Lord of the Flies at 70: how a classic was reimagined as a graphic novel

Like many Dutch teenagers – like many teenagers, full stop – Aimée de Jongh first read Lord of the Flies at school. She was 14 and in an English lesson when she found herself irresistibly drawn to this ostensibly rather British book about a group of schoolboys marooned on a remote Pacific island after a plane crash. “Fourteen is an interesting age,” she says. “I was still a kid, but I thought of myself as an adult. What I liked was their independence. They were free. They had no parents to tell them what to do.” She found that she could easily picture the world William Golding had created, for all that she’d “never been anywhere hotter than Italy”. It was a matter then, as now, of contrasts. “It’s set on a brightly coloured tropical island, like [the 1980 film] The Blue Lagoon or something. But the boys are wild and dirty. They’re a bit animalistic: they have long hair, they’re running around. They’re dark.” The book became her favourite novel and has remained so ever since.

Ten years ago, De Jongh, a cartoonist, illustrator and animator, was casting around for an idea for her first book. “I’d done a comic strip in a newspaper and I wanted to move on to graphic novels,” she tells me. “But I was scared. I’d never written a book before, and I thought: ‘Maybe an adaptation is a good way to start.’” Inquiries were made. Might Faber, Golding’s publisher, allow her to turn his celebrated novel into a long-form comic? But the answer was no: the rights were not available. De Jongh had to be content with giving two characters in a story she went on to write herself the names Ralph and Simon (after two boys in Lord of the Flies). Three years later, though, she tried again, only to be knocked back for a second time. “I gave up then. I told myself: ‘OK, this will probably never happen.’”

Two years ago, however, an email arrived out of the blue. In 2024, Lord of the Flies would be 70 years old. Faber and the Golding estate wanted to mark this anniversary with a new graphic adaptation, one that might bring the book to a new generation. Was she still interested? “I was told I would have to pitch [for the commission]; other writers and artists would be doing the same.” Had they, though, been preparing for this very moment for more than a decade? Perhaps not. “Luckily, I was the one who got through … ” And now the project is finished. Lord of the Flies: The Graphic Novel will be published next month, at which point it will join a long line of previous adaptations that includes two films (it was directed, most famously, by Peter Brook in 1963), a stage version by Nigel Williams for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a BBC radio dramatisation narrated by Ruth Wilson and a ballet produced by Matthew Bourne (Jack Thorne is also working on the first-ever television adaptation for the BBC).

Is De Jongh nervous about its reception? Of course she is. Few novels are better known or read more widely than Lord of the Flies, which has been translated into more than 30 languages. And as she also points out, she didn’t grow up in England; her upbringing could not have been more different from Golding’s. “I worked on it for two years, and every day of those two years there was a moment when I thought: ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Are people going to hate it? They have a vision of how they see the island and Ralph and Simon and Jack and Piggy, and here I come with mine’ – and that’s kind of definite in a book like this. Even now, I still sometimes wake up at night and think: ‘Ooh, that scene was so important – I decided not to use it and now people are going to hate me.’” On my screen – she is at home in Rotterdam, where she lives and works – De Jongh looks suddenly anxious, and I do feel for her. In my eyes, her adaptation is brilliant and thrilling. But Lord of the Flies is also the kind of book that feels as though it reached you intravenously, via some kind of mysterious literary drip. It enters us and never leaves, a boy with smashed spectacles forever in the back of our minds. Readers are proprietorial.

In putting her version together, De Jongh had all kinds of challenges. In the novel, the lost boys hold many meetings, using a conch shell to call everyone to order. “In the book, these really make sense,” she says. “It’s a kind of reflection of politicians, talking and talking and nothing getting done. But to draw that in a graphic novel would be very boring.” Cuts had to be made. Similarly, Golding makes a lot of the boys’ increasingly fevered imaginations. What is real and what is fanciful? Is there a beast in the forest or not? Again, this territory is risky if you’re working in pictures. Nothing must be too concrete; space must be left for the reader to make up their own mind. “If you’re reading a [regular] novel, you’re not actually seeing what’s described. But once I draw something, it’s there. That was kind of tricky. When I drew the airman [a dead fighter pilot floats down in a parachute on to the island, where his body rots], I struggled. The boys see a monster, but I couldn’t draw one: that would have been too confusing.”

But graphic novels do lend themselves to symbolism. “Lord of the Flies is an allegory,” says De Jongh. “Characters represent elements of society.” Certain colours and juxtapositions; images that share some of the iconography of religious art: she has deployed such things to great effect. After talking to Golding’s daughter, Judy, she also realised that it was in her power subtly to change the boys’ appearance over the course of the book. “She pointed out that her father’s vision was that the children grow older as you’re reading; they become more and more adult until – bam – in the final scene [spoiler: when they’re rescued], they’re kids again. This was definitely something I could do in a graphic novel. When you see Ralph walk through the jungle at the beginning, he’s quite childish. As the book goes on, he becomes more of a teenager: longer legs, longer arms. Then, in the final scene, he seems a couple of inches shorter again. I’m really happy with this. It’s subtle. You won’t really notice it. But the characters are changing and if you compare them at different moments, I’ve made them physically different, too.”

Debate has long raged over Golding’s view of humankind in the novel (this is one reason why it’s so perfect for study in school). Does his narrative embody pessimism, the sense that progress is a thin veneer hiding only savagery? Or should we take heart from the way that Ralph, the boys’ leader, resists the tribalism of his rival Jack? It may not surprise you to hear that De Jongh, whose influences include manga, belongs in the second camp: manga, after all, is often redemptive; her boys’ faces never lose their sweetness, not even when they’re striped with blood. But perhaps, too, she is right when she suggests the sheer renown of Lord of the Flies is at this point working against it. “When people say it’s about the primitive nature of man, I always wonder if they’ve actually read it,” she says. “Of course humanity has undercurrents that may not be very nice. But there is a way to stand up to these if we work together. It’s called civilisation and the book tells us that you can fight for it if you’re willing to put in the effort.”

Lord of the Flies was Golding’s first novel. As he later told it, he and his wife were sitting at either side of the fireplace one day when he said to her: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books?” His wife, Ann, replied that it was indeed a “first class” thought and that he should go ahead and do it – and thus he began work. His plot was inspired by a children’s adventure story of 1857 by RM Ballantyne, The Coral Island, in which three boys survive a shipwreck. But while that book (every home once had a copy) features good little children who face down both pirates and Polynesians (its themes have to do with the supposed civilising influence of Christianity and imperialism), the struggles of Golding’s characters – a fatal inversion – would be with one another and with themselves.

It all sounds rather straightforward, almost casual, put like this. Golding was apt, at least in public, to be modest when it came to his career; Judy recalls that after her father won the Nobel prize in Literature in 1983, he bumped into an old colleague in Salisbury, who congratulated him. “Well, the lightning had to strike somewhere,” he said. But in truth, Lord of the Flies involved all the usual writerly agonies. At the time, its author was still a schoolteacher. The novel was written, or so he recollected in his journal in November 1972, “in the interstices, crevices, cracks of a teacher’s life: and what is more, a teacher who had nowhere private to go”. Once it was complete, the novel was famously rejected by several publishers. When Faber finally accepted it, an editor new to the company, Charles Monteith, took a pretty hefty knife to the text. Among the things to get the chop was an early section that described a post-nuclear evacuation.

In the 70 years since its publication, Lord of the Flies has sold many millions of copies. In the UK, as in other countries around the world, it is a mainstay of the school curriculum – something that strikes me as slightly surprising given how many once beloved authors are now deemed to be too cruel, too politically incorrect, too potentially “triggering”. As Stephen King, one of its best-known admirers, notes in his introduction to a 2011 edition of the book, it is full of horror. “By the time I reached the last 70 pages … I understood not only that some boys might die, but that some would die,” he writes, remembering his first reading as a 12- or 13-year-old. “It was inevitable.” Even for those who do find optimism in it, the book is full of terror and pity – horrors its author saw no reason ever to renounce. Golding, after all, had commanded a landing craft in the Normandy landings on D-day in 1944; he had seen nuclear bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and he had read the first reports of the Nazis’ concentration camps. Where was hope in all this? “Twenty years after writing Lord of the Flies, I now see that Ralph who weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, was weeping for an age that is passing,” he wrote in his journal in June 1974. “Seen from the other side, the heart of man is not dark, but flame-lit and terrible. Perhaps then Jack and his hunters had the heart of the matter after all.”

Why has the novel endured? What makes it so indelible and so resonant? (It also, I should point out, has a particularly high number of self-proclaimed descendants, from Alex Garland’s bestseller The Beach to the reality TV show Survivor.) “In some senses, it’s obviously deeply ambiguous morally,” says Sam Leith, author of the forthcoming The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading. “But it’s also full of goodies and baddies, of people you’re rooting for and people you’re not rooting for. And it’s exciting, too.” It belongs loosely to a genre: Robinsonade, named after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe: shipwrecks, desert islands. “Except, unlike, say, The Swiss Family Robinson [an 1812 novel by Johann David Wyss about a family whose ship goes off course en route to Australia], where they build a nice hut and everything’s lovely, in Lord of the Flies, they just go bad. The moral calculus of adventure literature was always slightly orthogonal to the what-happens-next of it, but in Lord of the Flies, there’s a sort of energising quality there, too.”

The book plays with archetypes; it has aspects both of the fairytale (something bad in the forest) and of the fable (good versus evil). “It exists in a kind of liminal space, because of course it’s not really a children’s book,” says Leith. “I don’t think Golding thought his target audience was 13-year-olds, though the novel is quite simply written. But I’ve spent a lot of time with children’s books lately, and one standout quality of children’s literature, which Lord of the Flies shares, is that it encodes all these adult anxieties about what childhood means. There’s this sort of long swerve, depending on the religious temper of the country, between the idea in the 16th and 17th centuries that children were mired in original sin and literature should scare the shit out of them so they convert to Christianity and renounce playing knucklebones on the Sabbath or whatever, and the post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic sacralisation of children, which is totally the other way: Victorian children are suddenly all like [Frances Hodgson Burnett’s] Little Lord Fauntleroy – sort of pre-shriven: an innocent rebuke to the fallen adult world. In a way, Golding’s going back a bit to the first position. The book’s a kind of throwback.”

Golding’s daughter was nine when Lord of the Flies was published. “I was quite sentient, both before and after,” Judy tells me. “And I remember talking to my dad about the Arthur Ransome books [Swallows and Amazons etc], which as a family we all adored. I said: ‘You know, they never go to the lavatory, and I think that’s stupid,’ and my father said: ‘I do, too.’ There was a real intent there for him to make his novel as real as he could. He was a schoolmaster and that’s always what people talk about. But he also had two relatively small children, and I think that experience must have been very, very acute in his life. He was very much a hands-on father and I think the physicality of the children in the book came from our family life.” Like De Jongh, with whose adaptation she is thoroughly delighted (“My dad was an enormously visual writer and what she has done is just beautiful”), she has a more hopeful view of the book than Leith (and, frankly, me). “I think his heart was optimistic,” she says. But she also knows that he believed that once a book was out in the world, it takes on a life of its own. He used to tell her: “Whatever I say it means, your judgment is valid, too. Go away and have your own thoughts.”

She is talking to me via Zoom from her father’s study in her parents’ house in Cornwall. Nothing much has changed: here is Golding’s hat and here is his typewriter (I note that it faces, not the window, but the wall). His death at the age of 81 in 1993 was “a real disaster” for her, she says, and she misses him still: “He was very warm, slightly fumbling, and very active and clever. He knew everything: it was such a shock to realise that I couldn’t access all this information any more.” But she is lucky, too: he lives on in his books – and in Lord of the Flies, perhaps, most of all.

Judy once asked her father how he began writing a novel. He told her that while he usually had a couple of ideas, only one would “glow a bit” – and thus, it chose itself. It’s a good image – and Lord of the Flies continues to glow. If, as a notably postwar novel, it looks to the past, it’s also prescient. De Jongh believes it has an environmental message: her adaptation gives us red skies and scorched earth; hints (actually, more than hints) of a paradise that may soon be lost. And when I ask Judy what she hopes for the book’s next 70 years, she also talks about the planet. “I suppose, as a human being, I should say: ‘Well, I hope we will all become perfect and start being lovely to anyone.’ But I’d be very surprised if that happened.” She smiles. “What I do think, though, is that the environmental side of it is coming to the fore now. The pre-eminence of the fire [the boys having set one, it rapidly gets out of hand] in Aimée’s book is absolutely extraordinary, and I think it’s this element of my father’s novel that will start to seem more and more important in the future. We’re beginning to see now that we can’t mine the Earth for ever.”

• Lord of the Flies: The Graphic Novel by William Golding, adapted and illustrated by Aimée de Jongh, is published on 12 September by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Quotations from the journal of William Golding. Copyright @ William Golding Ltd. All rights reserved

• An exhibition marking 70 years of Lord of the Flies can be seen at the Gallery, the Bindery, 51-53 Hatton Garden, London, 11-25 September