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Title: Wasted on schoolkids
Review: William Golding's first novel has been read, most probably by most people, when they were at school as Lord of the Flies has long been a staple text of GCSE English classes. As a result many people read it at an age where they are filleting its pages for 'symbols' to be reprocessed in exam answers, and sniggering at innuendos such as blowing the conch.All of which is a shame, as Lord of the Flies articulates a theme of the innate savage just under the surface of civilized man. A trope that has spawned a thousand imitators in films and books since, but Golding's novel was probably the first. Beginning as a deceptively simple fable about some well educated British schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash, the allegorical story traces their descent into frenzied barbarisim.Golding himself was a schoolmaster for a number of years, and he knows exactly what boys are like. If they are not strictly regulated and controlled, chaos is the inevitable result.
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