The Pyramid
Hard to believe, really, that a writer of Golding's intensity had such a bland, innocuous novel in him, still less that he bothered to publish it. You can see the point of this as an exercise, an attempt to make the fearsome imagination that characteristically drives his fiction confront everyday life.
But the results are quite frighteningly dull: three novellas that wander around aimlessly with no particular place to go, relying on uneven characterisation and observation that never match Orwell's lovely eye for the England of a similar era. There are some pleasing touches along the way, but no warmth, no depth, nothing to make it all come alive. Oddly, Golding seems to struggle more with commonplace mundanity than he does with the extraordinary....
The Spire
A masterpiece of quite unsurpassed power. That power, driving what is essentially an extended parable, is derived from the key elements of Golding's incredible writing: his breathtaking vision and ambition, the almost physical density of his prose, the remarkable subtlety and skill that enables him to describe emotions, thoughts, ideas as vividly as he conjures up unseen, forgotten worlds at the edge of human experience.
This is, perhaps, the most astonishing product of that artistry, a novel that burns with the insane obsessions of its central character and, magnificently, peaks and slides with his perceived failure and subsequent death. As ever, there are occasional false steps - inevitable when you push the envelope so far - but the overriding impression is of Golding's range, capable of describing the monstrous strain of a disintegrating, splintering cathedral and the tender, hushed moments at the end of a human life with equal gravity, dexterity and potency.
One of the great modern novels, even if history won't ever acknowledge it as such.
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