Inferno

And all of Earth’s hells

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

I don’t think Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s brilliant debut novel, is the book most commonly adapted, most commonly referenced, in the English language. It just feels as though it is. The reference is too perfect, commonly resorted to by those who haven’t read it. And every screenwriter wants to adapt something so easy to read and parse, so morally complex, so apt to grip any audience.

But I’d like to take a little detour around the idea of adaptation.

Years ago, I decided to adapt Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. I had a good idea for it, too. The characters were to keep their functions, their places in the story, but their names were to change. And they were to signify something else. Faustus, I thought, would clearly do as Marlowe himself. His struggle, the racing clock, the approaching of midnight: all of them mirrored the life of the playwright, who threw his own life away on what the Victorians might have called ‘evil living’ and finally in a fight in an inn.

The other characters, I thought, could be renamed. Rather than the fellow students and contemporaries of Faustus, what about having them be the other playwrights and poets of Marlowe’s rough era? The university wits, indeed, nicely parallel the scholars of Faustus’s story.

But who could possibly do for Mephistopheles? Who could have the presence, the fascination? Who might seduce as only a demon could? I thought the answer was obvious, and still think it. Who else is so various in his guises, exhibiting so many faces? Sweet one moment, rousing the next, apt to offer glory even while glimpsing the vanity of human wishes? Who can better mediate on the absurd nature of life on Earth, and offer false succour?

I only had one candidate. The character simply must be played by Shakespeare. There could no alternative.

And, I thought to myself, as I prepared the work, every line of Mephisto’s dialogue could be substituted for, or augmented by, something Shakespeare himself wrote. There was not an item of human experience he didn’t at least allude to. Parts of our lives he summed up better than any other, before or since.

It would be a difficult thing, I thought. Getting through the entire collected works. Finding the right phrase, not only the mot juste. It could be done.

That’s not how it happened, though. I thought I could put something like this together; that with machine-like momentum I could force literature through my sieve. It didn’t quite happen like that. After quite some time (most of it thinking, some of it working), I was left with a half-made thing. It met my criteria. It seemed to do what I wanted it to do. But it was a failure. It lacked all substance. There was simply nothing there.

Our lives are full of failures and sometimes, you can still learn from them. I hoped I would in future learn from this. But who’s to say?

I did at least, I told myself, have one good idea. They don’t come along often enough to throw them away.

But let’s think for a second about Marlowe’s play, with or without my alternations. Why is it as brilliant as it is? Why so endlessly readable, why so quoted, why such a white whale for writer-directors, for radio dramatists?

Artists want to adapt Faustus for the same reason that I did. They see its genius, its perfect understanding of the truth of life. And they want some of it for themselves. Too morbid, possibly, for mainstream appeal (unlikely to top the box office, not apt to be broadcast by any except the most self-serious radio stations). Too hard to grasp. But all the brighter for it. All the more essential; all the more inescapable.

In part, and I don’t mean to go into this too deeply, of course, this is a question of theme. Books that claim to be ‘Shakespeare for children’ or ‘my first Shakespeare’ claim that merely by transmitting the plots of Shakespeare’s plays absent all the language, they still have something of the spirit of the original. The same must surely be true of Marlowe’s themes. They’re the big ones: inevitability, fate, raging against the pettiness of man whose life creeps itself along from day to day.

Every film student and most serious novelists believe that they alone have cracked the subject of death. And must surely be required by the weight of their own talent to write about it. But if anyone got it, Marlowe did. He saw that the futility of human action does not mean people are passive in the face of what’s to come. It means they deny reality; they act all the more feverishly to pretend to themselves that they matter, their appetites ought to be gratified, that all of this won’t be over in very little time.

Everyone wants to talk about the violence at the heart of human nature. But others got there first. Conrad, certainly, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

One more thing of Faustus. Given its age, given everything, it’s remarkably easy to read. Marlowe’s work is elegant but it is not covered in Shakespearean ornamentation. To me, despite Marlowe’s time translating the Roman poets, it is not overly Latinate and difficult. It’s remarkably direct. Just as Lord of the Flies is so beautifully clear, so deceptively simple.

This is perhaps why Golding’s work communicates so well. It is easy to read. Its themes are immense and they are dark, but they’re not hard to get.

The children live as they will. They suffer as they must. And all who read the book know what it’s meant to mean.