SIT MIHI FAS AUDITA LOQUI
Darkness Visible was the novel that gave Golding most trouble in the writing. Although it was published in 1979, Golding's first thoughts about it are in his notebooks from 1955, as John Carey's admirable biography records. It has two strands, which hardly touch each other in the finished work – the mystic progress of Matty from fire to fire, and the monstrous descent of the twins Toni and Sophy. Although they form a compelling unity in the final work, it perhaps took the experiences of disaster and destruction in the 1970s finally to bring these two disparate ideas together. It was the one book that Golding would never speak about; it is, in my view, his most powerful achievement.
The late 1970s and early 1980s was an exceptional period in the English novel. The advent of high fantasy, the breakdown and spread of wild genre fiction, and the rise of burning questions about the state of what might have seemed a society in terminal collapse created an extraordinary series of novels in England. A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden and Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers were, in very different ways, trying to make sense of the experience of the century, and of the nation. Darkness Visible, published in 1979 at the end of a long period of murder and terrorism – the Aldo Moro case, the IRA's shift of its campaign to the mainland, the Red Army Faction in Germany and many other national and transnational groups – tries to make sense of the terrifying breakdown of society, and settles, with unforgettable power, for a rendering of that breakdown.
Matty emerges from a fire through which no child should be able to walk. What is he? But the powers that have created Sophy and Toni are still more atrocious, and only hinted at – there is an appalling scene when their father is asked 'what he does' and tells his daughter, with a breakdown of all decorum, 'You want to know? You do? I masturbate.' The fires that have created Pedigree and his dreadful passions, reaching, unknowingly, for some kind of redemption, remain mysterious. The strands of the novel barely touch. Towards the end of the novel, Matty finds Sophy's ring, but to her he is only 'the odd-job man ... his awful face'. Fido, who works in the same school, 'appeared never to have seen or heard of him'. Like Zadie Smith's recent, magnificent NW, the formal separation of the narrative episodes render, in novelistic terms, the breakdown, in connection and sense, of society.
The immediate question for the reader is 'What is Matty?' But at the end, we find ourselves asking what Sophy is, and what Toni. Matty's surface is repulsive and shocking, but he, too, wants to find out what he is – is he an angel? Who does he speak to? Sophy and Toni's surfaces are anything but shocking; they are beautiful, and their monstrosity goes unchecked and unexamined because of it. Society regards their beauty as alluring, and forgives it anything, until it is too late for forgiveness. 'Beautiful young ladies', Goodchild says, 'are not generally considered to stand in need of an understanding of transcendental philosophy on the grounds that they exemplify in themselves all the pure, the beautiful and the good.' Society gazes at their beauty like Pedigree looking at the beauty of small boys, not interested in what lies beneath – and the author of Lord of the Flies knew very well what could lie within even quite small boys. Society stands in the novel, happy to have its arms 'full of the plastic roses on which it had not been thought necessary to imitate the thorns'. The twins, however, know what they are, and what is in their own minds: when one of them looks deep into blackness, even just an ink stain of no particular shape, she destroys a party – 'that dreadful screaming and screaming!'
In a suggestive passage, Sophy ridicules the shop manager who remarks 'It's quite a coincidence, isn't it?' when the date comes to 7/7/77. Those four numbers – 'you could see them coming, and wave goodbye to them! It was the system.' Similarly, the goodness and wickedness, the encounters between the utterly unlike – Sophy and Fido, Matty and Harry Bummer, Pedigree and the children – look like the product of chance, but are in reality unavoidable. You can see them coming, and it is the system. Where does the fate that determines the outcome descend from? That is a question Matty asks himself, as the fire organizes itself around him into a shape of flame.
Darkness Visible, as John Carey rightly remarks, sounds preposterous in summary, but, experienced in full, is astoundingly compelling. The most extreme and bizarre of its events become plausible through the solidity of Golding's imagining. It may not be very likely that a Sophy would experience a spontaneous orgasm through knifing her sexual partner, but the physical sensations of the flesh under the knife, and her bodily shudderings, are so powerfully conveyed that the novel has its way with us. It has an extraordinary rhythm; huge events like Toni departing for Afghanistan and being imprisoned for drug offences are despatched in a sentence or two. The writing has a hallucinatory, incantatory force which can approach Gertrude Stein: 'Not understood, only one thing understood, the great slash he had made between the two of them, through what had not existed, oh no, could never have existed, and where there was severance, goodbye and good riddance, cruel and contemptuous act of will.' And at the centre, there is the most fragile of human encounters: a man who has come through fire meets for a second two girls whose beauty wants only to destroy, and afterwards they veer away again, to death and exile. It is the most powerful, and strangest, of all William Golding's novels, and one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth-century English novel.
