Round-up of William Golding in the news in October 2019!
Monos, directed by Alejandro Landes, was awarded ‘Best Film’ at the BFI London Film Festival 2019. The film has drawn comparisons with Lord of the Flies, with Alex Godfrey in the Guardian calling it ‘Lord of the Flies in hell’. Lord of the Flies is clearly an influence on the film, and Mark Kermode notes the appearance of a pig’s head on a stick in his 5-star review.
Matthew D’Ancona compared Conservative Party adviser, Dominic Cummings, to Jack from Lord of the Flies, in an article in the Evening Standard. Lord of the Flies has frequently been invoked in discussions of British politics and Brexit, as we explored here.
In a somewhat surprising article in Screen Rant, Padraig Cotter defends the 1990 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies, despite its poor reception from critics. Cotter argues that ‘the increased profanity and violence, including the bloody death of Piggy, also give this version a harsher edge to its 1963 counterpart’. Our own exploration of the adaptation is less complimentary.
To mark Halloween, we published a new piece on horror in Golding’s writing.