The Double Tongue. Written by William Golding. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Hardcover $20. By Gregory MCNamee WHEN A GREEK man of Plato's time wanted to gauge the odds of success in a given undertaking--going to war, marrying, founding a distant colony, planting a vineyard--he went off to consult an oracle. The oracle, the mouthpiece of Apollo, was usually a woman in her fifties who, having once married and borne children, now lived apart from other people. From her shrine, located in a cave or oak grove or sheltered cove, she told the Greeks what was in the hearts of the gods. She terrified them with her knowledge, and she was sure of her powers. Promised one oracle, advertising her services to the citizens of Tanagra, "I know the number of grains of sand and the dimensions of the ocean; I hear those who cannot speak." William Golding, who died in 1993, imagines a different oracle in The Double Tongue. The seer who narrates the slender novel is a young woman by the name of Arieka, "little barbarian," raised on a wealthy farm in the countryside and unusually sensitive to the subtleties of life around her. All oracles were treated as if they were virgins, one of the few perks of the job; Arieka is a virgin in fact, even if her prophetic powers are first revealed in the course of a rather shaggy episode that involves a donkey. The oracle of ancient times was given to issuing pithy slogans--"Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess" are two that survive from the ancient literature--or to reformulating questions put to her so that the petitioner heard what he wanted to hear. When, for instance, the tyrant Croesus asked the oracle at Delphi whether to wage war on Cyrus, the king of Persia, he was told, "If you do, a mighty empire will be destroyed." The oracle did not add that the empire would be Croesus's own. Golding's oracle is never so fluent. In his hands, she is given to flat observations that only occasionally attain any depth. "There's a time in childhood," she says, "when girls don't know how happy they are because they don't know they're girls if you see what I mean, though they find out later and most of them or some of them at any rate panic the way fish do in the pan." The reader may well begin to panic at encountering such a sentence. Historical fiction is notoriously thorny, and Golding falls prey to some of the worst excesses of the genre. His tale is full of anachronisms, of "boughten slaves" and "spun gold," of ahistorical digs at contemporary bugaboos, such as this nip at the hand that now feeds his estate: "There were very few books when I was a child. Of course there are more now, when people--and not the best people--have made a trade of selling them." There are some good things about The Double Tongue. The title is one of them, suggestive of the oracle's enigmatic ways and speech. And Golding paints a persuasive picture of life in the ancient districts of rural Greece, a world shot through with superstitions about the rising of the moon, the sight of a wolf, the onset of menstruation, and the rise of prophecy. He's good at capturing in words the fleeting, sorrowful passage of childhood, and on the changes that come of self-discovery and revelation. "There is a void when the gods have been there, then turned their backs and gone," he writes, truly. "Before this void as before an altar there is nothing but grief contemplating the void." But the novel is shot through with problems. One is that The Double Tongue is a posthumous book cobbled together from unfinished manuscripts by presumably well-meaning editors, and the text is full of first-draft errors that a living author would, we hope, clean up. For another, nothing ever really happens in this novel. We see no real development in Arieka herself, and we are left with little idea of what she looks like, what her daily surroundings are, what she dreams of, and what she learns in the course of becoming a priestess of Apollo. This loneliest of cloistered women remains a symbol, and a shadowy one at that. Throughout his body of work, Golding held an archly simplistic view of the world as a duality of good and evil, as an arena for the battle between them. That view may work well in sermons and morality plays. It cannot sustain most fiction, and it does not sustain this book.

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