The Tonga castaways don’t disprove “Lord of the Flies”

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Book cover of "The Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

With the release of a new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes another round of media reminders that the book’s most famous plot element—shipwrecked children turn barbarous and violent—was “disproven” fifty years ago on an island in the South Pacific.

The logic goes something like this:

In 1965, six Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island on the southern tip of the Tonga archipelago. Rather than descend into savage violence, as the children do in Lord of the Flies, the Tongans managed to survive and form a communal-like existence. They shared duties, kept spirits up, and even tended to one another, such as setting one’s boy’s fractured leg. After fifteen months, they were rescued and returned to their families.

The story of the Tongans has grown into a modern parable warning against taking Golding’s book seriously, or even simply discarding it outright. One example comes from a recent article, where Lenore Skenazy recounts the Tongan success story with the brisk conclusion, “So much for barbarism.”

The popular linking of the true-life Tongan incident with Golding’s novel appears to have begun with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. His 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful History sets out to prove that people are fundamentally decent and eager to build a better society. Whatever Golding’s fictional account may depict, he says, real children do not become wild and bloodthirsty creatures once removed from the watchful eyes of civilization.

Bregman followed his book with a 2020 Guardian article headlined “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.” The story went viral on social media, leading to years of articles reiterating that the uplifting story of the Tongan castaways refutes Golding’s grim worldview. A sampling of subsequent headlines mirror the Guardian‘s, almost down to the word:

Since the Tongan teenagers didn’t turn against each other, the logic goes, Lord of the Flies has been proven wrong. It’s as if we should discard the lessons of Animal Farm because there exists not one recorded episode of farm animals forming an authoritarian Marxist collective.

The best at everything

As Scott Alexander writes, “Beware the man of one study.” A single example that ends well does not slam the door on Golding’s book, and it’s pretty sad that so many people think it would.

But if one example is proof positive, is a single counterexample dispositive? Consider the Sugamo child abandonment case. In 1988, a mother left her four young children alone in a Tokyo apartment for nine months. No, they weren’t shipwrecked like the Tongans or the Lord of the Flies boys—but that’s kind of the point. The children had modern shelter, clean running water, and easy access to food, which they procured from local convenience stores using money the mother had left for them. The children did a remarkable job of taking care of each other, but it wasn’t enough.

When finally discovered by social workers, they were malnourished, and one of the children was missing. The eldest boy admitted that two of his friends had assaulted and killed the youngest girl. While the eldest boy was not present at the killing, he helped his friends bury her body.

Still from Nobody Knows (2004), a Japanese film based on the Sugamo case.

When reports reached the public, the response in Japan mirrored an underlying question posed many times in Lord of the Flies: “How could Japanese children be reduced to this behavior?”

In Lord of the Flies, it’s the English who are puzzled: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than that,” one character remarks at the end of the book. The boys were raised well and taught in boarding schools. Each had a reading diet of British Empire adventure books about self-sufficient boys who always act as proper young gentlemen, even in the face of adversity. “We’re English, and the English are best at everything,” young Jack declares, a statement which turns out to be surprisingly empty by the final chapter. “The northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust wholly to this new rhythm,” the narrator of Lord of the Files declares, another statement found to be empty after only a few pages.

After all, the book most often named the first prose novel in the English language is none other than Robinson Crusoe, a story about a shipwrecked Englishman surviving due to self-discipline, routine, and his education. Crusoe was written for adults, but over the years it developed a younger audience. It also became a model for how every Englishman should act under duress.

It’s not hard to imagine Ralph, Jack, and the others reading Crusoe while in school. Yet Golding’s book feels like a rebuttal to Defoe’s classic, tearing down its colonial-era pride with cool precision.

Scene from the 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies.

“How can you be surprised that Tongans survived on an island?”

Contrary to popular depiction, the children in Lord of the Flies don’t immediately descend into barbarism. Upon their arrival on the island, the boys form rules, coordinate efforts, and develop routines, just as their boarding school education taught them. They choose a leader in the fair-haired (and fair-minded) Ralph, who sets about in assigning duties. He even leads the boys in building a signal fire atop the island’s sole mountain, exactly as the Tongan boys did.

The Tongans numbered six teenagers, aged 13 to 19. They were friends at a Catholic school. They ran away, gathered food and supplies, and stole a boat. That is, they were working together before they even reached the island.

In contrast, the number of children in the book is not stated with precision, but it’s likely close to twenty or thirty. The children do not know each other, and none are pubescent. The “littleuns” are so numerous that, after the mountaintop fire grows into an inferno, the older children are unsure if one of them perished in the blaze.

Two months after Bregman’s story in the Guardian, Tongan Meleika Gesa penned a rebuttal arguing the boys of ‘Ata were not the “real” Lord of the Flies. Gesa explains how Tongan values and education prepared them for survival. Not only did they know how to start a fire and catch and prepare fish, the Tongan culture instilled a familial cohesion among the group. There’s no such unity among the boys in Lord of the Flies, save for their nationality.

Amusingly, Gesa asks, “How can you be surprised that Pasifika people, specifically Tongan, can survive on an island?”

The Guardian article claims Bregman “unearthed” the forgotten story about Tongan teenagers on an island, like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil. Gesa points out the story of the teens is well known among Tongans, and not forgotten at all.

Gesa has more complaints about the way Bregman presents the story, but the overarching tragedy is that Bregman’s, not Gesa’s, account dominates public perception. “While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read,” Bregman wrote in 2020. That’s not so true today.

Realism and literalism

In the 1950s, William Golding wrote that Lord of the Flies “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. … The whole book is symbolic in nature.” (Emphasis mine.)

That Lord of the Flies is a parable constructed with symbolism and metaphor, and not a detailed, realistic account of children on an island, seems incredibly obvious to me—and yet, here we are, with people treating the book as a failed thought experiment.

We all seem to agree that society is defective—otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time arguing over politics, policy, and taxes. If society’s defects don’t emerge from defects in human nature, where else would they come from?

I see little evidence in the world that people’s natural instincts are to work together, avoid conflict, and live peaceably side-by-side. If anything, much of our modern existence is spent pushing against those social norms. (For example, tech companies’ practice of “better to plead forgiveness than ask permission,” or people treating all criticism as a personal attack.)

But can those social values—work together, avoid conflict—be taught? At one time, they were, via humanistic education, religion, active parenting—the same institutions Western culture has been discounting over the past fifty years.

Have we adopted some system of moral instruction to fill the void? If so, I can’t locate it. What appears to have taken its place is a kind of raw, undeveloped trust in Realism and Literalism, twin brothers of interpretation which frantically attempt to nail down, rather than open up, our understanding of human nature.

William Golding wrote, “The moral [of Lord of the Flies] is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.”

Tongan Meleika Gesa wrote during the pandemic, “Just look at how we’re surviving Covid-19 together. My family have given away food to our neighbours and checked up on friends and family because that’s how we survive.”

Jack in Lord of the Flies says, “We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

That’s the ethical and moral divide between the Tongan teens and the boys in Lord of the Flies. What follows flows from within.


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Three early audio stories

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Cover of Instant City, Issue 6: Disappeared
Instant City, Issue 6: Disappeared

Back in 2007, I had an unusual encounter at the Geary Club, a San Francisco bar near Union Square. A guy on the barstool beside me laid out his big idea—it was an era of Big Ideas—called dublit.com, a web site for people to freely upload and listen to spoken word recordings. It was to be a repository of audio essays, non-fiction, short stories, chapters from books, and so on.

I told him I was a writer, and I was interested in supporting it, if I could.

Fast forward one year: dublit.com’s launch party was a smashing success, and I vowed to make good on my pledge. Using nothing more than my iBook’s microphone and built-in audio software, I recorded two of my short stories, “Of Potential” and “Some of the Things He Thought That Year” (both available in my collection, A Concordance of One’s Life).

Later, San Francisco lit mag Instant City published my ode to The Owl Tree (another Union Square bar) and its recently-deceased proprietor, a lifelong city bartender and colorful character named C. Bobby. I read the remembrance at the magazine’s release party, which was recorded and made its way onto dublit.com as well.

Photograph of clear plastic goggles on sand

I recently discovered these old spoken word recordings on a backup. (I thought they’d been lost.) I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, where they should remain available for years to come.

You’re free to listen or download them. I’ve included a PDF of each short story alongside the audio, if you prefer to read or read along:

Sadly, many of the beautiful and sublime things I’ve mentioned are now gone: Geary Club, C. Bobby and The Owl Tree, the original dublit.com, even Instant City. So much loss against the wages of time, which ruthlessly spends down our youth with no regard for our future.

Close-up of ballpoint pen drawing a blue line on paper

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San Francisco street names project

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Title card for "The Streets of San Francisco" TV show

I’ve added a new page to this site, a little side-project I’ve been working on for a while now called “A somewhat subjective list of San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names.”

It’s pretty much what’s printed on the tin, but with a few surprises. Why are there two Mason Streets in the city? If Division Street divides two neighborhoods, what does Divisadero Street divide (if anything)? And is it true that two of the numbered east-west streets actually intersect?

It’s a goofy but fun way to look at San Francisco’s layout and history. I hope you get as much out of reading it as I did putting it together.


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Outliving your obituarist: Robert Duvall

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Photograph of Robert Duvall.
Robert Duvall (John Mathew Smith, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Twice in the past twelve months I’ve found myself taken aback by the death of a Hollywood actor.

First was the death of Gene Hackman, and then earlier this month, the passing of Robert Duvall. Both were generation-defining actors who played some of the most memorable Hollywood roles in the last fifty years.

They were also the kind of resilient actors who brought a hushed, understated presence to their roles. While masculinity is under attack in certain quarters for its toxicity, these men portrayed a quieter, sturdier kind of masculinity worth emulating.

However, I’m not here to discuss their work. I want to point out the Associated Press obituary of Robert Duvall, which offers this endnote:

Former Associated Press Hollywood correspondent Bob Thomas, who died in 2014, was the primary writer of this obituary.

In other words, the writer of Duvall’s obituary died twelve years before Duvall’s obituary was published.

I’ve long been fascinated with the writing process behind obituaries. It’s a journalistic art form clouded by a professional secrecy uncharacteristic of journalism and its desire for transparency. (“Democracy dies in darkness.”)

Obituaries for the powerful and famous are written years in advance of the person’s passing. These obits are not complete, however. A pending obituary remains open and subject to further edits if some new and significant chapter of the person’s life blooms.

Papers and wire services will prepare and sit on hundreds, even thousands, of unfinished obituaries, each a miniature biography-in-development of a full and public life. Newspapers and wire services jealousy guard this corpus of material, not even acknowledging they’re preparing an obit for any particular person. Only death seals an obituary shut, like nailing a coffin closed.

All this prep work is due to journalism’s tight deadlines, since an obituary is expected to be published within hours, not weeks, of the subject’s death. These realities shroud the whole process with a morbid pragmatism that borders on the absurd.

This is what led me to write my short story “The Obituarist,” published by North American Review and collected in my book A Concordance of One’s Life. The story regards a professional obituary writer who, faced with his own mortality, contributes an interview to be used for his own obit.

From the story:

My editors and my fellow obituarists have a little list, The Nearly Departed we call it, celebrities and politicians and artists and authors whom we agree are not long for this world. The unlucky are crossed off the list the same day their obit hits the back pages of the Times. The unluckier are those added when that slot opens. There is no announcement, no press release of their addition. My subjects are not informed privately.

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim Nelson

A few years after NAR published “The Obituarist,” I wrote a post for their blog explaining my inspiration for the story, as well as the peculiarities of the obituary writing process.

One peculiarity is when the obituary’s subject outlives the writer, such as what happened to Bob Thomas and Robert Duvall. Back in 2014, I learned that a similar situation happened when Mickey Rooney passed away. I’m certain there’s many other examples to be found.

Sometimes the paper prints the obituary while the subject is still alive. This famously happened to Mark Twain (“The report of my death was an exaggeration”), but also to Axl Rose, Abe Vigoda, Alfred Nobel, and more. One of my favorites is the note Rudyard Kipling sent to the paper which printed his obituary: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”

Another peculiarity is much rarer than the prior two, that is, when the subject is permitted to read his obituary before his death. In at least one case, a paper acquiesced to publishing an obit knowing that the subject was not dead: Huckster and showman P. T. Barnum convinced a New York newspaper to print his, just so he could read it before passing away a few days later.

So, while I mourn the death of Robert Duvall, I also tip my hat to AP writer Bob Thomas, who passes into infamy in a manner unique to the career of an obituary writer.


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“Chandler & West” released

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Cover of "Chandler & West: A Los Angeles Story"

The day has arrived—my new novel Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles is now available.

As I’ve written previously, this is a passion project, a novel about two writers I’ve read and admired and studied for years now. My book centers on a fictional meeting of hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler, banging out the manuscript to his debut The Big Sleep, and Nathanael West, himself working on his opus The Day of the Locust.

Chandler & West is also a love letter to Los Angeles, especially the L.A. during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Pre-release sales have been better than expected. They’re so good, yesterday I noticed the book sitting at #37 on Amazon’s U.S. Biographical Literary Fiction best sellers chart:

Screenshot of "Chandler & West" at #37 on Amazon's Biographical Literary Fiction bestseller chart.

The Kindle edition is available at a special limited-time price of $2.99, which will go up later this month. A paperback edition is also available. And, Kindle Unlimited subscribers may read it for free.

You can learn more about the novel on Amazon, or by reading its page here on my web site. There’s a sample chapter available as well.

Exciting times—this book took quite a while to finish, and I’m relieved to finally have it out there.


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Growing up a Scholastic Books kid

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Clifford the Big Red Dog

I was raised in a house brimming with books. Children’s books especially, but plenty of books for teens as well. I inhaled these books, reading some three or four times, just so I could reenter their worlds and experience them one more time. My brother and I were never in want of books, although my parents were not especially well-to-do back then.

The reason for this surplus is that my mother worked for Scholastic Books—yes, the Scholastic Books that hosted book fairs at your school when you were young, the company that published evergreen classics like Clifford the Big Red Dog, Goosebumps, and Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective. She did not work at the company’s New York editorial offices—what a different childhood that would have been—but rather at a West Coast distribution warehouse located in sleepy Pleasanton, California.

My mother was a voracious reader, and she wanted to pass her love of books on to her children. She was in her early twenties when she landed her position at Scholastic, and it was a bit of a dream job for her.

Her determination to teach us to read paid dividends. I could read by age three, although I was not an active reader. I preferred running around our quiet suburban neighborhood, playing kickball and riding my Big Wheel from one neighbor’s home to the next. I was one of those fearless/clueless kids that would walk up to a front door, ring the bell, and ask the parent if their child could come out and play. (I often did this during dinner time, much to the annoyance of our neighbors.)

It was in this suburban idyll that my mother introduced me to books. Scholastic permitted employees to take home a small number of remaindered and returned titles from the warehouse. When my mother came home from work, she occasionally would be carrying a children’s book or two. I was completely uninterested at first, and so these books were stocked away in a hallway closet.

Finally, when I was five or six, my mother suggested I might enjoy Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All by Donald J. Sobel. For whatever reason, I picked it up, lay on the couch, and consumed the book from start to finish in one read-through.

For those who don’t know, Encyclopedia Brown is a child sleuth who runs a detective agency out of the garage in his home. Propitiously enough, his father is also Chief of Police for the Smalltown, USA suburbia Encyclopedia’s family lives in. Each book in the series features ten (so so) short kid-centric mysteries, like stolen ice skates and missing hamsters. Right before Encyclopedia Brown solves the “crime,” the reader is asked to guess the solution before turning to the answer in the back of the book. (In this way, Encyclopedia Brown mirrors the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, where books also halted the narrative to challenge the reader to solve the mystery.)

Cover of "Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All" by Donald J. Sobel

Hooked, I read as many books in the series as she could bring home. From there, my reading habit grew outward. My mother happily brought home more challenging work for me to read.

The cultural, racial, and sexual shifts in America made the 1970s a rather shaggy and complicated time to be a child. This employee’s perk of bringing home remaindered books meant a great many of the titles I read were published in the 1950s and early 60s. The illustrations depicted working dads in ties and wingtips, and homemaker mothers in dresses and pearls carrying spatulas. Boys had haircuts like Marine recruits, or wore coonskin caps. Girls practiced ballet, rode horses, and, if they were a tomboy, tagged along with the boys on whatever wild adventure they cooked up. Some of these books had been published a mere ten years earlier, yet they read like they’d come to me via a bookmobile time machine.

Damn or praise these books on their political merits, the point is, I became an active reader at a young age. My reading diet quickly grew omnivorous.

I began to read the newspaper every morning. Not merely the comics page, but much of the front section, and especially the Opinion and Op-Ed pages. When I was bored, I would pick a volume of an encyclopedia off our family room shelf and simply browse it, page by page, until I found some topic I wanted to read more about. Later, I did the same with the colossal People’s Almanac #2, which I honestly believe I read in its entirety. (Not from front to back, but by dipping into articles as they suited me over the years.) All of this came about thanks to my exposure to Scholastic’s books.

This Flickr collection of titles sold by Scholastic Books in the 1960s and 70s really takes me back. I’ve not read all these titles, but I recognize the covers of almost the entire collection. Books about fancy dolls and show horses were not really my “thing” as a young boy, but I treasured books by Beverley Cleary and Judy Blume, as well as the intense psychological portrait of Harriet the Spy. Encyclopedia Brown made me want to be a detective; Alvin Fernald made me want to be an inventor; 100 Pounds of Popcorn made me want to be an entrepreneur. Every young person who read the Mad Scientists’ Club’s books wanted to join.

There are other books that stayed with me, but whose titles I’ve forgotten. One was about a boy blinded by a firecracker who has to learn Braille and to navigate the world via a seeing-eye dog. Another regarded a pudgy boy who lives in a New York skyscraper with his fitness-obsessed parents. They want to send him to a “fat camp” boarding school which, he learns in confidence from an admission counselor, doesn’t actually care what the kids eat, or even if they exercise. The boy spends his summer break devouring ice cream sundaes and perfecting his admissions essay. It’s a subversive little book, and definitely the product of 1970s, and not 1950s, America. My young mind, raised on the coy cynicism of Looney Tunes and MAD magazine, was magnetically attracted to anything eager to thumb its nose at authority.

Cover of "100 Pounds of Popcorn" by Hazel Krantz

Over time, my mother got to know many of the Scholastic editorial staff in New York City, even if their friendship was purely via long-distance telephone conversations. She knew R. L. Stine, for example, creator of Goosebumps. (He was more familiar to me as Jovial Bob Stine, editor of Scholastic’s Bananas magazine, their family-friendly substitute for MAD.) Somewhere in my parents’ house is a copy of Clifford the Big Red Dog signed by Norman Bridwell.

My mother loved working for Scholastic, because she cherished children and wanted every child to have books. She did that by providing free books to our school’s Scholastic Books Fairs, to ensure no one went home empty-handed. And she made sure our teachers’ classrooms had things like children’s dictionaries on their shelves, if they needed them, or any other reference material they may be lacking.

She grew up on a ramshackle farm in the Mississippi Delta, raised by her grandparents, where the muddy soil was tilled by mules and mosquitoes clouded the humid air. For her, books were a cheap way to escape penury and live vicariously in another world, if even only for a few hours at a time. Books were “portable dreamweavers,” and she wanted to share that dream.


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