What I said then:
[Another] forensic examination of humankind’s inherent bastardry, from the author of The Lord of the Flies and the brilliant To the Ends of the Earth trilogy.
What I say now:
Yep, William Golding was one pessimistic cat. If you're a character in a Golding novel and you're deeply deeply flawed, you've actually come out ahead: most of his characters are murderers, charlatans and thieves. Or, in this instance, paedophiles.
A small boy emerges from a horrific fire in London during the blitz. Given the name 'Matty,' his burns make him terrible to look upon and as he grows up the revulsion of those around him separates him from the rest of humanity. At school he is haplessly responsible for the sacking of a paedophile teacher (named, hilariously, Mr. Pedigree ... or 'Pedders' for short), before travelling through Australia for a while and slowly growing mad. Or becoming a conduit for religious revelations. Or something. When he returns to England a couple of elderly locals convince themselves that he's a saint.
At the same time, two sociopathic twin girls are growing up in the same town. Though they hate each other as much as they hate their father, his various girlfriends and the rest of the world, they'r always forced together because of the frustrating circumstance of having shared a womb. As adolescence arrives each explores the intersections between power, violence, sex and politics in their different ways. One becomes a terrorist (the novel was written in the 70's, the first age of terrorism), while the other plans a kidnapping, hoping to ransom a royal - not for ideological reasons, but simply to make enough money to last her the rest of her life.
When Darkness Visible is good, it's absolutely brilliant. When it's bad, it's completely incomprehensible. Matty is an enigma: what he's thinking is rarely made clear, either through his actions or through Golding's writing. Even when, for a couple of chapters, Golding presents Matty's own journals, they are so obtuse that they might as well be written in gobbledegook. He isn't alone in being difficult to understand; almost every character acts in mysterious ways for no apparent reason, or draws absurd conclusions from meaningless acts, or speaks in such a way that their intentions are obscured. In a nutshell: following what's actually happening in this book is really bloody hard. When you have to read a sentence twice to understand it, that's bad. When you have to read every sentence twice, that's terrible.
But ... but ... there's a section in the middle of the book in which Matty drifts into the background and Sophy, one of the twins, becomes the novel's focus ... and it's great. Written with infinitely more clarity, peopled with characters whose motivations make sense (if only to them), and narrating the adolescence of a cheerfully sociopathic teenage girl, that section was fantastic, and showed off why Golding won a Nobel prize. When Sophy, after believing for years that sex was merely a foolish chore, achieves orgasm for the first time by stabbing her partner with a pen-knife, Golding is a good enough writer that the scene isn't merely sensationalist, or bawdy; it's the first time the self-absorbed girl has truly felt anything, and the writing makes of it a moment of bizarre beauty.
Unfortunately, the novel lapses back into its weird affectations towards the end. I've loved some of Golding's work in the past, but could only truthfully say I loved bits and pieces of this one. The whole was too disjointed and vague for my taste. Oh well.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
books to go: 113
i hope that Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood isn't so bad it's taking you a month to read it!
ReplyDelete