I'm not sure it's an entire counter-argument
It's all over the place, that thing about 'it doesn't have to be Lord of the Flies if you have young boys marooned on a desert island':
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
There were six of them and they were already a group. Whereas what you had in Golding's book - and I'm prepared to concede that that was at least to some extent about his own demons - there were different groups and different ages and a whole lot of factors that might militate against cohesion. And of course there were - even if they were ineffectual - characters who didn't buy into the aggression and violence.
Perhaps what's actually wrong is people taking LofF as deep statement about the human condition rather than a narrative about boys of a particular background at a particular period, filtered through the consciousness of somebody who taught in a boys' school and (I have a recollection of reading somewhere) hated it?
Not to mention reacting against a whole swathe of Boy's Own Adventure-y narratives about Coral Islands, in which any threat came from cannibals without rather than dark forces within.
***
On Edens, however, this is rather lovely: Lizards, vines, papayas: working solo in the Eden Project during lockdown.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3076471.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.