The Double Tongue - Softcover

William Golding

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571177204 ISBN 13: 9780571177202

Publisher: Penguin Books India, 1996

Synopsis

An aged prophetess at Delphi, the most sacred oracle in ancient Greece, looks back over her strange life as the Pythia, the First Lady and voice of the god Apollo. As a young virgin with disturbing psychic powers, Arieka was handed over to the service of the shrine by her parents. She has now spent sixty years as the very medium, the torn mouthpiece, of equivocal mantic utterances from the bronze tripod in the sanctuary beneath the temple. Over a lifetime at the mercy of god and priest and people she has watched the decay of Delphi's fortunes and its influence in the world. Her reflections on the mysteries of the oracle, which her own weird gifts have embodied, are matched by her feminine insight into the human frailties of the High Priest himself, a true Athenian, whose intriguing against the Romans brings about humiliation and disaster. This extraordinary short novel was left in draft at Golding's sudden death in 1993 but it is a psychological and historical triumph.

About this title

About the Author

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.

From Publishers Weekly

Nobel Laureate Golding, who died in 1993, explores the disturbing relationships between the mystical, the sacred and the profane in ancient Greece in his 13th and final novel. Narrated by an octogenarian prophetess named Arieka, the book proceeds in rigidly linear form to recount her life from birth onward, employing a distinctly British voice that is mildly philosophical, occasionally graphic, often self-deprecating and generally rather arch. The young Arieka is ugly and dangerously naive, and she apparently possesses mysterious powers and a propensity for mischief that make her impossible to marry off. In late adolescence, she is "adopted" by Ionides, the High Priest at Delphi. Worldly and somewhat cynical, Ionides manages the renowned Delphic oracle like a lucrative tourist site, often fabricating prophecies to soothe the masses. Knowing that Arieka would make an ideal Pythia?the double-tongued Lady, voice of Apollo?he takes her under his care, educating her in a massive bookroom. That Arieka herself is never fully realized as a character is partly the result of her "occupation"?she is, after all, a medium, the human mouthpiece for the prophetic god, and not much else?and in part because she has been left in draft form amid an essentially unfinished narrative. The novel's philosophical framework is in place: questions about faith and exploitation, slavery and freedom abound, as do musings on human societies and their all-too-human perversions. But the plot (and an underdeveloped subplot in which Ionides attempts to subvert Roman rule) feels rushed and inconclusive, and its characters, while articulate, remain curiously soulless.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books India
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0571177204
• ISBN 13: 9780571177202
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165