Writhing molluscs, furry caterpillars, flies seething over rotting flesh – from the close-up shots alone, you know quite soon into Lord of the Flies that you’re dealing with a state of nature. Which makes sense: William Golding’s 1954 novel about young boys marooned on a tropical island, and therefore also this adaptation, probably represents the most popular retelling of the Hobbesian condition in English. As unlikely as it sounds, the bearded, billow-haired philosopher found a distant descendant in the bearded, billow-haired novelist. Life in Hobbes’s imagining was “nasty, brutish and short” – the same might serve as a description of Golding’s knee-socked 1950s schoolboys. Remove humans from their society, and you won’t find innocence, let alone goodness. You’ll only unleash the savage within.
Lord of the Flies lives in the classroom. That’s where Golding wrote it, working as a teacher after the Second World War and scribbling in exercise books, using the novel to work through some rough conclusions about human nature picked up from a pretty rough war. (“Man produces evil as a bee produces honey,” he later wrote.) It’s not exactly playground stuff, but the classroom is where we’ve kept it, feeding it to generations of children.
This adaptation, too, sniffs of didacticism. Scripted by Jack Thorne, currently enthroned as the conscience of a gender after the success of Adolescence, this series fits into his canon of increasing pessimism about teenage boys. We’ve had the Class C drug addicts (Skins), we’ve had a far-right inductee (This is England) and we’ve had the manosphere murderer. May as well have a punt at the darkness that vexes all men.
Thorne’s story is almost exactly Golding’s. Evacuating children from a nameless war, a plane crashes on an unidentified island. Ralph emerges as their leader – he can swim well, and athleticism is basically a system of government among boys of a certain age. But there’s quickly feuding in the ranks. The signal fire, Ralph’s first innovation, almost burns down the island and then goes out when a ship finally passes. Jack, head of the school choir which rebrands as the island’s “hunters”, challenges Ralph’s leadership. Piggy, the fat, clever kid with glasses, keeps wailing about building shelters and toilets like some enlightened pubescent despot, losing the group’s respect. There’s talk of a beast in the jungle, a rumour which infects the mind of the strange, sensitive choirboy, Simon.
The original book deals in obvious metaphor; there’s a hell of a lot of fruit on this apparently paradisal island, and that spectral beast is first glimpsed as a “snake-thing”. The plot is willed on by the force of allegory alone. What little context Golding intended to provide (a nuclear war backdrop, for instance) was cut by his editor, and the foreshadowing and symmetry is heavy, redolent of a Biblical parable. Thorne’s break with Golding therefore comes with his attempt to probe his charges, to understand them as boys, not myth, giving us characters that are less fated than Golding’s.
There’s an effort to demonstrate that pain begets pain, and via flashbacks, we get the story of how Jack became bad, and Simon became sad. Jack: on the evacuation tarmac, without a mother to say goodbye, left pretending to the others that his father is a secret agent. And Simon: befriended by Jack in long holidays spent in isolation at boarding school, before being dropped in term time (there’s the slightest sense of boarding house romance around all this, what with the snatched looks between cassocked boys in the chancel, and later in the tender application of face paint).
Jack Thorne is no optimist. But Golding was far gloomier, putting thoughts of “mankind’s essential illness” into the minds of his child islanders. This isn’t to fault Thorne’s adaptation for inaccuracy. His interventions of character seem like necessary surgery, a rescue from the motiveless menace of Golding’s novel.
The goal of any adaptation must be to send viewers to the book. The show will do that well enough with its lush directing, its precocious performances and its unsettling score, shifting from sweet, sunny strings to a jagged discordant fiddle. But when those viewers get to the page, and remember the vicious story they read long ago, they might think again about why – however much sense it may make to grown-ups – we use this book to teach children about themselves.
[Further reading: The Beauty: if good looks could kill]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment