Towards the end of William Golding's latest novel—Rites of Passage—its protagonist Edmund Talbot remarks to a naval lieutenant that 'life is a formless business, Summers, Literature is much amiss in forcing a form on it!' The notion is a central one in Golding's work and also in any appreciation of it, for literature, we are now fully aware, cannot do else other than impose a form, even when aping life at its most random and contingent. From one point of view Dean Jocelin's vision and construction of his cathedral spire is a prolonged debate on the futility of the entire purpose of trying to shape and create something out of redoubtably intractable material—the writer's problem no less than the medieval architect's. Golding goes further than this. Not content with the struggle to shape and form he also seeks answers to grave and essential questions...