Of its Time, yet Classic 
 I chose to reread Golding's debut novel of 1954 directly after Daniel Defoe's 
 Robinson Crusoe 
 of 1719, since in many ways Golding was writing an anti-Crusoe. Defoe's island castaway works over several decades to impose a personal civilization upon chaos, which eventually permits him to exert the rule of law over savages and mutineers. Golding's English schoolboys, survivors of a Pacific plane crash, appear in school blazers and establish laws among themselves immediately, but within months they will have descended to savagery, superstition, and murder. The book has been hailed as a classic for its depiction of the darker sides of human nature; Time called it "the most influential novel since Salinger's Catcher In The Rye" (though it is infinitely more savage). Rereading it now, however, I was especially struck by how much it belongs to its period and nation. 
 I first read the book in 1955, when I was in school myself and scarcely older than the oldest boys on the island. It rang immediately true, not only to the lives we were leading in our boarding schools, but as a subversion of the long tradition of English school stories on which we had been raised. The character of the fair-haired Ralph, for instance, the natural leader who effortlessly organizes the younger boys by his charismatic embodiment of team spirit and quiet competence, was familiar both in fiction and in our lives. Equally familiar was the figure of Piggy, the overweight, asthmatic, astigmatic butt of everyone's jokes and not always gentle bullying; we would laugh at such characters in the person of a Billy Bunter in fiction, but we knew them also in life. Those of us who had been among either the tormentors or the tormented (and often both), knew at first hand something of the darkness of schoolboy nature that the stories rarely told, but Golding did. 
 Golding is purposely vague about the nature of the disaster that has led the boys to the island. Some sort of war is raging; there is talk of atomic weapons, and parents who may already be dead; the airlift is an updated version of the trains that had evacuated schoolchildren from London in 1940 at the start of the Blitz. [The device enables Golding to have the children come from different schools so there is no built-in authority structure--with the exception of a group of choirboys who give their own leader, Jack, a private army to back his eventual bid for power.] This is very clearly a Cold War novel, written at a time of shifting political power, when even survival was in question. Golding wrote that "the shape of a society must depend upon the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." The war between Capitalism and Communism was still being fought, but his own country, Britain, was declining as a major power. "We're English, and the English are best at everything," one of the characters exclaims, "so we've got to do the right things." We would not have questioned these sentiments for a moment when we first read them. But the speaker, Jack, turns out to be the villain of the tale, and the first to betray his own ideals. Golding's world will not be held together by patriotic shibboleths, and the moral war between principle and pragmatism has no certain winner. Like George Orwell's fable Animal Farm, published only nine years earlier, Lord Of The Flies is an object lesson in political ethics, but it adds a personal component that takes it even deeper.