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 rancorous world. On the surface its premise is a boys' adventure: a plane crash, a , no adults, and a savage descent into violence. Yet this 20th-Century classic refuses to age. Stephen King calls it foundational; Matthew Bourne has staged it as dance; The Simpsons ran it as parody; Yellowjackets is, in effect, its female knockoff. Now Jack Thorne, writer of the megahit Adolescence, has adapted it for Netflix because, he tells the BBC, the resonance is unmistakable: today's online life, he argues, is a place where it is easier to disparage 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 . Piggy is the bullied, bespectacled thinker; Ralph the would-be civic leader who insists on rules; Jack his power-hungry rival, who marches the others into anarchy; and Simon the visionary, almost sacrificial 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 manuscript, he notes, opens as a novel: the boys are being evacuated from a conflict, and a deleted passage describes the rising behind their plane. That image, Kendall says, Golding's central irony: on the island, the boys repeat in miniature what the adults are doing on a planetary scale. In the published text only one phrase, , gestures at the that framed the writing. That deliberate vagueness is, paradoxically, what has secured the novel's universality.
Each generation has found a different door into the book. Judy Carver, Golding's daughter, recalls that early readers treated Simon as a and read the novel in religious terms. More recently, she observes, the environmental angle has , prompted by the boys' burning of the island. Today, the rise of autocratic rulers makes Jack the obvious mirror, and the rules of warfare and of fair trial, Carver suggests, sit on a . She is careful to call it anachronistic 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 adaptation mines the book for nuances that schoolroom readings tend to flatten. As a child, he says, he simply despised Jack; rereading 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 accumulation of small, frightened decisions made to keep authority intact. 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 trauma of their fathers' war and were the way they had been socialised, Thorne sees a present that is just as fraught for young men. The phrase , 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 soberly, as the 1950s power structure : leaders of the world were men, so leaders on the island had to be boys. Thorne's eloquent flashbacks refuse the simplistic move of blaming distant fathers for social dysfunction; Jack and Simon both have absent fathers, yet walk in opposite moral directions. The book's title, he worries, has been reduced to a shorthand, summoned whenever commentators announce another . 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 rancorous world. On the surface its premise is a boys' adventure: a plane crash, a , no adults, and a savage descent into violence. Yet this 20th-Century classic refuses to age. Stephen King calls it foundational; Matthew Bourne has staged it as dance; The Simpsons ran it as parody; Yellowjackets is, in effect, its female knockoff. Now Jack Thorne, writer of the megahit Adolescence, has adapted it for Netflix because, he tells the BBC, the resonance is unmistakable: today's online life, he argues, is a place where it is easier to disparage 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 . Piggy is the bullied, bespectacled thinker; Ralph the would-be civic leader who insists on rules; Jack his power-hungry rival, who marches the others into anarchy; and Simon the visionary, almost sacrificial 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 manuscript, he notes, opens as a novel: the boys are being evacuated from a conflict, and a deleted passage describes the rising behind their plane. That image, Kendall says, Golding's central irony: on the island, the boys repeat in miniature what the adults are doing on a planetary scale. In the published text only one phrase, , gestures at the that framed the writing. That deliberate vagueness is, paradoxically, what has secured the novel's universality.
Each generation has found a different door into the book. Judy Carver, Golding's daughter, recalls that early readers treated Simon as a and read the novel in religious terms. More recently, she observes, the environmental angle has , prompted by the boys' burning of the island. Today, the rise of autocratic rulers makes Jack the obvious mirror, and the rules of warfare and of fair trial, Carver suggests, sit on a . She is careful to call it anachronistic 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 adaptation mines the book for nuances that schoolroom readings tend to flatten. As a child, he says, he simply despised Jack; rereading 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 accumulation of small, frightened decisions made to keep authority intact. 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 trauma of their fathers' war and were the way they had been socialised, Thorne sees a present that is just as fraught for young men. The phrase , 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 soberly, as the 1950s power structure : leaders of the world were men, so leaders on the island had to be boys. Thorne's eloquent flashbacks refuse the simplistic move of blaming distant fathers for social dysfunction; Jack and Simon both have absent fathers, yet walk in opposite moral directions. The book's title, he worries, has been reduced to a shorthand, summoned whenever commentators announce another . 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