The Double Tongue: The Nobel Laureate's Stunning Final Novel

This is Golding at his gentlest. As with The Inheritors, Golding goes into the ancient past for his material, choosing as his protagonist the reluctant Oracle at Delphi in a time when Greek culture and political power were waning, and Roman influence under Julius Caesar was fast becoming a juggernaut. Her agon is the nature of her faith in Greek religious tradition, caught as she is between the economics, ethics, and metaphysics of religious and priestly praxis. Golding has freed himself from the contraints of his earnest and often spellbinding Christianity here: the Oracle is a Greek Matty Windrover/Pincher Martin in some ways, though not as intensely immersed in the spiritual. But Golding also christianizes his subject in subtle and, for Christian readers at any rate, engaging ways. Paul's statue "to the unknown god" figures here, as does the Apollo/Christ connection so often discussed in myth criticism and anthropology. That Christ may not be easily recognizeable, however. He has more akin with Donne's "three-personed God"--at least as Donne would want Him--than he does with the persona of the NT. My chief complaint is that the novel is too short. It lacks a substantial middle, in Aristotelian terms, so that the rising action feels a bit malformed and hurried. I imagine that, had he lived, Golding would have shaped and expanded it considerably. But overall, the premise is interesting, and the text works aesthetically. Golding had lost none of his ability to "see through to the heart of things" eschatological and ontological, and to represent those experiences in language in intense and ultimately rewarding ways. I recommend it unreservedly to readers familiar with Golding's oeuvre beyond Lord of the Flies.