I practise a craft I do not understand and cannot describe. Golding, Belief and Creativity (195) William Golding's last novel, Double Tongue, was left unfinished at his death in the summer of 1993. Its publishers reassure the reader that it survives as a draft neither so incomplete as to be a mere fragment nor, on the other hand, as polished as Golding would undoubtedly have wished it to be had he lived to revise it. (1) Not surprisingly, and even in light of the prevailing postmodernist hostility to notions of finality, reviewers displayed considerable anxiety about the novel's completeness and authority. suggested that it lacked the absolute verbal precision and slight tendency to overwriting that characterise much of his (Kaveney). Another remarked that one result of the lack of revision was that of it--notably the last pages--seems rather rushed (Hensher). Refusing to take the hesitantly phrased Publisher's Note at face value, another reviewer more bluntly, and somewhat unfairly, observed that One of the perks--or plagues--of being a Nobel Prize winner is that your h eirs get to publish whatever they find on your desk (McCullagh). tepid reception for Golding's last work was of a piece with the increasingly ambivalent assessments of his oeuvre that had set in with the publication of Darkness Visible (1979), and critics repeated some of the reservations expressed about his writing when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Whatever its incompleteness and failures, Double Tongue has a signal place in Golding's canon as his final statement about a number of issues that had concerned him throughout his career. It is at once an implicit defense of the aims and methods of his writing, an assessment of his own achievement, and by the choice of setting and plot, an act of homage to his muse--an admittedly unfashionable term--toward the close of his creative life. It also gives fictional expression to the sense of mystery that he felt was an ineluctable part of the creative process: The heart of our experience [that of the novelist] is not unlike that of the poet at his height. There is a mystery about both trades-a mystery in every sense of that ancient word (Belief and Creativity 192). Like Paper Men (1984), the novel is also a response to his critics. Dependent for the continued life of his work on their curatorship, Golding resents the inherent possibility of misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his ideas. He con cedes, however, that, much as he may dislike this state of affairs, he can exert only limited control over it, a more optimistic stance than that taken in Paper Men where despite Wilf Barclay's heroic efforts to maintain his independence and identity he ultimately perishes at the hands of the vulgar and vulgarizing biographer-critic, Professor Rick L. Tucker. Double Tongue continues Golding's exploration of trends in contemporary fiction, relying, like Paper Men, on postmodernist gesture to probe current notions of textual control and finality. But whereas Golding uses a contemporary setting to explore these issues in Paper Men, Double Tongue is, to use Northrop Frye's term, displaced, a fact that comprises part of its postmodernist gesturing as its distinctly twentieth- century concerns at times deliberately collide against its historical setting. At the same time, while both novels variously play with indeterminacy and end in compromised finality--in Paper Men the narrator's death in midsentence, in Double Tongue in a belief posited in incertitude--Golding yearns for absolutes. novel is, moreover, clearly what Millgate calls a testamentary act, (2) with the octogenarian writer cocking a final snook at impercipient critics as well as at the legion of readers, in particular schoolteachers, who had badgered him about what exactly he had meant in Lord of the Flies. …