為了鍛煉自己的英語寫作能力，接下來英文書的書評我將會用英文寫，有需要的朋友們可以點翻譯。

The fourteenth book that I’ve read this year is “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. Resulting from a plane-wreck, a group of boys aged 6-12 are left stranded on an undiscovered island without any adults. As they assemble together under the call of the conch, each born of different natures and intents, will they cooperate to maximise their possibility of rescue, or allow their moral standards to deteriorate in the absence of law and order?

Although the first few chapters were a bit slow, I was quickly affected by the tension that built up between Ralph, the voted chief of the boys, and Jack, the head of the choir boys. It was especially piercing at the rising action, where Jack let the fire go out to pursue his hunting intents, just when a ship had coincidentally passed by and missed the boys since there was no smoke signal. Golding’s use of dialogue in this scene aptly intensifies this tension; Ralph’s pithy, laconic repetition of anger and disappointment “you let the fire out”, “there was a ship”, contrasts with Jack’s long-winded, elusive descriptions of his quest, signalling at the tilted power dynamics between the two, where Ralph takes the upper hand. Ralph enforces the matter upon Jack again and again, cutting short Jack’s attempts to change the topic, obligating him to face his grim misconduct and acknowledge his faults. Though Jack takes out his agitation on Piggy as a sign of his defiance and an assertion of power, he is suppressed by Ralph’s authority and eventually apologises. That marks the first crossfire between the two main characters, and seeds of belligerence have since then been planted deep within Jack’s heart, growing into malicious creepers as the events unfold.

Other than dialogue, the use of symbolism and pathetic fallacy throughout the book also contributes to the development of the plot. The two most important symbols are the white, immaculate conch and the dark, virulent “l(fā)ord of the flies”. Both foreshadow the end of an age and the start of another, one disciplined and orderly, the other deranged and chaotic. Furthermore, the changes in the weather also signal the shift of events. I won’t spoil the details here; I’ll leave them for you to read on your own.

As for the characters, I didn’t find myself intrigued most by the natural-born leader Ralph, nor the marginalised intellect Piggy, but rather by the subtle, enigmatic Simon. He was the one who discovered the mystery of beast from air, and also the one to mark the turning of an age. I wonder how he had mustered the courage to wander on his own in the dark forest, carrying with him the fear of the beast but also a calm and generosity that few children possessed. In a sense, his cool-headedness resembled that of an adult, though his debut of a faint adds to the complexity of his character and leaves the reader pondering the roots of his upbringing.

Regarding the children’s behaviour, many seem to be based on theories of psychology, especially those of group identity. Jack’s act of covering his face in paints and urging his tribe to do the same in effect creates a sense of within-group belongingness, while severing their connection with the other boys, marking a rift that grows ever larger between the two opposing groups, inviting animosity. Their behaviours towards the other group also remind me of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), where students who were given the identity of prison guards mistreated their prisoner peers without remorse and went on to devise further torturous acts; this shows how humans can quickly adapt to a new layer of identity imposed on them despite its possible conflict with their original dispositions, especially when power dynamics arise between two opposing groups. Furthermore, self-serving bias also comes into play as the children make up explanations for the beasts from water and air. Additionally, the description of how the boys almost always start interrupting each other and become rowdy monkeys despite pre-established rules of one person speaking at a time is such a true depiction of a typical middle school classroom that my head starts to hurt every time I see this happen in the story. Nonetheless, whenever Ralph craved the guidance of an adult and hypothesised that if they were adults they wouldn’t be in such disorder, I would always doubt the validity of his hypothesis. However, it would be interesting to consider how the situation would play out if the island were full of girls instead of boys.