Adolescence creator Jack Thorne’s new BBC series sees him return to the subject of masculinity, this time turning to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The novel, which remains a GCSE set text, has been a staple of secondary school English departments almost since its publication in 1954. The decision to include a diverse cast, including the excellent Winston Sawyers who plays Ralph, will probably be viewed by many as a progressive move, ensuring that not only white actors are offered roles and not only white people are represented on screen. But for all its progressive aspirations, an adaptation like this obscures some of the most interesting themes discernible in the book.
It’s important to state at the outset that I am certainly not suggesting there are too many Black and Asian people on television. The opposite is often true. Instead, I’m questioning what aspects of Golding’s original story are obscured by the inclusion of Black and Asian actors in the series.
A key trope of the “Robinsonade” genre, that takes its name from Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, is white English men finding themselves on an island where they encounter non-European Others. If you’re not thinking about this, it is hard to understand Piggy’s declaration in Golding’s text: “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything.”
The colour-blind approach to casting at the expense of story is not new, nor is the issue undiagnosed. Writing about Bridgerton in 2022, Gary Younge described the decision to employ a diverse cast as offering “the depiction of racial difference in the absence of racial inequality”. In the US, Ishmael Reed wrote the play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda in response to Hamilton, drawing attention to how an inclusive cast obscured a racist past. The same might be said of another of Thorne’s projects, his 2020 film The Secret Garden.
What is lost by this approach to adaptation and storytelling? For one thing, Golding’s tale loses some of its original potency, and meaning, when abstracted away from the context of British colonialism and racism.
Golding envisaged Lord of the Flies as something of a response to RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, a Robinsonade boys’ adventure story that glorified British civilisation and treated racial hierarchies as natural. Robinsonades, which also include films such as Swiss Family Robinson, The Admirable Crichton, Lost in Space and The Martian, depict people (men, in the main) finding themselves in inhospitable climates, remote islands, where they are forced to survive by dint of their ingenuity and sure moral compass. Often, these survivors have their humanity brought into sharper focus through encounters with racialised others. This is the vision conjured up by Piggy’s reference to savages, a trope that can be traced right back to Defoe’s book and which even finds its way into the US Declaration of Independence in uneasy tension with the claim that “all men are created equal”, and suggesting that those labelled savages are not in fact to be regarded as fully human.
The original edition of Golding’s book contained usage of the N-word, which was replaced in subsequent editions with the word “Indians”. These terms are used to indicate a racial hierarchy and in the traditional Robinsonade, this racial hierarchy is usually, and unapologetically, endorsed (spoiler: white European men are always at the top). Golding’s novel is certainly not unproblematic, but through irony and self-reflection, it opens itself up to be read as an anticolonial text. Informed by the events of the second world war, he departs from the Robinsonade tradition in suggesting that the “savagery” in fact lies within these upper-class white English boys. Is the same true for Thorne’s adaptation? It has clearly provided opportunities for actors of colour, which is important – but in rehabilitating a monocultural “classic” through diverse casting, it has also obscured important readings.
Thorne has taken characters that are classed, gendered and raced in Golding’s book and decided that only two of those three identities are of consequence in his series. A story often viewed as dystopian becomes a racial utopia. At a time when so much racism is articulated through patriarchal notions of asserting dominance and protecting “our women” from those not like us, this feels like a curious retreat – a white flight, if you will – from how notions of masculinity are deeply entangled with both gender and racial hierarchies.
Darren Chetty is a writer and academic, and co-author with Karen Sands O’Connor of Beyond the Secret Garden: Racially Minoritised People in British Children’s Books
