Bobby and I have many thematic ideas for this podcast and one of them is revisiting books we read at school and loved/ loathed/ didn’t understand. We did Wuthering Heights (nb. this will take you to your podcast app, as this was before we moved the pod exclusively behind the B+B paywall) which I studied at school and hated, we’re debating whether or not to do Animal Farm, and now we’re tackling Lord of the Flies, published by William Golding in 1954 (having been rejected by numerous publishers for several years.)
Bobby never studied it, and I’m pretty sure I studied it in Year 8, aged 12, rather than at GCSE (to deter us from going off the rails…? One can only wonder) but both of us came to it with the same haunting ditty ringing in our ears: KILL THE PIG. Oh, Piggy. Piggy! But it turns out Piggy isn’t the one whose hunted. Isn’t it funny what the mind retains?
As ever, Book Chat is spoiler heavy (happy) so don’t listen to this if you don’t want to know the plot. Although if you’re British, I imagine you will already know the plot, as Golding’s debut novel is one of the most canonical British books of all time. It’s about a bunch of small children, ranging from 12 (the bigguns) and 6 (the littluns), air-wrecked on a tropical island, where they jostle for authority, fear the big mysterious beasties that visit during the storms, and over time, descend into savagery. It’s not a remotely easy read (I kept thinking of my 5-year-old when reading the descriptions of the littluns, feasting on berries all day and curling up like puppies at night) beautifully written.
