История запрещенных книг.
A bestseller in the 1950s and ’60s, The Lord of the Flies, by British author William Golding, is the story of a group of schoolboys marooned by a plane crash on a desert island. The oldest, Ralph, initially takes the lead and tries to organize the group as a benign, democratic society, but he is no match for a savage undertow that emerges, represented by the dictatorial Jack, his rival. Under Jack’s leadership, bloodthirsty rites emerge, and two of the boys are murdered. The group is only rescued — from itself, above all — by the arrival of a naval officer.
The book’s depiction of the boys’ descent into lawlessness and brutality makes for disturbing reading, which not everyone thought suitable for children, even though the book is a popular set text in schools. Over the decades, there have been many attempts to have it banned from schools and libraries. In 1981, for example, it was challenged in a high school in South Dakota on the grounds that it suggested humans were little better than animals. In Canada, in 1988, the Toronto Board of Education condemned its representation of the island’s Indigenous inhabitants and advised schools to withdraw it.
The novel reflects racist ideologies common in the mid-1950s, and Golding clearly had in mind the children’s classic The Coral Island (1857), by R.M. Ballantyne, in which a group of children take over a Pacific island, face down pirates and hostile locals, and claim the island for Queen Victoria. Part of Golding’s intention was to question the glib expectations of human nature and society represented in such stories.
