Books like The Pyramid

'I did not deceive myself into believing that I was good looking, but I had heard that girls were relatively indifferent to that. I hoped they were; for as I inspected my face in the mirror, I came to the regretful conclusion that it was not the sort of face I should fall in love with myself. There was nothing fragile about it. I tried smiling winningly at myself, but the result made me grimace with disgust.'I didn't expect this book to make me cry. So much of it is written with an exceptionally witty, darting lightness that I wasn't entirely prepared for the cumulative weight of its emotional insight.It's a powerful, deft, *modest* novel that brilliantly marries comedy and nostalgia.William Golding is an outstanding writer. His books are all about — and turn upon — perception. He has a clear-eyed way of inhabiting his characters. In this respect, I think there's a quality of (early) Joyce about his writing. And that's a massive great compliment, I should add.Golding is stylistically restrained, pellucid. Consistently, he pulls away from the melodramatic, the glib, the tritely resonant. He understands how people — real people — speak and think and feel. He doesn't *give them lines*, like some second-rate dramatist. Again like Joyce, much of the book is concerned with (admirably) stunted, partial exchanges between characters intent upon their own purposes. And when, finally, Golding allows dialogue to erupt into blazoned feeling, it is extraordinarily powerful in its fractured incoherence:'That's right. That's it exactly—Everything's—*wrong*. Everything. There's no truth and there's no honesty. My God! Life can't—I mean just out there, you have only to look up at the sky—but Stilbourne accepts it as a *roof*. As a—and the way we hide our bodies and the things we don't say, the things we daren't mention, the people we don't meet—and that *stuff* they call music—It's a lie! Don't they understand? It's a lie, a lie! It's—obscene!'This is a book about growing up and understanding people retrospectively. About the arrogance of adolescence, the sad recognition of one's own limitations. And about the slow, late, partial acquisition of compassion.It is a beautiful novel.