they see as “weirdness.” Mature, they use their physical beauty as a mask to conceal their inner corruption. Toni runs off to become a model in London, disappears from England, trains with Palestinian and Cuban terrorists, then returns to her sister as a hardened revolutionary. Sophy, even more depraved, flings herself upon men for casual sex, becomes bored by her own moral vacuousness, and finally settles with a gang of toughs, restless for petty adventures. When Toni enlists herself in a kidnap-ransom scheme that might involve a lucrative reward, Sophy is more excited by her sadistic notion of the outrage than of any mere promise of wealth.

The child marked for the kidnapping, a Middle-Eastern youth of mysterious origins, had been attending the exclusive Wandicott School. He now becomes the focus not only of the Stanhope girls’ criminal plot but also of Matty’s revelations. The spiritual voices tell Matty that he must ready himself for a selfless act. As the drama moves quickly to its apocalypse, a chorus of witnesses, the feckless but innocent Sim Goodchild and Edwin Bell, try to piece together with their deficient human understanding the divine purpose. Yet they fail, well-meaning though they are, to comprehend the meaning of Matty’s final redemption. To save the child from the act of outrage, he must return to fire; he immolates himself as a final sacrificial holocaust. Thus darkness becomes fully visible: through the fable of apocalypse, Christian salvation becomes possible.

Carefully crafted, suspenseful, and consistent, Darkness Visible is a worthy technical achievement for the author of Lord of the Flies and The Spire. On both thematic and psychological levels, however, the novel falls short of the high level of Golding’s best fiction. With the theme of redemption, one suiting the talents of Graham Greene, a less melodramatic, less hortatory presentation would seem necessary. Serious, indeed humorless, Golding at times unintentionally parodies his own subject. For example, the Australian aborigine who stomps upon Matty’s genitals in a scene intended to represent the hero’s crucifixion (or mock crucifixion) is named Harry Bummer. Bummer comes upon Matty in the desert, famished, surrounded by “large black ants running at his feet” (we recall the ant-martyrdom of Celia in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party) and crying out for water. Bummer notices with disdain that Matty has a Bible, then leaps to his feet with this execration: “Fucking big sky-fella him b’long Jesus Christ!” In another climactic scene in which Golding’s language similarly appears inappropriate to maintain the serious mood that he intends to establish, Sophy wields a knife at a rabbit trapped in a latrine. Hysterically she imagines that the rabbit is, instead, the kidnapped child: “She felt an utter disgust at the creature itself sitting there on the stinking loo, so disgusting, eek and ooh, oh so much part of all weirdness from which you could see the whole thing as ruin. . . .”

Just as Golding betrays his theme at times by inappropriate language, he also fails to make many of his characters psychologically credible. Matty never truly comes to life. Only with the introduction of the evil Stanhope twins does the novel sustain a vitality. Their wickedness is far more engaging, from the point of view of fiction, than Matty’s suffering sanctity. Bored, vicious, and calculating, Sophy is perfectly realized as a type. Yet Golding burdens even her uncomplicated character with language beyond her capabilities: “A truth appeared in her mind. The way towards simplicity is through outrage.” Better for Sophy to commit outrage than to philosophize about it. Similarly, at the end of the novel, Golding places into Pedigree’s consciousness ideas that the reader would not expect him to develop. In a Resurrection scene, Matty has returned to his old schoolmaster, seemingly has blessed him, offering the pederast a momentary grace. Then Pedigree, in a passage that shows Christian charity, accepts Matty’s sacrifice; but his thoughts are profound beyond those we would expect of this dreary man.

To Golding, it is Pedigree, not Matty or the Stanhope girls, who is central to the existential problem. Matty, a modern John the Baptist who makes way for the redeeming child, is holy beyond ordinary human possibilities; the twins are contrastingly evil, as diabolical as Matty is good. Yet Pedigree is flawed, the Old Adam, neither wholly good nor wholly evil. Although his tendencies are toward homosexual love for boys, he suffers remorse for the excesses of his imagination. Moreover, he at least has the power to love, even though his eroticism runs counter to societal norms, and he has the power to choose. To Golding, freedom permits the terrible existential choice of good or evil. Caught between the antipodes, Pedigree must choose a way for himself. In his decision he has been aided, for at least a moment’s grace, as a result of the supernatural intercession of Matty. To Golding, such an apocalypse, one that makes darkness visible, has already been offered to all Christians.