Lord of the Flies as dystopia in the LA Times

Liesl Schillinger has written a piece in the LA Times arguing that Lord of the Flies is the most relevant dystopian novel in the current political climate. As I mentioned in my recent post on dystopian fiction and Lord of the Flies, a variety of classic dystopian novels have risen to the top of the bestseller lists, and Schillinger discusses some of these in her article, before concluding that:

‘Rereading [Lord of the Flies], I recognized that this book — whose chipper, bluff, breezy beginnings careen quickly into a nightmarish, lawless, irrational power struggle — was the book for now.’

Despite a somewhat misguided comparison of some of the boys to members of Trump’s administration, Schillinger details the breakdown of the boys’ fragile society well, tracing this through the destruction of the conch and Piggy’s glasses. Her conclusion urges the reader to continue to listen to reason and rationality:

‘The signal fires are lit, but the question is: Can they be kept going long enough to get us back to a civilization we recognize?’