Tag: William Golding

The Real Lord Of The Flies

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I awoke this morning to discover I had been sent the same link to an article by two different people. Interestingly enough they both share the same birthday just to add an extra layer of intrigue. This then is an article in the Guardian about ‘the real Lord Of The Flies‘; as they describe the story of six boys in the 1970s who found themselves stranded on a small island off Tonga for eighteen months. Incidentally I mentioned William Golding, the author of the dystopian novel that inspired the article, just the other day when I discussed one of his plays. The Lord Of The Flies is a great story, and like others I found his ability to get inside the psyche of these boys and explore the depths of human behaviour remarkable. It helped he was a Headmaster at a school, and according to this article a depressed alcoholic who sometimes beat his own kids. It suddenly becomes clearer why he had such little faith in the fictional children he created working together towards any kind of positive outcome. They really were the naughty little archetypal child of his time, this being the 1950s.

The article is quite interesting though because it raises the prospect that in fact the inevitable outcome of such a scenario is not death and destruction as these kids from the real version proved. Over the course of their eighteen stranded months they managed to exist in their own structured, disciplined and harmonious little world. They worked together and despite some serious incidents managed to all survive intact and healthy. The article is adapted from a new book by Rutger Bregman called Humankind, he previously wrote the relatively well known Utopia For Realists which I haven’t read but I hear is very good. He is attempting to change the narrative to one that shows “how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other” than the tired old one which convinces us we’re a destructive animal destined to ultimately destroy ourselves. There are and continue to be many stories out there of us working together when required, and the fact we have survived this far shows we must have been and still are capable of this cooperation.

It is important to mention though that clearly society is full of psychopaths and all it would take is for one person in the group to adopt that position for events to take another turn, as Lord Of The Flies demonstrates. In many cases then it turns out luck plays a defining role, the luck of who else you would find yourself stranded with. Perhaps if we knew a little more about how to handle such situations, to resolve a destructive element, we may be a little better prepared but how to do that is beyond my limited knowledge. Still narratives clearly can and need to be redrawn if we are ever to come together and survive as a species to benefit of all life on earth. Perhaps it’s time to see whether we can feasibly translate one of these micro examples onto the world at large.

BR#4 – The Brass Butterfly

Hamar Williams1 Comment

I should start calling these ‘Play Reviews’ and not Book Reviews’ as this is my second one for a play and considering the total is now four, that’s a good half and half. Today then it’s The Brass Butterfly by William Golding. I have previous with William Golding as I recently attempted to read his third novel Pincher Martin; about a sole survivor of a torpedoed naval vessel. He washes ashore on an island and seemingly expresses every thought ever made; which may have been a wonderful recounting of a mans mind in an extreme and desperate moment of survival but seemed far too descriptive and hard to follow that I gave up on chapter three unsure of what was going on. He did though win the Nobel Prize for literature so it could be more about my ability to read than his ability to write. Having written Lord Of The Flies, which is easily his most famous and successful novel and far more accessible than Pincher Martin, an inability to grasp his third novel may be my loss over his.

The Brass Butterfly though is the only play of his I have read and I enjoyed it. It’s a comedy, and it’s quite an easy simple one at that. Set in the Third Century AD the story follows an Emperor, his grandson, his General and heir apparent, an inventor and the inventors sister. It follows a common theme of idiots with power and an inventor trying to achieve things despite them. While he comes up with pressure from steam, and therefore a ship faster than any other, as well as a pressure bomb that can be thrown from a catapult like a grenade, the Emperor is only interested in the possibilities of experiencing a pressure cooker and the food it can produce. Eventually the sister saves the day and at the end it turns out the old Emperor is far wiser than appears throughout the story. There were times I thought of Astrix, but that is probably only because the General is called Postumus. And times the story reminded me of a Tom Sharpe novel but without the sex and nudity. It was written in 1958 and there was something of that time in the humour, hence the Tom Sharpe connection in my mind. I can imagine my father enjoying the story.

Ultimately a simply and easy play. They don’t all have to be intense and painful to experience. I shall leave you though with a quote from the Emperor which had little to do with the storyline but is worth repeating;

“You work among perfect elements, and therefore politically you are an idealist. There will always be slaves, though the name may change. What is slavery but the domination of the weak by the strong? How can you make them equal? Or are you fool enough to believe we are born equal?”