Hellfire is a potent symbol and William Golding makes liberal use of it in his brooding and pessimistic 1979 masterpiece Darkness Visible. As a child Matty Septimus Windgrove (or Windrove, or Windrake--the reader is never offered a solution to the mystery of his name) emerges disfigured from a burning building during the London Blitz and responds to the scars and markings he is left with by withdrawing from the society that rejects him for being physically unappealing. At school he unintentionally exposes Mr. Pedigree, the only teacher who pretends to tolerate him, as a pederast. Mr. Pedigree loses his position and guilt for being the cause of this plagues Matty for the rest of his days. In adulthood he embarks on a quasi-spiritual quest (which takes him to Australia and then back to England) for meaning—or something like it—a quest that consumes the remainder of his life. Matty's inept and largely ineffectual goodness finds its moral antithesis in the Stanhope twins, Toni and Sophy. These two begin life as deceptively angelic little girls who grow up to become seductively attractive young women, and who respond to their inauspicious upbringing (absent mother, neglectful philandering father) by embracing evil. Toni leaves home to take up a career as a political terrorist. Sophy flees a mundane existence for crime, starting out in desultory fashion as a prostitute before graduating to petty larceny and then hatching a scheme to kidnap a boy whose wealthy parents will surely pay a king's ransom to get him back. Unfortunately, the men she enlists to help carry off the plan are clods and everything goes awry, foiled in part by Matty, whose life ends as it began: in flames. Golding's characters are never in a position to clearly articulate or even reflect upon what they are seeking. In a series of exquisitely cryptic journal entries Matty writes about beings (spirits?) that visit him, but how they influence him and the things he does is unclear. Sophy does not seem necessarily determined to become a criminal; crime is simply a default response to the intolerable boredom that everyday life inflicts upon her. In the end, Darkness Visible comes across as an indictment, but of what exactly? Golding judges neither his characters nor their actions. Mr. Pedigree, though loathsome, is depicted as a pathetic victim of perverse impulses that nature has made it impossible for him to resist. He does not want to be this way, but since he can't do anything about it he might as well make the most of it. The same could be said of Matty and Sophy. Each responds to the life they are given in the only way they know how. But is the reader expected to admire Matty’s heroism and condemn Sophy’s wickedness? In the psychologically complex and morally ambiguous world that William Golding conjures up in this novel, that seems far too simple-minded a response.
It seems blasphemous to give this book anything less than five stars. It's a very important novel by a very important author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and is, incidentally, one of the writers I love best. But Time has a way of changing one's opinions.I've read this book four times over the 36 years since it was published, and on this last re-reading it struck me more forcefully than ever that while that part of the novel dealing with Matty Windrove is among the best fiction ever written, the other half -- dealing with the twins Sophie and Toni, and the friends Sim and Edwin -- is like bad John le Carré.I've never read anything more gripping and mysterious than the Matty sections of the book, in particular the prolonged adventures in Australia. The 1970s in general were years of despair for western culture. We faced not only the almost daily shock of international terrorism, horrible acts committed by apparently soulless young people, but our artistic heritage seemed to have petered out. The arts had no answer to the imminent disintegration of our values. In literature, it was the advent of magical realism, pioneered by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, that pointed a way forward -- and Golding's work formed an important part of the movement.But the theme of the perverted sisters, the terrorism, the ex-soldiers and so forth, is not well-done. Golding makes monsters of his villains. There were real and all-too-horrible roots of 1970s violence -- outrage against American foreign policy in general and the Vietnam War in particular, against the poverty of the Third World, against the treatment of the Palestinians, against the widespread corruption so visible throughout Europe. Golding has his terrorists simply born evil. As a result, this theme is distinctly inferior to Le Carré, who at least knew what he was talking about. The Honorable Schoolboy was published in 1977, two years before Darkness Visible, and clearly had an influence of some kind on the final stages of Golding's novel, which had been incubating for almost a quarter of a century in Golding's mind. The influence was not a good one, taking Golding out of the metaphysical realm, where he was incomparable, and into the realm of the spy novel, where he floundered.It seems to me that Golding betrayed the original scope of the novel, an exploration of mysticism and asceticism, by lowering it in the second half to the level of popular entertainment. The marriage between the magical Matty material and the Greenfield material is so uneasy that the book almost falls into two pieces in your hands -- and even the most enthusiastic readers have struggled to reconcile the halves.It remains a magnificent, majestic novel, which everybody should read. But like its protagonist Matty, it's a work half-glorious, half-marred.
What do You think about Darkness Visible (1999)?
This novel begins with a child emerging from a fire caused by German bombs in World War II London. Anonymous and badly disfigured, the child will be named Matty and will become one of the central characters in Nobel laureate William Golding's disturbing 1979 novel. Matty asks the questions "Who am I," "What am I," and finally "What am I to do." His lonely journey through life, with only a Bible for a companion, brings him into contact with a number of other characters who, though not scarred physically, are indeed scarred psychologically. Perhaps the most memorable of these are Mr. Pedigree, a compulsive pedophile, who becomes a brilliant but sad case study of obsession, and Sophy, a young woman who thinks constantly of "the cone of black light" that extends from the back of one's head into infinity--that trail of darkness we drag behind us. Matty is clearly symbolic of the modern man who no longer knows what or who he is but can sprinkle his language with fragments of apocalyptic biblical rhetoric, even if the latter is sometimes incoherent. Other characters too reflect various facets of a world gone awry. The Cornwall-born Golding, as all readers of Lord of the Flies know, is more than a little pessimistic about humanity. This novel of several story lines does not weave together at the end as tightly as I had expected. Nevertheless, for an intensely dark but acute vision of modern man, "Darkness Visible" is recommended. And for someone like me, who grew up with the prose of the King James Bible, Matty's Bible-soaked language is at times distressing and at times downright funny.
—Stephen Durrant
A man disfigured as a boy in the fires of WWII London and a beautiful young woman represent polar opposites of the spiritual spectrum, the first a literal-minded social outcast who believes himself to be in communion with holy spirits and undergoes great sacrifice in order to do their bidding and the second a believer in chaotic chance who exploits herself and others in order to satisfy her need for autonomy.William Golding is on a serious mission here. He is concerned with questions of judgment, morality, community, and spirituality, but he denies the possibility of easy answers. The result is a dense novel, generally difficult, sometimes entertaining, written in prose that I found to be needlessly verbose. It is an interesting book, but I did not find the main characters to be convincing as individuals so much as vehicles for the author's explorations of the extremes of human nature. Some of the secondary characters, particularly the bookseller Sim Goodchild and the pedophile Mr. Pedigree, were more compelling. That they figure prominently in the conclusion is to the novel's credit.
—David Bonesteel
It was dark, intriguing, and vivid, certainly; Golding has that mastered. I suppose I didn't like it quite as much as The Paper Men because (1) I'm naturally going to be more drawn to books about writers, (2) the humor wasn't as present, or at least was different (3) reading Matty's sections and especially his journal felt like revisiting the work of Medieval female mystics - interesting, but not my cup of tea (4) it had the same abrupt, cut-off ending, but it worked MUCH more effectively in Paper Men, even if it was a bit corny.
—Jillian
