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For a long time, I was too scared to read Lord of the Flies.
There was a simple reason for this. We had a copy in the house, the edition Faber printed to tie-in with the movie. This was yellow, with a reproduced film still on the cover.
Knowing nothing about the book, beyond the title, what it seemed to me to show was a young boy (about my age) dressed in rags, standing on a cliff top, with the most horribly deformed hand. It was large and round and knobbly and the boy seemed to need the other hand just to hold it up.
At the time, I thought this must have something to do with the ‘Flies’ of the title. Raised on Doctor Who, I assumed the Flies had somehow infected the boy with their particular lurgy, and that he was now metamorphosing into a mutoid.
I somehow transferred this into thinking that, if I picked up the book, the same thing would happen to me - the book would become my hand would become deformed.
Later on, when I'd overcome my fear and read it, I realised that, of course, the thing wasn’t a deformed hand but the shell which the shipwrecked boys use as a horn.
The experience of reading Lord of the Flies for the first time is similarly uncanny: we know all about it, and yet we don't know it at all; we’ve got it simultaneously right and wrong.
It has gone so far back into the collective unconscious that it seems an archetype. But it isn't. Nor is Treasure Island, nor Robinson Crusoe, nor even 'The Tempest'.
The archetype is located somewhere inside everyone. The archetype is the question: What would the world be like, if only I and my friends were left? (Another archetype altogether deals with the more basic question: What if only I were left?)
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Author interviews
