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Darkness Visible

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Best known for his how-to-survive-amongst-prim-and-proper-turned-savage-children-on-a-stranded-island guide, "Lord of the Flies", Golding published a much more sinister and perhaps even more relevant work in 1979, "Darkness Visible." Though groundbreaking in its own right, Lord of the Flies took a sense of content that could legitimately appeal to all audiences without any tongue-in-cheek aspect to it---this book, however, not only cross that line, but spits on it when it passes by.

The story revolves mainly around two people: a World War II damaged boy, Matty, and Sophy, a young girl whose twin suddenly disappears one day, leaving her to grow up on her own without the presence of the other half that had been such a force in her upbringing. Golding, after presenting the two characters and their backgrounds, weaves an intricate plot of terrorism, drugs, sexual depravity, violence, and spirituality using both of them together unwittingly in many of the same events that affect their lives.

Yes, as the other reviewers said and as the editors' reviews noted, this is definitely a weird book, so if you can't stomach it, don't buy the book.. What with the deviant tendencies (take your pick---an implied child molester, a drug dealer, a dominatrix, a chess master who seems to have a new wife/mother for his children daily) of the personalities of the people Golding forms, one can easily be tempted to laugh this one off as a wannabe shocker with no real substance---but it's not. I'd rank this up with the best of his works, hands down---there is intelligence, mellifluous imagery, cleverness, wit and humor galore, a sense of cynicism, but overall, incredible creativity and prose in Darkness Visible. It may be a difficult book to get through at times because of the way it is set up and the changes in its style at random, but if you're looking for something different that will challenge some of your thinking and implant in you a different perspective on a lot of things going on in our world, don't pass it up.

I actually received this book in error (my error) but was drawn to the title and read it anyway. I was stunned at the grace and clarity in which it moved in view of the dense and thought provoking subject matter. It will rest on the top of my book shelf, along with the other life changing novels.

As with all great books, Darkness Visable is multifaceted and open to interpretation. However, if there is a central theme to this book that I can grasp, it is a sort of Freudian notion that trauma as children, and particularly rejection by parental figures, leads - in the case of Sophy and Matty - to profound and irreversable damage later in life.

Sophy's decent into depravity started not with drugs or sexual experimentation, but with rejection by her father. As Golding describes it, with obvious Freudian overtones, as a small girl she attempted to woo him, succeeding only once in getting him to take her for a walk. During this walk, the young girl wished her mother and sister would never return - even wished they would die - so she would not have to share her father ever again. Later, there is her subsequent curiousity about the "auntie's" bedroom, and what may have transpired there; and her terrible jealousy about her father's impending second marriage.

The frustrated craving for parental love is less obvious in Matty, but nevertheless present. Matty's craving for affection becomes fixated on the pederast Pedigree, a sort of unwitting reciprocity of the latter's perverted passions, which may have led Matty to murder his rival Henderson. A desire to redeem himself and win Pedigree's approval becomes the defining feature of the rest of Matty's life.

The final irony in the book is that Matty, who has absolutely nothing in life, nevertheless finds a sort of redemption in the end, in spite of his slide towards insanity and the occult. On the other hand, by the time the story ends it is obvious that Sophy, who to all outward appearances had every advantage in life, has become an irredemable sociopath. While wounds from war and fire can be mended, there are some less visable scars that never heal.

Brilliant title, making allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost. This was the tactile impression of the Angels newly fallen to Hell. Golding deals with the concept of evil as a universal human experience, and chose the phrase from Milton because it deals with the aesthetic of Hell, which is very real and possible, and as it turns out, necessary to varying degrees. There are characters in the book that are quite reprehensible, yet the experience of evil, say, in Matty, is integral to his entire existence, and it is also integral to the other characters as well. Really the only redeeming qualities visible are in people that are at least at odds with the evil within them. The people that are completely reconciled to evil are the dangerous ones. But all this is pretty straightforward and can be found in the book of Romans. But the character that gets scary is Matty, whose sense of personal evil is so profound that it causes torment in him exceeding the stricken conscience of a person who has really screwed up (put very mildly). This 'condition,' leads to some interesting interpretations of experience. The next two paragraphs deal w/ this book as it relates to schizophrenia, a condition that Golding suffered from. The last paragraph has nothing to do with this. I wrote an enormous amount & did so because the book means so much to me. It astonishes me that I had never heard of it. If you stop here, I hope you will take my advice and buy the book.

Before I say what I am about to say, I don't mean to put anybody off by suggesting superior understanding, yet I have some insight into the central character. The delusions described in the journal create & are a reaction to absolute horror. I can tell you from personal experience that Golding did not open the book with Matty emerging from the fire for no reason. Golding suffered from schizophrenia and though he must have functioned beyond the level of Matty, his descriptions validate in my mind that he had like delusions. There have of late been a barrage of movies that deal with the illness, all with varied degrees of success, but having lived with the illness I can say that the descriptions of Matty's hallucinations/delusions could not have been written by someone w/out the illness, and indeed, could not have been written by most people w/ the illness. Most of what is put out can be identified as done by someone w/out an intimate knowledge of the cognitive oddities because almost none of the people with them are capable of making films. It is a challenge to live.

The one thing I will say is that I have come to understand that despite the torment such 'delusions' create while they are experienced and however incapable a person may be at dealing with them at the time, these 'visions' are just what I called them. Glimpses into the hidden. Don't believe me? See Huxley. A blessing? Well, until 1952 most people with the illness suffered tremendously and died early which was probably the best part. Luckily, now there is effective treatment. So I do not glamorize this condition. There is no doubt that Golding had this condition and somehow dealt with it effectively enough. Also Dostoevsky in 19th Cent. St. Petersburg. These are exceptions in two ways: 1. they were able to survive w/out treatment. 2. they were able to make something of what they had 'seen.' I realize I sound like I'm full of it. If so, ignore this.

Now my impressions aside from the character Matty:

When I read Darkness Visible I had to admit for the first time that the universe is not based upon simple justice and many things that are supposed to be dealt out according to (supposed) righteousness or worthiness are indeed rather arbitrary, at least according to what we understand. I do believe in a higher justice now, and it is one that is not so simply arrived at. No one is teaching it in a church, yet some of the greatest teachers have been the ones to help me. St. John of the Cross wrote a book 600 or so years ago that helps describe the dynamic of pain, pain so intense that it might as well be called hell. However, when it is experienced with hope, it is not hell. And this is not woe is me, many people know exactly what I am talking about, and most of the ones that don't know about some other kind of pain.

I have to say that if anyone swallows this book, it's going to be bitter for a while. The Tibetan book of the dead and like I said St. John of the Cross (Dark Night of the Soul) really are the two main sources that have helped me arise from the earth-shattering implications of this book. Actually I forgot one other. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (tho I have no interest in using LSD or Mescaline and tho the conclusion to Heaven and Hell is sloppy and dismal) by Huxley. Do not stop at Pincher Martin and Lord of the Flies. Though the latter is by far what makes Golding a well-known literary figure, Darkness Visible is the height of his achievement, and makes him a creative & intellectual giant. And--though it might seem odd, I believe Golding is actually a great spiritual teacher, though, when it comes to this book, he leaves you alone to repair the universe that he has just shattered.

Golding is in top form in this story about the gradual descent into terrorism by twin siisters; and an unlikely "savior" that comes in the form of a man deformed by a bombing raid. Again, Golding proves that creating a mystery amidst thoughtful social critcism leads to a great and imaginiative story. It is dark, strange and stays with you for weeks.

It's been thirty years since I first read this book. I realize now this was the second Golding novel I first fell into at too young an age to fully understand all its implications, but intelligent enough (and "old enough," in terms of a bright child's sense of adults' hypocrisy, and experiences of the inevitable cruelty of this world -- peers, bullies, parents, teachers) to grasp the horror.

At age 9, my father gave me Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and Golding's "Lord of the Flies" to read. I had been reading since age 4 by that time, and was proud to accept the gifts of my terribly educated and terrifyingly unpredictable father. In retrospect, I realize how inappropriate these gifts were for my age, but as I was already reading several grades above my chronological grade level in school, I suppose he thought I could "handle it" and that, moreoever, I would "get it." Well, it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that these books either cemented in me a sense that already existed, or sparked in me a sporadically hopeful but mostly pessimistic outlook on what is now probably considered the cliche of "man's inhumanity to man."

Being too young to grasp the larger issues, though, meant that in my wise-beyond-my-years-but-still-a-child way, I was drawn in by the prose and by the absolutely note-perfect -- in many chilling ways -- details of the points of view of the school boy characters in "Lord of the Flies" (and Bradbury's Montag's struggle against the horrible conformity and desire for ignorant bliss of all his fellow men, including his wife). I read "Lord of the Flies" over and over because I *was* all those boys; longing for the freedom of their adult-free island world, wanting to be a hunter, knowing I would think what Ralph thought, fearing I would act as Jack did, realizing that the ones I was really closest to being and understanding were Piggy and Simon -- doomed. I didn't know anything of the author, and I didn't care anything about him, at the time; he had written a novel that was both my dream -- to be free of the painful, punishing authority of adults -- and my nightmare: that freedom would also mean that there would be no protection from injustices and cruelties by others my age, there'd be little or no comfort, and my survival would depend wholly on my being as brutal about surviving as the hunters were about hunting.

The great horror of reading "Lord of the Flies" at the age of 9 was realizing that while I would have *liked* to be like Ralph, and while I had the sensitivities and proclivities of Ralph (but more Piggy and Simon), I would most likely -- faced with the same situation -- have allied with Jack and his hunters, or at least have stood by impassively as they killed off Piggy and Simon, just to save my own neck, perhaps lamely trying to help Ralph at the end in a doomed attempt to redeem myself. I might have been too young to understand the larger philosophical issues, but I certainly understood the baseness of man (in myself) and the depths to which one might sink morally in an effort to survive physically, emotionally, *socially* (because, in such a situation, your social death means... your actual death). Who, as a geeky, too-bright young child, hasn't seen and sensed the cruelty of other children (and adults), and yet also participated in it when the opportunity arose to smugly make known one's superior social rank?

I wasn't proud of recognizing these things in myself, and so starkly, with the aid of "Lord of the Flies"; I was ashamed. There are a couple people, to this day, I regret not having apologized to in grammar school for the banal cruelties I extended their way, which they probably haven't forgotten to this day (and us in our 40s now), and which I certainly haven't forgotten, because they make me cringe with self-loathing to think of them, and they were done for the weakest of reasons: peer pressure (I hate that term, but it is an accurate one). Little did I know how much worse adolescence would be in terms of testing one's true beliefs; little did I know -- although "Lord of the Flies" certainly gave me a terrible glimpse -- how I weak I would prove to be, only proving Golding right, so right.

I re-read "Lord of the Flies" in high school (I thought, oh, this'll be great: I've already read it a couple times, so it'll be easy to write a paper about... not realizing how wrapped back up into it I would become again, understanding so much more with just a few years' wisdom gained -- and so little wisdom, at that; who knows *anything* when just an adolescent?). It hit me with perhaps less visceral force at age 16 than at age 9, but with so much greater moral force, that I shortly gave up participating in anything based on peer pressure so that I could live with myself and not cringe inside at who I'd become. But that began my social suicide, a sinking to the bottom of the social ranks, and made me a target in the rather vicious teen world of kill or be killed. So I could live *with* myself, internally, but in the "real world" -- the external -- I became more painfully isolated, and found this other way to live was just as difficult as the previous; I could more or less sleep with a fairly clear conscience, except that my nightly pre-sleep minutes (sometimes hours) would often be spent re-living my humiliations of that particular day, and the days preceding.

In 1982 I was in a book store (I spent a lot of time in book stores as a high schooler), and chanced across a paperback copy of "Darkness Visible." Having already read "Lord of the Flies" and experienced its ability to shake one's faith not only in mankind, but in oneself, I didn't even think; I just grabbed it off the shelf and bought it. I was 15 years old, even more finely tuned to the hypocrisy and lies of adults, and expected I would be able to "handle" "Darkness Visible." The Milton reference was completely lost on me, of course.

But "Darkness Visible" pulled me into the utterly convincing and intricately detailed inner worlds of its monstrous main characters. I was powerless to resist; the prose practically reached out of the book and dragged me in to live with these characters. I had a younger sister, only 2 years younger, so I could relate to the way Sophy and Toni are "everything to each other" and how wonderful and terrible that is, how such sibling relations test both the boundaries of love and intense hate. Golding's rendering of the characters' internal worlds and the twins' childhood world with each other (and Matty's childhood world in school) is so intimate and so accurately evokes a child perspective; his portrayal of Matty's inner world, and his experiences in the outer world, is crushingly detailed and full up with the literal misunderstandings that children and innocent minds make of what others, especially adults, say.

But I think what perhaps spoke to me most was the "weirdness" of Toni, as well as Matty's bizarre experiences with the figures who "don't appear to him, but bring him before them" (I'm paraphrasing an actual quote). I didn't know it at the time, in the way that one doesn't see the forest for the trees, and in the especially adolescent way one can not step really outside oneself and see the dysfunction, but merely accepts it as part of one's landscape, internal and external... but I was spiraling down into a major depression which, within less than 10 years, would leave me requiring medication for basically the rest of my life. In this way, I entirely related to Toni's "weirdness" and how it felt to be "weird" inside, and Matty's monstrous-ness. Indeed, it becomes obvious after Sophy has left that Toni is herself spiraling down into depression, a nihilism born of the emptiness inside and outside her.

Another reviewer here has mentioned the fact that these characters are traumatized, and I agree. There is much said these days about abuse and trauma, and of course Matty's having been rescued from a post-bombing inferno, but left permanently physically damaged and disfigured, qualifies as "Trauma". But there is only just now beginning to be understood the "traumas" of living life, of growing up... which is how Tony and Sophy are traumatized: the loss of their mother, the revolving succession of "aunties," the distance and fearfulness of their father, essentially a rejection. In my childhood days, no one really recognized the abuse or beating of children as abuse or "Trauma" (or even "trauma") but I can tell you, it is trauma (choose big T or little t as you please; they're equally damaging). The rejection of parents whose love is conditional on their children not being who they actually *are*, but who they *want* their children to be, is also traumatic; it's a negation of the self, a deeply felt rejection that leaves one with self-doubt that, when combined with physical trauma, can quite twist a person internally. I have spent much of my life trying to "fix" myself of dysfunction and damage that was taken out on me in childhood, and while a good portion of the "acting out" is gone, the internal thoughts haven't substantially changed so much as had the volume turned down a bit.

While that's great, and much farther than I ever thought I would come, it's also left me wondering why I didn't turn out to be a sociopath. I don't think it's because of gender (as far as I'm concerned, women can as easily become sociopaths as men; they're just more likely to enact their sociopathy in passive-aggressive ways as "befits" a "lady" where men would just be aggressive-aggressive). I think the only thing that really saved me -- and what does NOT save Sophy and Toni -- was adequate (and, a day late and a dollar short, more than adequate; but that's another story) mothering.

It's that moderating influence of mothering that none of these characters are allowed in the world of "Darkness Visible" -- Matty has no parents, and he gets no mothering, except an exquisitely brief experience of hugs and comfort from one of his nurses, whom he loses when he is transferred to another hospital. Sophy and Toni have only their cold, distant father and a succession of "aunties" and each other. But their competitiveness -- perhaps an inescapable fact of sibling-hood? -- negates what comfort they might take in each other; their closeness is broken up by their resistance to being subsumed by the other when in their "everything to each other" love/hate world of being too often and too long left to their own devices (by a father with too many of his own problems to pay much attention to them, and too incapable of understanding needs they are too young to articulate). And so the world is, for all of them, emotionally cold and uncaring, leaving a not consciously known or acknowledged hollowness or void in each, which is yet sensed helplessly, sometimes angrily and with the rage of abandonment, and mostly hopelessly, by each individual.

The void in each of them has to be filled with *something* -- and it is... in ways it shouldn't be, in the way that nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it with whatever is at hand, natural or unnatural, dear or depraved, soothing or sick, and all points in between. There is a deep kind of grief in this novel, a haunting sense not of loss, but of *never* *having* *had*. Yet the prose is so beautiful, so stunningly clear at times, that it grips you and pulls you along, even when you can't tell what is going on, even when you realize what is going on and want to look away (for isn't that what made the three of them the way they are? all that looking away by those who should have been looking *at* each of them) because it's so disturbing.

This deep grief, the angry void that subsides into apathy and hopelessness (for Toni), each tries to fill with some kind of meaning. It is not filled, of course, and their attempts are in some respects so narcissistic -- but it's the narcissism of a child, placing him/herself at the center of their small world, feeling him/herself to be both at fault and yet blameless, cause and effect. And yet it's also the narcissism of the sociopath, of one who can't be down in the mundane world with all the others to whom nothing ever happens, because that would negate the extraordinary-ness each secretly (or consciously) believes him/herself to possess, and that failure to be as extraordinary as he/she wishes he/she was, is so self-erasing that it must be either dismissed, fought off, or wholly unacknowledged... even if not to fit into the mundane world of others is also lonely and isolating.

I of course read the book again multiple times, over the years, trying to understand that which seemed to dance just outside my vision, to grasp the swirling miasma of thoughts that seem to rise up in the back of the mind while reading this novel, so specific and authentic and definite are the prose, the characters, their stories... and yet somehow so mystical and *connected* to the unspeakable and the transcendent as well. I can't say I understand it any better now, but I was certainly branded by the first reading, and remembered whole passages nearly verbatim for the clarity and specificity of the world they conjure, into which you, the reader, are immersed. It is an experience not to be missed; it is disturbing; it is evocative; it is moving; and, perhaps when you least expect it, it will sear you with it's hopeless beauty. You will perhaps be lost in thought about these characters for days or weeks after you've finished it, pondering their fates, wondering could things have turned out any other way for any of them, where in their paths could they have turned aside or turned back, or wondering if all that occurs is somehow predestined and they themselves moved inexorably towards their fates like chess pieces pushed by unseen hands.

There is a great catharsis in this novel, which is perhaps what one other reviewer meant by being shattered by it. I have used so many words here and yet, somehow, I feel I haven't sufficiently described why, even though "Darkness Visible" made me weep when I first read it -- which is rare, in books (my being brought to tears by them; the last book was Toni Morrison's "Beloved" -- I would (and have) read "Darkness Visible" again (and again), still despairing that I didn't *truly* understand it, still waiting (maybe hopelessly?) for that which is just outside my vision, the heavy weight of the rising, swirling thoughts, images, and *senses* Golding conjures but which remain in shadow just behind my conscious, reading mind, to all make itself *known* and explicable in ways I suspect it may never. And which I'll probably aspire to uncovering by reading (and re-reading) this book every few years until I'm too old and blind to read anymore.

This is very much a tour de force: evocative, disturbing, haunting, moving. It is not for those unwilling to invest time and emotion in it (yet not all that long a read, actually), and also not for the easily squicked.

I recently read "Lord of the Flies" and then happened upon this lesser-known book by William Golding. I am a slow reader, but I read this novel surprisingly quickly, and was drawn in and eventually absorbed by the characters, their inner dialogues and their private universes. Matty, the "Anti-Hero/Martyr", represents many things for me--a prophet in the wilderness, a shaman, a clown, whom I would not consider to be evil; he is not vengeful, violent, nor is he vindictive. And yet in his silence, he can be frightening; he commits "a grievous deed" for which he turns to the Bible, and then to spirits/spiritual guides, in a quest for redemption. There is a dreamy, surreal aspect to the prose, that occasionally left me confused as to the exact nature of whatever reality was being described at a particular moment; for example, near the end of the book--is Sophy (one of two "evil twins") actually brutalizing the young boy that has been kidnapped for her, or only suffering from criminal delusions of grandeur? Is she merely imagining this violence? I am impressed with the way Golding develops both the inner and outer lives of the two little girls (Sophy and Toni), who start out innocently enough as children. Sophy and Toni grow up in an emotional vacuum, nursing dangerous fantasies, as a result of their father's neglect. Nevertheless--in the end, both girls make their choices about the type of individuals they want to be.

Certainly the traumatic childhoods of Sophy and Toni contribute to their respective downward spirals into delinquency. [And yet others, who in real life come from scarier circumstances than these two little girls, can go on to accomplishment, achievement and greatness in their adult lives.] Sophy and Toni are both very bright girls; at least metaphorically, the twins resemble Regan and Goneril from Shakespeare's "King Lear", minus Cordelia. Matty chooses his destiny as well; the difference being that I can sympathize with Matty, as he, and his life, has been so literally "scarred" from the beginning. Like Quasimodo, the archetypal "ugly monster" often has the biggest heart. Matty's deformity also makes him stronger than either Sophy or Toni; he is resiliently independent from a very young age. And as reclusive and mysterious as Matty is--I believe him to be compassionate. After reading this book, which contains some "Dickensian" aspects (particularly the character of Mr. Pedigree), in my understanding of the term--I can see why Golding became a Nobel laureate. Not only by means of his intellectual and creative gifts, but also via the empathy and understanding he shows for his characters. All of which Golding is able to elucidate in a prose that is often poetic, and explicit when necessary (surely this was much easier to do in 1979 when this book was published, then it would have been in 1954 when "Lord of the Flies" was published). I am looking forward to reading Golding's second novel, "The Inheritors". There is a lot to be learned from this multi-faceted writer.

Stephen C. Bird, author of "Hideous Exuberance: A Satire"

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.

Golding's vision of mans dark side and how the fight between good and evil is won by restraint.

In order to get the whole picture the reader needs to submerge into the lifes of all the characters and then pull back away from it all. First then it is possible to see the story and how it unfolds. It is complex and requires patience but the reward is worth it and can be rather refreshing.

I do recommend it

i don't know if there's ever been a character as scary as young Sophy Stanhope.

Watching her "flower" is especially disturbing as it's made plausible by hearing the thoughts insider her head.