The novel is also a covert assault on ruling-class British ideology. Among other things, it’s a dark parody of R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian classic Coral Island, in which a group of marooned children manage to pull through by sheer public-school spirit and backbone. Jack, the proto-fascist character in Golding’s version, is a hangover from this stiff-upper-lip heritage, but is one of the first of the boys to surrender to barbarism. Golding saw himself as something of an outsider in British middle-class society and was plagued by feelings of social inferiority. For all its literary renown, Lord of the Flies is an act of revenge on the Establishment.

The anti-humanist thesis which shapes the novel is familiar enough. Human beings are in the grip of dark, primordial powers which a skin-deep civilization is too feeble to restrain. Once that civilized veneer cracks, these malevolent forces will break through and play havoc with our moral idealism. Civilization is just a sublimated form of savagery. All this is a rather vulgarized version of Sigmund Freud’s view of the relation between ego and unconscious. But it’s also an outlook deeply influenced by the history of British imperialism, which involved a confrontation between so-called civilization and so-called barbarism. The most subversive moment in that history is recorded in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the imperialists find a mirror of themselves in the so-called natives. The Other turns out to be as close as breathing. The stiff upper lip is a shield against the fact that there’s something sinisterly attractive about the chaos and bloodlust which the “natives” supposedly represent. Mrs Moore, the sensitive, humane middle-aged woman at the centre of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, feels the vibrations of meaninglessness emanating from the Marabar Caves and loses her grip on life. Joseph Conrad, a naval officer like Golding, speaks in his novel Nostromo of the imperial project as being as pointless as trying to plow the sea. At the very moment when the colonialists need a robust identity in order to impose some order on a resentful population, they are overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic futility. They can only accomplish this project if they are far from home, but being far from home is also what can sap their faith in the enterprise.

This happens in a different way in Lord of the Flies. The terrifying beast which the boys fear is real enough, but it’s inside them, not out in the ocean or deep in the jungle. In promoting its bleak case about humanity, however, the novel stacks the cards in one flagrantly obvious way. The idea is to show that men and women will quickly revert to primitivism if the pressures on them are sufficiently powerful. But Golding’s characters are not men and women but children. And since children are only semi-civilized in any case, it’s no great surprise that they should take to sticking pigs and smashing each other’s glasses. Boys (even choirboys) will be boys. They will also be adults, but they aren’t yet. What if Golding had put the members of a Yorkshire brass band or a bunch of chartered accountants on the island? There’s no assurance that they would have behaved impeccably, but it’s unlikely that they would have torn themselves apart with such alacrity.

Novelists quite often stack the cards to ensure the results they want. Take, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire of Stalinism. The book shows how swiftly the project of building socialism succumbs to a brutal authoritarianism; but to illustrate the point it uses farm animals, and farm animals aren’t remarkable for their ability to engage in complex social or political operations, any more than children are. If you set your case up in a particular way, the conclusions you’re looking for will fall obediently out the other end.

Golding’s novel is an example of what one might call the Room 101 syndrome. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 is where you confront what you fear most, and how you cope with this terror is the ultimate test of who you are. The hero has an understandable aversion to having rats burrow through his cheeks, and breaks under this hideous prospect. He cries out to his torturers to do it to his partner instead, and the guilt of this betrayal destroys him. But why should how you act in a moment of extremity be taken to define who you are? A lot of us would betray anyone at all to avoid our tongue being chewed by rodents, including the odd babe-in-arms, but to claim that this reveals our “real” self is absurd. The extreme doesn’t necessarily define the norm. The belief that to press someone to their limit is to discover who they are goes hand-in-hand with the equally dubious claim that everyday existence is inherently inauthentic. Once you peel it away, you reveal the real thing. Once you put children in a situation where there are no civilized restraints, you find out how uncivilly unrestrained they are.

Jack Thorne’s vividly imaginative recreation of the book for television deletes its religious dimension. The dead parachutist on the islands, presumably the pilot of the doomed aircraft, is referred to in the novel as “a dead man on a hill”, a reference to Calvary, and the role of the child Simon (Simon Peter, Jesus’s right-hand man) is to bring the good news that there’s nothing to fear about it. Instead, he is murdered for his pains, as indeed was Simon Peter. Christianity, however, doesn’t maintain that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, whatever Golding may think. It rejects both the bright-eyed progressive view that we’re naturally selfless and compassionate, but also the sour-faced reactionary case that we’re a bunch of deep-dyed villains who can be saved only by a gratuitous act of divine grace.

It isn’t, however, a question of steering judiciously between these two different viewpoints. It’s rather a matter of grasping that they’re opposite aspects of a single situation. The very powers which allow us to forge genuine progress (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and so on) are also the powers which enable us to commit genocide. It’s the self-contradictions of the human species which are at stake here. Because we have bodies of a certain kind (laboring, communicative, cooperative, and so on) we can develop technologies far beyond the capability of squirrels. This is why squirrels have no National Health Service, as far as we can tell. But it’s also why they can’t stockpile nuclear weapons. They can’t send vital resources (sacks of nuts, etc.) to less privileged squirrels overseas, but neither can they run secret torture facilities like the CIA.

More from this author

Jane Austen was no Romantic

By Terry Eagleton

The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.

For some progressive thinkers, neither world wars were supposed to happen. They seemed to be inexplicable disruptions of a history which had been marching upwards and onwards at least from the Victorian era, or even from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Charles Dickens may have scourged the evils of his age, but he thought it vastly superior to any previous phase of history. For some conservative thinkers, the Holocaust is eloquent testimony to the callowness of this vision of progress. Today, we are fearful about our future, but we tend not to ask whether a species capable of such atrocities really deserves to survive. If it’s finally wiped out by climate catastrophe or nuclear war, might not this simply amount to getting its comeuppance?

We should recall, however, that if a lot of men and women spent their time planning and executing the Holocaust, a lot of others gave their lives to bring the Nazi regime to an end. Besides, if Lord of the Flies is a parable of the darkness of the human heart, then it could give comfort to the malign forces its author fought against a few years before he came to write it. If violence and cruelty are built into our natures, then it might be that our responsibility for torture and murder is diminished. We are, after all, only being faithful to the kind of animals we are. But the Second World War wasn’t the result of human nature. It was the consequence of a complex set of historical factors, any one of which could have been different. There may have been no need for William Golding to give his crew orders to fire on the enemy. And if there hadn’t been, he may not have written the novel now showing on television.

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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Mankind always needs a monster

By Tanya Gold

One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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Adolf Eichmann and me

By Shaul Ladany

Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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Why ISIS love to kill

By Simon Cottee

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.