Books: Human Geometry

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THE PYRAMID by William Golding. 183 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.50.

William Golding is a philosophical novelist whose moral theorems in hu man geometry are demonstrated with severe economy. His originality lies in his ability to trace complex psychological diagrams within the traditional form of the novel without technical stunts or verbal virtuosity. His art concerns extreme situations and final choices.

Hitherto, Golding has preferred to present his characters almost as abstractions. Lord of the Flies was a laboratory demonstration of original sin taking place on a rather unreal island; The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin dealt with a mid-Atlantic castaway who seems to choose life with pain over easeful death, but is in fact already dead and in purgatory; The Spire set a drama of spirit and flesh in a remote time. The Pyramid represents no retreat from these tours de force, but Golding's command of fiction is now such that he can dress his tragedians in street clothes, put them on a topographically exact stage and fix the time in the present. This is a more interesting literary exploit.

Abortive Lives. Ostensibly, The Pyramid is a simple story told by a man named Oliver, who recounts his life at three stages. The base of this living pyramid is an English village near the Trollopean cathedral town of Barchester; the village is Stilbourne, appropriately named, since it encloses so many deformed and abortive lives.

To Oliver, Stilbourne is an awful shambles from which he must escape. He is the classic adolescent—ruthless, secretive and vulnerable; few better studies have been written of his condition. He wrestles with sacred and profane loves, one represented by Imogen, a local beauty and culture snob who is headed for a cathedral marriage, and the other by Evie, the town crier's pretty daughter, a "secular" sexpot with eyes like black plums. For Oliver, a chapel-going apothecary's son, marriage is unthinkable with either, even when he gets Evie pregnant (or so she lets him think). It sounds like an un-American tragedy; yet Golding's story is no glum Dreiserian dirge. Eros wears a comic mask.

Seen from the outside, through the eyes of Stilbourne's dim but eccentric characters, Oliver is just a bright boy with a small talent for music and a chance to rise on the "awful ladder" of the British class system by way of a science scholarship to Oxford. The boy views himself as others do—a mod erate success. It is only in the later episodes that he comes to see himself as Novelist Golding sees him—a moral failure. Sadly, he recognizes that he is one of those who would like to pay anything for a chance to give life to himself and others, but that actually "he would never pay more than a reasonable price." It is not enough, for by then he is a successful career man in science (he made poison gas during World War II), and his real life lies stillborn behind him.

Nothing Is Simple. The people in Golding's work are not so much characters as beings. Somehow, they are elevated above their existence in the commonplace world into a region where nonpractical life is led; behind the plane surface lies another dimension. On the level of social comedy, Miss Dawlish, Oliver's music teacher, is a Margaret