The Pyramid

Oliver is eighteen and wants to enjoy himself before going to university. But this is the 1920s, and he lives in Stilbourne, a small English country town, where everyone knows what everyone else is getting up to, and where love, lust and rebellion are closely followed by revenge and embarrassment. The three-part structure is used ironically to point out the cruelties and torments of social class and sexual passion. Oliver himself remains largely unable or unwilling to see the consequence of these forces – even as an adult.

Golding originally wrote The Pyramid as a novella, having completed the final episode first as a stand-alone story called ‘Inside a Pyramid’. Two further ‘Stilbourne Stories’ were produced and his editor, Charles Monteith, persuaded him to turn them into a novel. There are autobiographical elements in The Pyramid, with Stilbourne standing in for Marlborough, where Golding grew up.