This graphic novel adaptation of William Golding's classic, 'Lord of the Flies' was first published in 2024 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the original book and it serves as a powerful companion to it. It's been a long while since I've read that novel, but artist Aimée de Jongh claims that all the dialogue in this version is taken verbatim from the original and that rings true. What I should add to that is that there isn't a lot of dialogue. There's enough, to be sure, to get the story across, but de Jongh wisely keeps it to a bare minimum. The most powerful panels and pages are ones where nobody says a word.

Just in case you haven't encountered the story before, it's about a host of young English boys who become stranded on a deserted island. None of them are particularly old for children and the first thing they do is to simply have fun in the water, the novelty of their situation trumping any idea of the serious danger they're all in. It's Ralph who realises that first and brings them together, using a conch shell to summon them from wherever they happened to wash up on the island, so they can plan their next steps. He's quickly elected leader and the conch becomes a symbol of authority.

And so some structure is built. They figure out shelter and food and plan for rescue, lighting a fire and ensuring that it remains lit so that passing boats might notice it and thus them. However, it's not all as straightforward as that. Golding wrote 'Lord of the Flies' very deliberately as a counter to R. M. Ballantyne's 'The Coral Island', an 1857 children's novel that chronicled the adventures of a trio of English boys shipwrecked on a Polynesian island. Ballantyne's suggestion was that English boys would thrive on the challenge of such a situation, emphasising Victorian ideals of leadership, colonialism and civilising Christianity. Golding's take was that children would act very differently, devolving to a form of savagery, so that's what he wrote.

Ralph, the closest thing to a voice of reason in 'Lord of the Flies' is flawed, as we soon learn when he perpetuates the hated nickname of his first companion to the broader group. We thus come to know him as Piggy. Maybe Ralph learns from this and tries all the more to do the right thing, but he's countered by the growing impact of Jack Merridew, leader of the choir. He has his own clique, as we see when they come marching down the beach together to Ralph's original conch call, and he has his own agenda. He's left in charge of the signal fire but the first time a boat passes close to the island, he's let it go out, being far too busy hunting a pig. Over time, Jack gains the upper hand and the community does not benefit from it.

How far society devolves I'll let you discover for yourself, something you really should have done long ago. 'Lord of the Flies' was published in 1954. You've had plenty of time and many of you will have read it in school, as I believe I did for the first time. However, I will explain the title, which is meaningful in two ways. For one, it's the literal translation of Beelzebub, a common name for the devil. For another, it's the name of the sacrifice that the boys leave for the beast they believe is hiding somewhere on the island, waiting to prey upon them. It's the severed head of a pig, killed for food, that Jack mounts on a pole, in hope that the beast will accept it as a gift and thus leave them alone. It's a powerful symbol for how far they've already degenerated.

As you can imagine, a severed pig's head stuck onto a pole and attracting legions of flies is hardly a pleasant image and de Jongh doesn't flinch away from the darkness of Golding's novel. She has a fondness for full page panels when she feels the need to make something impactful, whether that be the rotting face of a fighter pilot whose corpse parachuted down onto the island or the bloody result of the dance of death lying face down in the tide. There are even scenes only horrific when seen in context, like a glimpse at the vastness of the ocean with no ship in sight. In isolation, that could be seen as soothing. In context, not at all.

There are a whole slew of full page panels during the finalé, as the mass hordes hunt Ralph onto the beach, where he trips in front of a naval officer who's just arrived. I could cite a dozen panels from earlier in the book as my favourites but these may be the most impactful, as the weight of everything done since their arrival on the island suddenly descends on every boy simultaneously.  De Jongh devotes a double page spread to the biting cynicism of the final moment, in which the officer, embarrassed by the warlike state of these boys, turns away from them to look at his large and horribly beweaponed cruiser, reminding us that the boys are only on the island because they were being evacuated during wartime.

While 'Lord of the Flies' is mostly remembered for its suggestion that young boys, left alone in a survival situation, wouldn't handle it anywhere near as well as their equivalents—who were also named Ralph, Jack and Simon—in 'The Coral Island', it's not all about them. It also suggests that this is inherent behaviour to all of mankind, not just to youth. Golding was a philosophy teacher, naturally searching for what makes us human, but he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy in World War II, personally commanding a landing craft in Normandy during D-Day. Even after that war ended, the Cold War took over. No wonder he was so pessimistic about the human race.

'Lord of the Flies' isn't particularly a book to enjoy; it's far more a book to make us think. This is a graphic novel, so has the benefit of pictures to aid us in that journey and de Jongh does a stellar job of translating it to this new medium. My Penguin edition is a lush one, in heavy hardback with full colour throughout. The format chosen is stocky, nine inches by seven, so de Jongh has plenty of opportunity for what we could call widescreen panels, aiding the cinematic impact of it all. The island setting plays wonderfully into that, as does her choice to use so many large panels.

If you haven't read the novel and aren't convinced that you want to dive into something cynically pessimistic about the human condition, then maybe you should start here. It's a great companion to the novel, but it would work very well as an introduction to it. Start with this and, if it speaks to you as effectively as the Lord of the Flies speaks to Simon, then follow up with Golding's novel. It's a book to stay with you, however long it's been since you've read it. It must be thirty years for me, but I've never forgotten the impact. Now that impact has faces. ~~ Hal C F Astell