Book description
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.
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, submarines
and aircraft. He was present at the sinking 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.
