Goodreads asked Leena Varghese:

If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?

Leena Varghese The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

This viscerally disturbing, but astoundingly profound book came out after the world had witnessed Nazi pogroms and atomic bomb destruction.

However I only have to look out of my window and see a bunch of shrieking kids, playing football to know that the themes of group dynamics, absolute power, blind prejudice, hatred and violence are intertwined together. The book is as relevant today, if not more, as it was then. Nothing has changed. The Beast is thriving. And his games are not a child’s play. I see it displayed in newspapers and TV channels every day. Awful things that are revealed in lurid details and even things that no one can afford to reveal, if you read between the lines.

I read this book in college as part of my curriculum. I could not love it. But I could not avoid thinking obsessively about it either. We can’t love things which compel us to question ourselves too deeply. And Golding wrings out questions from us and the story has been doing that ever since. I don’t think I can read this book again. It is too dark. Especially now that I have children of my own.

The Lord of the Flies questions power equations between the ever-clashing, opposing forces of good and evil. How quickly the bunch of children stranded on an island metamorphose from civilized little humans, raised by an organized, law-abiding civilization, into violent clans who hunt down the younger kids as coolly as hunting the pigs on the island. For many of them it is just a silly game until rescue arrives. How easily aggression becomes a tool to control the physically and intellectually weak. How the flimsy veneer of civilized behaviour is peeled away and discarded when it comes to greed for absolute power. By the end of the book, three children are already hunted down and murdered in cold blood by their own peers.

Children are called innocent. (Even now I still love them more than I love the adults in my life) But are they truly innocent or are they the real face of our society, stripped of controlled behaviour. What is true innocence? Ralph mourns the destruction of innocence at the end of the book. But I see jealousy and sibling rivalry even among babes. Does it stem from a desire for the best resources that the parents provide, namely, food and shelter and affection? Or is it merely survival instinct?

On a larger scale, the desire for ultimate power and complete control over material and human resources, still leads man to commit the most heinous crimes against entire communities and even nations.

Nothing has changed since the primordial times. I see the Beast gaining power, in the eyes of a rampaging mob that lynches helpless victims during a religious or ethnic cleansing that leaves behind millions dead and the women and children raped and butchered or sold for a price. The Beast grins obscenely at me when I hear of terrible college ragging and bullying of vulnerable targets in school corridors and even behind closed bedroom doors.

The book clearly gives a message that until we cast aside violence and prejudice we can never hope to evolve into a more compassionate and empathetic species who live in harmony with the others.

The Beast is here. Inside us. Inside me.

So I would want to step into The Lord of the Flies, and ask a few vital questions to Simon, the epileptic boy, the only voice of reason and wisdom in the story. I wept when I helplessly watched him die. I wanted to scream and shout for help. Simon is so young and vulnerable and yet he holds the most powerful, life-affirming knowledge about us. He sees things clearly. It makes him different from others. I empathize with that. He is too different to be acceptable. I empathize with that too as many of us would. He tries hard to tell everyone the truth about the Beast but is brutally killed in mindless hatred.

The questions I want to ask him would be-Does wisdom make a man weak or strong? Does it bind our instinctive responses, making us vulnerable to the marauding mob? How do we deal with the Beast who becomes more and more powerful every day?

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