Golding died in 1993, but in 1995 Faber published the manuscript he was working on at the time of his death as The Double Tongue. Bearing in mind that this is only a second draft, The Double Tongue is a remarkable book, and no doubt, had its author lived longer, it would have been even more remarkable. As the protagonist and narrator of The Double Tongue, Arieka, muses on the ambivalence of the Oracle's responses to her questions, she notes: ‘There was always something in the answer which could be interpreted in different ways.’ The Double Tongue, too, can be interpreted in different ways. Like The Inheritors, The Spire, The Pyramid, The Scorpion God, Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, the book is another of Golding's historical novels, this time set in Greece in the first century BC. Now an elderly woman, Arieka surveys her life in terms of the utmost equivocation. A plain girl, with little chance of securing a husband, and further burdened with purported psychic powers, about which she was then, and is still now, herself sceptical, she is in effect sold to Ionides, the hereditary priest of Apollo. Ionides is gay, cynical and charming; he needs a biddable mouthpiece, a ‘Pythia’ for Apollo's answers at Delphi's omniscient Oracle. Although at the outset of the novel Arieka is the number three oracle, the two senior oracles almost immediately die and it is Arieka who must go down into Apollo's cave and transmit the words of the god. However, whether this is what she actually does is an issue at the centre of The Double Tongue. Is it really the god speaking? Or is it Arieka herself? As indeed the book's title suggests, The Double Tongue centres around doubt, scepticism and equivocation. Like Golding's earlier historical fictions, The Double Tongue uses its setting to raise issues that transcend the temporality of its chronological siting.

The book received mixed reviews, and a number of them were dismissive, suggesting that, at best, it was of primarily biographical interest.