Posted by John Richardson on 10/09/99 from proxy.mcmail.com:
In Reply to: Re: Ransome in other author's books posted by Anne LeVeque on October 04, 1999 at 15:29:03:
Anne’s post reminds me of a comment made about Lord of the Flies in a critical commentary on Golding’s work. I had thought this was in the definitive critical study by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor (which I heartily recommend) but I am clearly remembering another, lesser work.
Ballantyne’s Coral Island is the far more extensive source and target for Golding’s more profound response and re-working, and this debt is acknowledged both within (by the characters) and without the text (by the author and his use of Ballantyne’s names for his character). The reference to Swallows & Amazons is only direct speech by one of the young boys early in the novel – the contrast between the tiny, parochial lake island where the rigid naval hierarchy of the Walkers withholds and friendly parents are sent letters after just one night: and the large, exotic, dangerous tropical ‘paradise’ where English society breaks down and only Piggy is myopic enough to expostulate with plodding logic why he had not written to his “Auntie” – is indicative of how utterly the authority of the novel refutes the comparison.
Given this, it is interesting that the forgotten-by-me author of this study, pauses long enough at the reference to Swallows & Amazons to suggest that Lord of the Flies is actually more a response to Secret Water – an arguably lesser and certainly less well known Ransome novel. She points out that in Secret Water savagery is an explicit part of the child make-believe and the children’s games ultimately extend to human sacrifice and cannibalism (pretended, of course).
She doesn’t take this much further, but might have, especially had she read Peter Hunt’s Approaching Arthur Ransome. One of Hunt’s key themes is the growing distance between the world-view of John and Nancy. This distance approaches conflict in Secret Water and becomes the crux of the plot where the captain of the Swallow holds steady to his identification with the code of English civilisation and British Empire, whilst the Amazon captain falls in with the Eels who have reversed the previous imaginary equation so that the children are savages and the adults are missionaries.
It would be hard on Nancy, and perhaps Peter Hunt is a little hard on her, to suggest that had the whole cast of Ransome’s children been marooned on a desert island as per Lord of the Flies, John would have immediately adopted the mantle of Ralph (whose father was in the Navy!) whilst Nancy would have been most likely to gravitate towards Jack. That really would have been conflict.
None of this is meant in any way as a grand claim – certainly not of any intentionality on the part of Golding who one might to suspect to be familiar with Swallows and Amazons only in passing and with Secret Water not at all; still less as a damnation of Nancy. But books such as Lord of the Flies, Coral Island, Secret Water and Treasure Island clearly share themes and imaginative locales, and a key thematic difference between what are fundamentally different books might be: Coral Island posits idealised boys in a romantically exotic location; Lord of the Flies posits realistic boys in a romantically exotic location; Secret Water (and Swallows and Amazons) posits slightly idealised children in realistic (indeed real) locations which they nonetheless imaginatively transform to the romantically exotic.
The fact that in Secret Water Ransome’s very ‘good’ children do experience conflict, if not the breakdown of society which occurs in Golding’s much more extreme location, vindicates Ransome’s strength as a realistic rather than escapist writer, and puts him perhaps, closer to Golding than to Ballantyne in this regard.
Oh yes, and if we do recast Lord of the Flies with Ransome characters, how about Dick as Piggy, Titty as Simon, Peggy as Roger…… only joking guys.