One day last week, I reread Lord of the Flies, which was assigned reading in high school. I always liked "children on their own, without grown-ups" adventure stories as a kid - The Boxcar Children, Five Children and It, the Narnia books, and the wonderful Far-Distant Oxus*. Those are happy-go-lucky stories, of course, and Lord of the Flies is really dark. But I still liked it.
The second time through, I particularly appreciated the writing. The descriptions of the tropical heat, the shimmering of the humidity on the beach, and the intense quality of the light, are so vivid. You really feel like you're there. Golding describes the beach as being "fledged with palm trees, their green feathers a hundred feet up in the air" coconuts being "skull-like", a wild sow "fringed with piglets," and those are such interesting, fresh words to use. Simon's encounter with the Beast is so spookily written you almost hear a hypnotic kind of drone in your ears as you read it. All of this is just icing on the cake, though, for the moral message the book is trying to get across, which is heavy enough to provide grist for any number of English class essays.
It's so much better than anything I think I could write. I could write something decorative and of interest to a few people, I think, but I'd have to really push myself to get the descriptions up to that calibre. And I just don't think I have it in me to write a "great" book that deals with human morality and society. Golding tosses it off like that's the whole point of writing. I'm awed.
* Far-Distant Oxus: No one has heard of this book, but it's really great. It's about six English children in the summer holidays riding their ponies around the countryside, totally unsupervised and having a glorious time. It's a good read by any account, but especially considering that it was written and illustrated by two girls who were 15 and 16 at the time of publication.
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