculinity, even if a sensitive reader can extract that reading. A novel, her father came to believe, passes generation by generation into its readers' hands.
Thorne's adaptationadaptation: The process of adjusting to new conditions, or a version of a work modified for a different medium — 适应；改编；改编作品 mines the book for nuancesnuance: Subtlety or fine detail — 微妙之处；细节 that schoolroom readings tend to flattenflatten: To make vapid or insipid; to render stale — 淡化；使失去层次. As a child, he says, he simply despiseddespise: to disregard or ignore — 无视；不屑一顾 Jack; rereadingreread: to read again — 重读 him as an adult, he found a portrait far more tender than expected. Jack's destruction, Thorne argues, is not the work of a black heart but the slow accumulationaccumulation: The process or result of gradually gathering an increasing amount of something — 积累；积聚；堆积物 of small, frightened decisions made to keep authority intactintact: not damaged or impaired; remaining complete and whole — 完整的；未受损的. The episode told from Jack's point of view shows him as a lonely boy whose hunger for power is partly bravado, a performance designed to hide his fear from himself.
Where Golding watched boys who had absorbed the traumatrauma: a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, or physical injury — 创伤；心理创伤 of their fathers' war and were playing out: acting out or living through (a pattern, role, or conflict) — 重现；演绎 the way they had been socialisedsocialise: To instruct somebody, usually subconsciously, in the etiquette of a society — 使社会化；潜移默化地教化, Thorne sees a present that is just as fraught for young men. The phrase toxic masculinity: harmful traditional male behaviours such as dominance, aggression, or emotional suppression — 有毒的男性气质, he notes, has become so commonplace that boys can no longer hear the second word without the first; for a teenager trying to work out how to be male, that is genuinely terrifying. Kendall reads Golding's all-male island, more soberlysoberly: In a sober manner; temperately; coolly; calmly; gravely; seriously — 冷静地；严肃地, as the 1950s power structure writ small: the same thing shown in miniature; a small-scale version of something bigger — 缩影；小小一版的: leaders of the world were men, so leaders on the island had to be boys. Thorne's eloquent flashbacks refuse the simplisticsimplistic: Overly simple — 过于简单化的 move of blaming distant fathers for social dysfunctiondysfunction: A failure to function in an expected or complete manner. Usually refers to a disorder in a bodily organ (e.g. erectile dysfunction), a mental disorder, or the improper behavior of a social group — 功能障碍；失调; Jack and Simon both have absentabsent: Not present in a place or not existing in something. — 缺席的；不存在的 fathers, yet walk in opposite moral directions. The book's title, he worries, has been reducedreduced: To lose weight — 减肥 to a shorthand, summoned whenever commentatorscommentator: A person who comments on events, especially on television, radio, or in newspapers; an analyst or critic. — 评论员；解说员 announce another Lord of the Flies moment: a moment when society or a group seems to break down into chaos and cruelty — “蝇王时刻”——社会/群体崩坏的瞬间. The novel deserves better, because what Golding caught in those frightened, ordinary boys is still, unbearably, true.
Seventy years on, William Golding's Lord of the Flies still speaks to a rancorousrancorous: Full of rancor; bitter; unforgiving — 怨恨的；充满敌意的 world. On the surface its premisepremise: an underlying assumption or statement from which a conclusion is drawn — 前提；假设 is a boys' adventure: a plane crash, a deserted island: an island with no people living on it — 无人岛, no adults, and a savage descentdescent: The action of moving downward; a person's origin or ancestry. — 下降；血统；世系 into violence. Yet this 20th-Century classic refuses to age. Stephen King calls it foundationalfoundational: Fundamental or underlying — 根本的；起根基作用的; Matthew Bourne has staged it as dance; The Simpsons ran it as parodyparody: A work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony — 滑稽模仿作品；戏仿; Yellowjackets is, in effect, its female knockoffknockoff: An imitation of something, particularly a well-known product, usually lower in quality and price than the original — 仿冒品. Now Jack Thorne, writer of the megahit Adolescence, has adapted it for Netflix because, he tells the BBC, the resonanceresonance: Something that evokes an association, or a strong emotion — (情感或思想上的)共鸣；强烈呼应 is unmistakable: today's online life, he argues, is a place where it is easier to disparagedisparage: To dishonor by a comparison with what is inferior; to lower in rank or estimation by actions or words; to speak slightingly of; to depreciate; to undervalue — 贬低；轻视 strangers than to help them.
The book's classroom afterlife is mixed: some readers embrace it; others have balked at being force-fed it as required reading. Yet its cast endures because Golding draws each boy with such balance that the island reads as a microcosm of society: a small group or system that represents the larger world — 社会的缩影. Piggy is the bulliedbully: To act aggressively towards — 恃强欺压, bespectacled thinker; Ralph the would-be civiccivic: Relating to the duties or activities of citizens; relating to a city or town and its local government. — 公民的；市政的；城市的 leader who insists on rules; Jack his power-hungry rival, who marches the others into anarchyanarchy: [Between Two World Wars] Absence of government; lawlessness — 无政府状态; 混乱; and Simon the visionaryvisionary: Someone who has visions; a seer — 有远见者；预见者, almost sacrificialsacrificial: Relating to sacrifice — 献祭的；与祭祀有关的 figure who senses that the island's evil comes from inside the boys themselves. Golding's small island has always functioned as a microcosm of something larger.
Tim Kendall, Professor of English Literature at Exeter and editor of William Golding: The Faber Letters, argues that the novel began as a much more specific creature. The early manuscriptmanuscript: an author's original text of a book or article before publication; a handwritten document — 手稿；原稿；手抄本, he notes, opens as a World War Three: an imagined third world war (the book was conceived during fears of nuclear conflict in the 1950s) — 第三次世界大战 novel: the boys are being evacuatedevacuate: To move people from a dangerous place to a safe location. — 疏散；撤离；转移 from a nuclear age: the historical era after the atomic bomb, when nuclear weapons shaped global politics — 核时代 conflict, and a deleted passage describes the mushroom cloud: the cloud shape made by a nuclear explosion — 蘑菇云 rising behind their plane. That imageimage: Something mapped to by a function — 像;映像, Kendall says, hammers home: drives a point in forcefully so it cannot be missed — 强调到位；让人印象深刻 Golding's central ironyirony: a state of affairs or an event that seems contradictory to what one expects, or the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning — 讽刺；反语: on the island, the boys repeat in miniatureminiature: Greatly diminished size or form; reduced scale — 缩小尺寸 what the adults are doing on a planetaryplanetary: Of, or relating to the whole Earth; global — 全球性的；全球范围的 scale. In the published text only one phrase, the Reds: Cold War-era slang for the Soviets and communists — “红色分子”（冷战时期对苏联人/共产党人的俗称）, gestures at the Cold War: the long political standoff between the US-led West and the Soviet Union, roughly 1947 to 1991 — 冷战 that framed the writing. That deliberate vagueness is, paradoxicallyparadoxically: In a paradoxical manner; so as to create a paradox — 矛盾地, what has secured the novel's universalityuniversality: The property of being universal, common to all members of a class — 普遍性；通用性.
Each generation has found a different door into the book. Judy Carver, Golding's daughter, recalls that early readers treated Simon as a Christ figure: a character in a story whose role mirrors Jesus Christ: innocent, suffering, sacrificed — 基督式人物（殉道形象） and read the novel in religious terms. More recently, she observes, the environmental angle has come to the fore: become prominent or important in attention — 凸显出来；占据中心位置, prompted by the boys' burningburning: A fire — 火灾 of the island. Today, the rise of autocraticautocratic: Of or pertaining to the manner of an autocrat — 专横的；独断的 rulers makes Jack the obvious mirror, and the rules of warfarewarfare: the activity of fighting a war, especially using particular methods or weapons — 战争；作战；冲突 and of fair trial, Carver suggests, sit on a knife edge: a state of dangerous balance where things could collapse at any moment — 千钧一发. She is careful to call it anachronisticanachronistic: Erroneous in date; containing an anachronism; in a wrong time; not applicable to or not appropriate for the time — 时代错误的；不合时宜的 to claim Golding wrote a book about masculinity, even if a sensitive reader can extract that reading. A novel, her father came to believe, passes generation by generation into its readers' hands.
Thorne's adaptationadaptation: The process of adjusting to new conditions, or a version of a work modified for a different medium — 适应；改编；改编作品 mines the book for nuancesnuance: Subtlety or fine detail — 微妙之处；细节 that schoolroom readings tend to flattenflatten: To make vapid or insipid; to render stale — 淡化；使失去层次. As a child, he says, he simply despiseddespise: to disregard or ignore — 无视；不屑一顾 Jack; rereadingreread: to read again — 重读 him as an adult, he found a portrait far more tender than expected. Jack's destruction, Thorne argues, is not the work of a black heart but the slow accumulationaccumulation: The process or result of gradually gathering an increasing amount of something — 积累；积聚；堆积物 of small, frightened decisions made to keep authority intactintact: not damaged or impaired; remaining complete and whole — 完整的；未受损的. The episode told from Jack's point of view shows him as a lonely boy whose hunger for power is partly bravado, a performance designed to hide his fear from himself.
Where Golding watched boys who had absorbed the traumatrauma: a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, or physical injury — 创伤；心理创伤 of their fathers' war and were playing out: acting out or living through (a pattern, role, or conflict) — 重现；演绎 the way they had been socialisedsocialise: To instruct somebody, usually subconsciously, in the etiquette of a society — 使社会化；潜移默化地教化, Thorne sees a present that is just as fraught for young men. The phrase toxic masculinity: harmful traditional male behaviours such as dominance, aggression, or emotional suppression — 有毒的男性气质, he notes, has become so commonplace that boys can no longer hear the second word without the first; for a teenager trying to work out how to be male, that is genuinely terrifying. Kendall reads Golding's all-male island, more soberlysoberly: In a sober manner; temperately; coolly; calmly; gravely; seriously — 冷静地；严肃地, as the 1950s power structure writ small: the same thing shown in miniature; a small-scale version of something bigger — 缩影；小小一版的: leaders of the world were men, so leaders on the island had to be boys. Thorne's eloquent flashbacks refuse the simplisticsimplistic: Overly simple — 过于简单化的 move of blaming distant fathers for social dysfunctiondysfunction: A failure to function in an expected or complete manner. Usually refers to a disorder in a bodily organ (e.g. erectile dysfunction), a mental disorder, or the improper behavior of a social group — 功能障碍；失调; Jack and Simon both have absentabsent: Not present in a place or not existing in something. — 缺席的；不存在的 fathers, yet walk in opposite moral directions. The book's title, he worries, has been reducedreduced: To lose weight — 减肥 to a shorthand, summoned whenever commentatorscommentator: A person who comments on events, especially on television, radio, or in newspapers; an analyst or critic. — 评论员；解说员 announce another Lord of the Flies moment: a moment when society or a group seems to break down into chaos and cruelty — “蝇王时刻”——社会/群体崩坏的瞬间. The novel deserves better, because what Golding caught in those frightened, ordinary boys is still, unbearably, true.
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
When Tim Kendall observes that the manuscript opens as a World War Three novel and that the published text retains only the phrase "the Reds," he is suggesting that:
- 02
Thorne calls his portrait of Jack "more tender" than the version he encountered as a child. The article uses this contrast to show that:
- 03
Carver calls it "anachronistic" to claim Golding wrote a book about masculinity, yet she also concedes that a sensitive reader can extract that reading. Together, these two moves imply that:
- 04
The article argues that Lord of the Flies has become more, not less, urgent over seventy years. Using at least two specific pieces of evidence from the text (a quotation, a critic's interpretation, or a structural choice in Thorne's adaptation), evaluate this claim. Is the novel genuinely more relevant today, or has the public simply become better at finding crises that fit its title?
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
Thorne avoids the phrase toxic masculinity, while Carver calls it anachronistic to read Golding as writing about masculinity at all. Yet the new adaptation foregrounds masculinity as a theme. Construct an argument that explains how all three positions can be coherent at once.
Suggested length: ~100 words
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
When Tim Kendall observes that the manuscript opens as a World War Three novel and that the published text retains only the phrase "the Reds," he is suggesting that:
- 02
Thorne calls his portrait of Jack "more tender" than the version he encountered as a child. The article uses this contrast to show that:
- 03
Carver calls it "anachronistic" to claim Golding wrote a book about masculinity, yet she also concedes that a sensitive reader can extract that reading. Together, these two moves imply that:
- 04
The article argues that Lord of the Flies has become more, not less, urgent over seventy years. Using at least two specific pieces of evidence from the text (a quotation, a critic's interpretation, or a structural choice in Thorne's adaptation), evaluate this claim. Is the novel genuinely more relevant today, or has the public simply become better at finding crises that fit its title?
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
Thorne avoids the phrase toxic masculinity, while Carver calls it anachronistic to read Golding as writing about masculinity at all. Yet the new adaptation foregrounds masculinity as a theme. Construct an argument that explains how all three positions can be coherent at once.
Suggested length: ~100 words