Review - Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's more a 3 and a half, but I couldn't quite push this one to a 4 star rating.

The ending of Lord of the Flies makes up for a lot of the book - great ending, but otherwise my overall feeling is that it is a peculiar book. I'm surprised this is a book studied in schools. Why? It's not well written - I struggled to work out who was speaking sometimes and sentences were stilted and description was unclear; how do you lift 'up' a cheek flap to see through a swollen eye? Is it for the storyline? One that I had heard raved about a lot, but was somewhat disappointing, and then quite gruesome, especially for school children to be reading or studying.

I had heard the group of children in Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome (No.3 - a favourite until Fury Road came along) were similar to those in Lord of the flies, but I couldn't relate the two at all.

I had expected much more: a much more developed sense of a society, but it was very primitive and slow moving. Maybe I need to remember it was written in 1954, and that these were sheltered children. Maybe I've been infected with the current modern view that everything should start with lots of action and not be a slow build to what is quite a big climax at the end. It's been a long time since I read something where I had only a couple of pages left but still didn't know how it was going to end. It was the saving grace of this book.

The description of the book in Wikipedia explains more than some of the description in the book about the events that take place in the book. I'm surprised this is an award winner, and considered good literature. It does not encourage me to read anything else by this author.

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