William Golding
Il Signore delle Mosche

Finally, I read a book that I didn't like.

I know, strange words and perhaps, for some, absurd for the masterpiece by William Golding, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. I say finally because it had been a while since I had read only either good books or absolute masterpieces (for those interested, I am available to provide a list of both). I was starting to worry about my critical judgment, my ability to understand, my extreme ease of adaptation.

"Lord of the Flies" did not appeal to me, not because of the story the author tells, but especially because of how it is told. The reading does not flow, there is a lack of fluidity in the action and the glue between many scenes. I struggled a lot to enter the closed and isolated world of the group of children/teenagers who, surviving a plane crash during a phantom war, manage to save themselves on a warm tropical island. Alone, without the presence of adults, the group tries to reorganize to meet the basic primary needs and to find a means of salvation. It will all be in vain; the "primitive" society of youngsters will crumble into a wild war between enemy clans. Their little world will become the war ground like the one the adults were fighting on a global scale.

The innocence of the children is raped by the seed of evil and violence that grows, chapter after chapter, in their souls; cruelty is inherent in their every action, blood and death brutally make their entrance into the story. The supernatural creeps in, the fear of the "beast," Beelzebub embodied in the pig's head impaled on a stick in the middle of a clearing in the tropical forest. Democracy, as often happens, is beautiful in words but in fact is surpassed by the will to dominate that manifests in the fundamental figures of Ralph (the democrat) and Jack (the dictator).

"Lord of the Flies" is a book that completely overwhelmed me. I have always associated it with a "children's classic," a "high school" read. I found myself holding a deeply sociological and anthropological novel, pessimistic and almost apocalyptic in its conclusion. Man is irrational, instinctive, and ferocious like the primitive who, coming out of his cave shelter, went hunting to procure food.

A brutal book where the final lifeline is too timid and isolated to redeem from sin and to rescue the souls indelibly stained with blood. The book perhaps shows its age, taking off only in the last chapters, in the frightening "final solution," in the indiscriminate hunt.

Good and evil confront each other, as they always have and always will. Who will be the winner is easy, alas, to imagine.