Lord of the Flies: The Graphic Novel by Aimée de Jongh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I think sometimes when you are familiar with a story, familiar with it to the extent that the title of it has slipped into common language, it’s easy to lose track of the original thing itself. You hear the title, make some sort of connection with what you know of it, and then move on because you’ve got some sort of meaning and that’s enough for then, for you, and that’s fine, that’s how we work. We layer meaning on top of meaning and we shape it for the moment, for the situation we find ourselves in. And that brings erasure, it brings a loss of what came before (because change is change, it is a shift in the status of things, and sometimes it’s worthwhile going back to the book, so to speak, returning to the page, and looking twice at the thing and reminding yourself of what it was, is, and its brilliant, brutal place in the world.
The Lord of the Flies is amazing, terrifying, and I read it far too early because I did not quite realise what was happening. The great thing about Aimée de Jongh’s frankly brilliant adaptation (like, this is art), is that we have to dwell, we have to sit within this situation and realise just quite how awful it is, how immediate that awfulness is, and how close the animal is at all times. de Jongh sits in the text and does not allow you to move on, does not allow you to escape this, and it is just an excellent piece of work. She writes in the afterword about keeping Golding’s “beautiful composed sentences intact” and it’s a decision that serves her well. Restraint makes the wild, the madness, all the more profound, the more immediate, for it.
There are a thousand moments of power in it but none moreso in the still moments around Simon and, in particular, where he meets the [spoiler]. Here the pages turn nightmarish, wild, spilling out of panel and white space until the entire page is full of the nightmarish present. It is shocking, scary, and never anything less than brilliantly done. This is such a good, good book.
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Daisy May Johnson 
We “did” Lord of the Flies as a set text at school. Not sure who decided that it was a good choice for an all girls’ school!
That’s a definite choice!!
I wonder what my reaction to the Golding would be now, either as the original text or in this form, especially after reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea which felt like Lord of the Flies transferred to postwar Yokohama, with a nihilistic gang of 13yo boys.
Oh now that sounds intriguing – I don’t know it at all. Thank you for the mention! I’ll look it up.