Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 27 Mar 2019
The Pyramid by William Golding
The two novels which preceded William Golding’s The Pyramid (1967) – Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964) – received very mixed reviews at time of publication. Critical opinion was divided between those who thought that if only people were capable of reading Golding’s work more intelligently then his challenging, experimental novels would be seen as the classics they deserved to be; and those who thought his books were gradually sinking under a burden of symbolism, mysticism and philosophical ideas they could not support.
These views may have played a part in prompting Golding to choose a far more naturalistic approach for his sixth novel, the mid-career The Pyramid.
Golding is on record as describing The Pyramid as his “exposé of the English class system”. Anyone taking this at face value and reading the book in search of a realist ‘social novel’ trouncing class oppression and discrimination will be disappointed, however. Class is part of this story but it is really about respectability, bourgeois convention, eroticism, childhood and coming of age. It is also, it should be said, at times quite a funny novel.
The novel is set in Stillbourne, a lightly fictionalised Marlborough and concerns Oliver, the son of lower middle class parents – his father is the dispensing pharmacist for Dr Ewan, the local GP and pillar of the community. Oliver is getting ready to leave for a university place at Oxford – but not before, if at all humanly possible, he manages to lose his virginity to local siren, Evie Babbacombe, who is working class and therefore in Oliver’s estimation (and that of Dr Ewan’s son Robert) ‘available’. Evie’s father is the town crier, a police sergeant, the church caretaker – all eminently respectable functions, but nonetheless the kind of menial jobs reserved for a vestigial servant class which no longer has grand houses or a country aristocracy to employ it.
The precisely nuanced measures of social status must have seemed anachronistic even when the book was published in the late-60s, and there is no doubt that it is a deeply anachronistic book, even allowing for the fact – which is not immediately evident – that when it opens it is the early 1930s.
The novel is made up of three sections. The first and longest section concerns Oliver and his relationship with his parents, with Robert Ewan, his social superior (well-off, handsome, entitled, proud owner of a motorbike), and centrally with Evie.
The second section might be seen as Golding’s attempt at comic writing – at which he does far better than one imagine. This section takes place a year or so later. Oliver is back home at the end of his first year at Oxford and is pressured by his mother into helping out in a production being staged by the Stillbourne Operatic Society. A flamboyant guest-producer Mr Evelyn De Tracy, evidently homosexual, attempts to confide in Oliver, but the boy’s reaction is callow, ignorant and insensitive – indeed, like so much else about Oliver.
The third section is told mainly in recollection by the adult Oliver, now married and a father of two children, who is returning to Stillbourne for the first time in many years. It is 1963. This section concerns ‘Bounce’, Miss Dawlish, local spinster, music teacher and eccentric. Oliver had at one time shown great musical promise (or at least, in the estimation of his mother he had) and had been taught piano (after a fashion) by Miss Dawlish. But this section is not quite what it seems – and it reveals that much else in Stillbourne was not quite what it seemed.
For many years Miss Dawlish conducted a curious relationship with a Henry Williams and his wife, Mary. Williams began by maintaining Miss Dawlish’s little two-seater car, progressed to taking lodgings with her for himself, his wife and child, and ended in building something of a business empire – garage, petrol station, farm equipment hire – on her land and, it seems, with her frequent investment. That the relationship was perhaps more than this is hinted at. When Oliver returns to Stillbourne in this closing section, Miss Dawlish has been dead for three years and Henry Williams has paid for an extravagant gravestone to be erected in her memory. Clara Cecilia Dawlish, the stone reads, 1890-1960; and in smaller lettering at its base, three words that she would often say to her music pupils: “Heaven is Music”.
Although class (perhaps more specifically, the sense of being a social outsider) was a persisting theme in Golding’s work (and indeed in his life) he would write nothing else quite like The Pyramid. His comic sensibilities would surface again in some of his later novels especially perhaps Rites of Passage (1980), which has a distinctly comedy-of-manners feel about it at times.
Some critics felt that in The Pyramid Golding’s adventurous, exploratory edge had been blunted. “The experimental novelist…has been snuffed out by the critics”, one said. “Middlebrow” and “awful”, another called it. “The worst has happened,” wrote another, “we have Golding as social commentator writing about everyday life”.
Ultimately, however, I think that Golding has confounded his critics – as he was often to do during his heyday. The Pyramid has its weaknesses, certainly, but it is also a richer and more moving novel than many acknowledged when it first came out. It offers something very different to his great metaphysical novels – less grand, but also more human, more touching. In The Pyramid Golding produced a lightly autobiographical period-piece, a near-historical novel, in which rural Stillbourne emerges from the darkness and burns brightly in the landscape, minutely scrutinised by Golding’s eagle-eyed gaze.
Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended for those who want to see another side of William Golding.
Alun Severn
March 2019
William Golding elsewhere on Letterpress:
William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies: John Carey
Lord of the Flies and the social construction of childhood: Joanne Southall