For Nobel Laureate William Golding, Darkness Visible was not a popular (or even generally critical) success. Nevertheless, the novel, written after a gestation of twelve years, shows a bold commitment to the Christian values that Golding had previously treated indirectly through metaphors. To be sure, the moral parable of the book is clear enough: transcendent grace is revealed “darkly” in a world of evil. Yet the darkness, the ambiguity, upon which Golding insists puts off many readers. Why, for example, does Matty expose his true nature to Mr. Pedigree instead of the sturdily normal Mr. Goodchild? Sim Goodchild is a kindly man, a rational man, a spokesman for goodwill and toleration, whereas Sebastian Pedigree is a shabby, timid lover of boys, a deviant. Mr. Goodchild, however, lacks the power of intuition. Mr. Pedigree, for all of his flaws (his human “pedigree” of original sin), understands the reality of suffering, the bleakness of sin and guilt, the pitiful yearning for love. Only to this miserable man Matty reveals himself with a sacrifice of love.

In Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (1962), James Gindin argues that Golding’s metaphors are “gimmicks” that work against the structure of his fiction, “clever tricks that shift the focus or the emphasis of the novel as a whole.” Yet the reader of this book may reject entirely the metaphor of transcendent grace through which Golding allows Matty to transform himself from fire-monster to saint. Stripped of Christian embeddings, Darkness Visible offers a reverse image of irony and absurdism.

In a world lacking grace, Matty’s self-sacrifice is nothing more than a delusion, the acting out of a fantasy from the twisted mind of a creature deprived throughout his lonely life of the realities of companionship and affection. In such a world, too, the only certainties for most people are cruelty and madness. The novel begins with the insanity of the firebombing of London; it ends with the near assassination of a foreign student and the self-immolation of a fanatic. From this skeptical vantage, the cosmic drama of Christian salvation shrinks to tabloid-newspaper dimensions. The Stanhope twins are merely thrill-seeking criminals; their crime is gratuitous, a senseless exercise in radical anarchy. Sim Goodchild, one of the “simple” innocents of the earth, is ineffectual. Mr. Pedigree, the final witness to Matty’s return from death, experiences a hallucination, not a beatific vision. From the rational point of view, darkness—the ambiguous pattern of divine purpose in an absurd world—must triumph when evil alone is visible, manifest.

Curiously, Golding’s contrasting metaphors complement one another. Whether the world is understood by the reader as patterned or meaningless, whether controlled by forces of transcendent good or uncontrolled, absurd, and chaotic, Golding asserts that evil, at least, exists. The last character in the novel is a park keeper who observes Matty’s “brilliant ball” Iying a few yards from Mr. Pedigree. To the attendant, the pederast is a “filthy old thing,” incurable, and must be reprimanded. The park keeper confronts the evil of the world. Yet next to Mr. Pedigree is the miraculous ball, and this he cannot comprehend.