I didn’t get a chance to read William Golding’s famous first novel in high school. I guess Mr. Secrest – or who ever my grade 8 English teacher was back then – chose Charlotte’s Web or The Outsiders instead. This book is not an easy read. It’s easy enough to get through the plot of this book but I can just imagine all the difficult and inquisitive questions that an English teacher could come up with about this book. One question, for example: The conch in this novel obviously plays the part of symbolizing how delicate and fleeting true power is for people in competition for ruling control. However, what is Mr. Golding trying to symbolize with the pink granite that “thrust up uncompromisingly through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high”? Think of all the delicate answers you might get from the boys in the class. Obviously, the book is an amazing study of power and development (or de-development) of civilization with the absence of authority and the defying of rules but still it seems like a book that I’ve read before. Can anyone say William Butler’s “The Butterfly Revolution”? It’s a good book and I enjoyed the ideas it produces and the thinking it provoked. However, if I was 13 – or however old you are when you read this in school – the writing style would have bored me to death. Based during the Second World War and written in English from that time period, I can totally understand how students that have to read this book think it’s boring. I stole my copy from school. Rating: 4/5. (225 pages. Total for the year: 4301 pages)
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