We’ve Become Too Savage for ‘Lord of the Flies’

 

 "Not everyone has read “Lord of the Flies,” but thanks to the novel’s million descendants, everyone has encountered the novel’s core conceits and feral mythology, generic monuments that loom titanic over the psycho-oceanography of the zeitgeist.

Golding’s novel might feel somewhat dated, but his delirious beast-haunted island, in shattered refracted form, sure as hell does not. And many of these newly risen Hispaniolas of depravity have kept up with our rising incivility, our deepening tribalism, our social media derangements.

So could a talent as massive as Mr. Thorne make Golding’s island haunt and disturb when we live in a society that isn’t just obsessed with brutality, it almost is brutality?"

read review by Junot Diaz

 We’ve Become Too Savage for ‘Lord of the Flies’