After the pretension of "The Spire" William Golding seems to be relaxing, or at least thudding down to earth, with "The Pyramid." Its ugly-jolly narrative is in the reminiscent, realistic vein of "Free Fall" rather than the mythmaking manner variously seen in "Lord of the Flies," "Pincher Martin," and "The Inheritors."…

Even among the crude humor, old-fashioned shock effects, vagrant symbols, and stitched-together set-pieces of the new novel, there are hints of the old thrust toward significance. "We cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos," says the narrator, making a nice point but one that is only loosely illustrated in the novel. Soon after, he yearns for absolution from his parents, "that the days of our innocence might return again." The feeling may be authentic but it occurs after such a sequence of slapstick seduction scenes, melodramatic disclosures of perversion, etc., that it is...