Eventually, and rather implausibly, the boys help some missionaries to convert the native islanders to Christianity.īallantyne had researched the South Seas carefully before writing.
When dark-skinned “savages” come to the island, the three boys show their British pluck by defending a (slightly lighter-skinned) woman from a ferocious male, whose utter savagery is demonstrated when he dashes out the brains of a baby. Writing a hundred years earlier, Ballantyne lands his three young sailors, Jack, Ralph and Peterkin on an island where they have to struggle for existence, and the best chapters of the book describe them discovering foodstuffs, building shelters and so on, in the spirit of Robinson Crusoe. This mystery needs investigating.Īs every GCSE student ought to know, Lord of the Flies is a book that takes pot-shots at a sitting target – R.M.Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, a book decidedly out of fashion even when Golding published in the nineteen-fifties. Golding doesn’t tell us where it has come from. By chapter eight, some of the boys have magically acquired green paint. In chapter four, Golding tells us that Jack paints himself with red and white clay and draws black lines with a charcoal stick, but says longingly, “If only I’d some green,” because that would be the best colour for camouflage when pig-hunting. The first question is: where do they get their green face paint from? Yet this is an image that raises one or two questions of a different type from the ones they set on the exam papers. The book has been a predictable fixture on the English Literature syllabus for decades. It’s one of the iconic images of twentieth century literature, known to anyone who takes fiction seriously, and to a vast number of ex-GCSE students, for some of whom Lord of the Flies has been the only grown-up novel they have ever read. Demoniac figures with faces of white and red and green rushed out howling… the tallest of them, stark naked save for paint and a belt, was Jack” “ The forest near them burst into uproar. (An essay that’s away from my usual topics, nothing to do with the Great War.
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