I have … never met a more melancholy example of an author yielding to the intrinsically worthy impulse to tackle the world's problems and, by so doing, wrecking his own book than that represented by William Golding's [Darkness Visible].

I read the first part in a trance of admiration. It tells how a boy, nameless but later informally christened Matty, walks out of the heart of flame which is London's firebombed East End. Golding's prose flares white and rose with the blaze and plods with the charred victim. It groans with the long agony of his surgical restoration, brightens with the rare tenderness he encounters and peals with compassionate mockery at the scorn his repaired but still-ghastly countenance arouses. This prose delicately and impeccably fashions itself to the evocation of Matty's strange story.

It puts forth fronds of sophistication to generate Mr. Pedigree, a tormented, demonic paedophile to whose class Matty is consigned. It becomes the ironmonger's shop in which, after a tragedy at the school, Matty works and also the wondrous being, a girl, at whom Matty peers before retreating, sensing that human love is forbidden him forever. It turns into Australia, to which Matty emigrates, and the desert and, perhaps most mysteriously of all, it becomes the steaming pool in the forest, writhing with parasites, in which Matty baptises himself before embarking on his mission to….

To what? For somewhere about here came the caesura, the break with the imagination. I can only speculate as to the real cause. Perhaps Matty simply wandered beyond the sphere of art and there was nowhere aesthetically credible for him to go. Perhaps Mr. Golding just ran out of vision. The break is not abrupt. Matty travels on in almost pristine form a little further, back to England where he meets the blue and red Spirits of Paranoia or, if the author really accepts the supernatural, of the Hidden World and is directed by them towards a new encounter with Mr. Pedigree, who is now a confirmed police case. But all the time the prose is shrivelling underfoot, like grass denied sun and water.

There are 265 pages in this book. Part one takes us to page 102 and ends with a long extract from Matty's mystic journal which, if not quite so fine as the preceding narrative, is still delicate and convincing. Of nothing that follows can this be claimed….

But I have neither space nor heart to recount all the silliness and tedium that drags us through the final three-fifths of this book. Whereas the first part is not only beautiful and artistically true but also unified, the remainder is an untidy mish-mash of contemporary themes forcibly grafted onto the excellence that went before….

I was left with a sense of loss and outrage. If Mr. Golding had really reached the end of an imaginative trail, he should have stopped. He might still have published the work as a fragment. Even incomplete it would have been an ornament to English Literature. As a rag-bag for his not always savoury views (there are sour observations about 'pakis' and 'nigs') it is merely an ignoble ruin.