William Golding

As we said at the start, in 1979, this won the Booker Prize.

And it was an interesting year for that because the hot favourites originally were William Golding's Darkness Visible and V.S. Naipaul's Abend in the River.

I'm not sure Golding actually made the final short list, but the two literary giants, And no one had ever heard of Penelope Fitzgerald.

But the judges were split, and Offshore was kind of everyone's second choice.

For some odd reason, humans will value anything complicated and totally disregard anything made simple.

Author and speaker William Golding once said, the greatest ideas are the simple ones.

And that is so true.

There are many universal laws, but the one I will be talking about today is the law of reaping and sowing.

All right.

So the last two books out of the first round before we start getting into the real head-to-head will be the number two, which is coming in as the newest illustrated version of the classic William Golding book, The Lord of the Flies.

This one for best adaptation from another medium.

It was adapted by Amy Dijon and came out of Penguins Classics.

was actually chopped off.

It's recorded in Golding's archives, it's kept well among his papers, but the publishers made him chop it because they felt the book was too long and they didn't like the beginning of where things went.

But actually it puts the book in a lot of context.

So in the book, just in case you haven't read it, just quick summary, Group of boys end up on shore together.

Humans can be very savage to each other and children can be certainly savage to each other too.

Anyone who survived the middle school or junior high experience knows just how savage we can be to each other.

But the context that's missing from the book in the first quarter of it is these boys are being evacuated and you think it must be from some sort of natural disaster, but that's not what William Golding intended.

The first section of the book talks about the boys being evacuated from England because of a nuclear war.

Now, it was released in 1973.

It's a fantasy romance novel by William Golding? Goldman.

Golding? Goldman.

Goldman.

"Just a game," said Ralph uneasily.

That was William Golding's Lord of the Flies, published in September 1954.

That scene comes about halfway through the book, and it's when these boys, a group of British schoolboys who have been marooned on a desert island following a plane crash, are playing what appears to be a game.

It's quite obvious from that reading alone that it's much more than just a playground game.

He named it his book of the year and said it was beautifully written, tragic, and provocative.

Yeah, I mean, amazing reviews, and those were incredible accolades for a, basically a debut novel by a writer that nobody had ever heard of.

So there's a great biography of William Golding by John Carey.

He's one of my heroes, former professor of English at Oxford.

What happens when you take a group of people raised in that kind of strict orderly society, remove every single adult and strip away every single one of those civilized rules?

Well, you get William Golding's 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

You get a terrifying accelerated study in the absolute fragility of the social contract.

This book is a visceral gut punch.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I think that in a lot of ways, uh, you know, it's just, um, William Golding was very much interested in the fall of man as a theme.

Yes, clearly.

Um, and, and it, Lord of, it didn't end with Lord of the Flies.