First edition of William Golding’s The Pyramid. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.

Published thirteen years after Lord of the Flies, The Pyramid turns Golding’s attention from the violence of an isolated island to the quieter cruelties of an English provincial town.

The novel is set in Stilbourne, a fictional community whose apparently ordinary surface conceals an elaborate hierarchy of class, desire, embarrassment and social ambition. Its three interconnected episodes follow Oliver, the local pharmacist’s son, from adolescence into adulthood. The “pyramid” of the title is the social structure surrounding him: everyone knows his place, everyone knows who stands above and below him, and crossing those boundaries carries consequences.

It is an unusually intimate Golding novel. The grand allegorical architecture associated with Lord of the Flies remains, but here it is embedded in courtship, music lessons, amateur theatricals, sexual awakening and the small humiliations of provincial life. Golding himself had grown up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Stilbourne draws upon the landscape and social world of the English town of his youth.

The book appeared in 1967, sixteen years before Golding was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee would later praise the way his novels illuminate “the human condition in the world of today,” and The Pyramid is a particularly domestic expression of the preoccupations that run throughout his work: hierarchy, power, shame and the uncomfortable distance between civilization’s surface and human behavior beneath it.

This is the first edition, first impression, published by Faber and Faber in London in 1967, retaining its original pictorial dust jacket designed by Leonard Rosoman.

Bibliographic details
William Golding (1911–1993). The Pyramid. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. First edition, first impression. Octavo. Original dark blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt; original pictorial dust jacket by Leonard Rosoman.

Condition
Very good. Binding sound and contents clean. The original dust jacket shows some toning, rubbing and wear at the extremities, with minor edge wear and small chips, but remains attractive and substantially complete. Now preserved in a removable protective sleeve.