Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.     

“DARKNESS VISIBLE” by William Golding (First published in 1979)

There was a long hiatus in William Golding’s work. He had published his three novelle under the title The Scorpion God in 1971, but then eight years went by before his next novel, Darkness Visible, appeared. In an interview [available on line] his daughter said that Golding worked and re-worked this novel very carefully. It is clear that he was once again dealing with the problem of evil, or if you prefer sin, just as he had done in his earliest novels. The very title tells us what he is doing. The phrase “darkness visible” comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost where Milton is describing Hell. Read carefully, we see evil all the way through Darkness Visible, countered only by a few who are righteous. Darkness Visible is his most metaphysical novel. It was applauded by reviewers when it was first published, winning a prestigious prize. But it was, and is, a difficult novel to read. Darkness Visible is presented in three different parts. When I first read it, I thought it was really three separate stories. Only in the last part did I understand how the novel binds together as one narrative. As the novel was written in the 1970’s, when censorship was loosening up, Golding for the first time occasionally has characters saying words like “fuck” and has some detailed sex-scenes, though there is nothing joyful about them.

So to one of my laborious synopses

PART ONE – MATTY

During the Blitz on London, when the firemen are desperately trying to put out fires as the bombs fall, out of nowhere walks a young child – a boy who is scorched and deformed by the fire. Some of his skin has been burnt off and he looks almost grotesque. He is given a name but gradually he becomes known as Matty. He is sent to an old-fashioned boys school, always set aside from others because he is so unusual. A teacher called Mr. Sebastian Pedigree teaches Classics and likes telling the boys about “Greek love” [i.e. homosexuality]. Mr. Pedigree is clearly a pederast [obviously William Golding gave the character the name Pedigree because it is close to Pederast.] Mr Pedigree likes taking individual boys into his study for extra tutoring. Some boys like him. Others are wary of him. In a tragic situation, one boy dies. For his misuse of boys, Mr Pedigree is sent to prison, cursing young Matty for catching him out…. And in this first chapter we are aware of evil and perhaps sinfulness. The opening sequence about the Blitz reminds us of the horror and destructiveness of war, made by human beings; while the sequence of the boys school tells us of the abuse of the innocents.

Matty is given a job at an ironmonger’s factory. In fact he has little work to do there, apart from delivering items - but he is treated well. Now a young teenager, he is attracted by a girl at the counter selling artificial flowers, but with his shyness and his deformed face he does not make any contact with her. He takes to walking and understands how cruel life can be. He goes into a deserted church and, with his deformed face, he will never be loved by a woman. He weeps, but he knows that this is reality.

In young adulthood, he migrates to Australia in the hope of never having to deal with the likes of Mr. Pedigree again. [For the record, William Golding spent some time in Australia before he wrote this novel…. and the Outback is like the wilderness of the Bible.] Matty is now always asking himself “Who am I?”. He goes through the Bible and then asks himself the deeper question “What am I?” And this in turn leads him to how different he is to other people. He asks “Am I only different from them by face?” Could it be that he too is a morally flawed creature? In Australia he makes a living doing odd jobs, moving north to the hotter parts of Australia. He gets lost in the Outback, almost dies, is noticed first by an Aborigine and fully rescued by an Aussie stockman. He becomes an eccentric – a sort of hermit seen in the park, preaching – still clutching his Bible… and finally he ships back to England. The imagery as such that he is almost like John the Baptist, although Golding never overtly uses Christian images.

Years have gone by. Far from the Blitz, England is now in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Mr Pedigree has come out of jail… then gone back in again… then come out again.. He is now an old pathetic man, trying to haunt public lavatories and he gets into trouble. And Matty returns…

And we now get passages from the journal Matty has been writing. He sometimes sees himself as 666 – the Beast. He – like everybody – has a core of evil. But he now sets the Bible aside and listens to the voices in his mind as he feels some remorse for the way he dealt with Mr. Pedigree. After all, his turbulent  thoughts seem to have reached some form of calm. He knows what evil is; but as he works peacefully as a school’s groundsman he also think of redemption.  Can the evil be redeemed?

 PART TWO – SOPHY

Mr. Pedigree is still around. He is caught out stealing books in the children’s section of a bookshop. But that is only a small event in this section of the novel – which is why I at first thought this second part of Darkness Visible had nothing to do with the first part.

The Stanhope family are upper-class. When they were young, the Stanhope girls Sophy [Sophia] and Toni [Antonia] were admired as well behaved little children… but now Mr. and Ms. Goodchild , the people who run the book store, regard them as haughty and negative. What they do not known is how disorderly the Stanhope house is. The girls have to live away from the main part of the house. They don’t really have a mother. Their father has had mistresses and has settled with a woman the girls call “Winnie”. Making matters worse, there is strong sibling rivalry between Sophy and Toni.  Sophy is always annoyed by the fact that Toni is faster with witty words. Toni is better-looking than Sophy is. Toni is brighter in company and seems to do better in school. So Sophy drives on resentment. She spitefully leaves nasty things about.  She alerts Toni and their father that “Winnie” has been sleeping with another man. The father, from this point, relies on a series of women only. His hedonism is clear. Sophy gradually begins to see that Toni is not as clever as she seemed. Puberty comes along. Toni is indifferent about it. Sophy is enraged by it. But it is Toni who gets duped by one man, and then Toni is caught up in very dodgy people, taking her overseas and being involved in terrorism. And Sophy, just out of curiosity, decides to try sex. She takes a random man, loses her virginity in a car [this is where William Golding has some effing-and-blinding and graphic details]… but she feels nothing at all. Then she has sex for money with an old man. She has become totally impassive.

Men are to be used. She lives a while with a prim man, who almost expects her to marry him. But she’s not interested in sex anyway and she’s bored with him. She eventually slaps him off. She spends time cruising around bars and discos [remember this is the early 1970s]. She thinks she has a mate of sorts, a real thug called Gerry who lives by theft. She enjoys some of the criminality. But she is soon bored by this life, she suggest that they could make much money by kidnapping the son of a very rich man… but it comes to nothing… and all her plans are pointless. There is a sense of the  pointlessness of her life. She finally confronts her father, wanting him to explain why things have gone so badly for both of the sisters. There seems to be no real explanation.

So where is the sin that we saw in the first part of this novel? First we have seen human-made war and pederasty. Now we see despair, impassivity, envy and crime. Of course you could blame the upbringing that Sophy and Toni had gone through, but there is something more profound than that. So we come to some sort of answer…

PART THREE – ONE IS ONE

… which I will deal with briefly.  At the bookshop, there is sometimes a gathering of people who regard themselves as intellectuals. Sometimes they come together in what amounts to being a sort of séance. One of the group is Edwin Bell, who had been in the boys school when Matty was there… And at a certain time a man butts in and starts talking about religion. Clearly this is a sort of avatar of Matty. He disappears. Old Mr Pedigree also reveals who he is, upsetting Edwin Bell. Matty turns up again in another form and chastises pederasts, being backed up by Edwin and a person called Sim….

… but in his journal Matty writes “What good is not directly breathed into the world by the holy spirit must come down by and through the nature of men. I saw them, small, wizened, some of them with faces like mine, some crippled, some broken. Behind each was a spirit like the rising of the sun. It was a sight beyond joy and beyond dancing. Then a voice said to me it is the music that frays and breaks the string.” He now does not chastise the fallen but looks forward to redeeming and curing them. He has made it clear to himself that evil is born within us and our origins, but we must repair the string. By the time Mr Pedigree talks directly to Matty, it is obvious that Matty is the human consciousness – or a kind of angel.

I admit that I found the last section of Darkness Visible to be almost cryptic. I also admit that I did not fully understood all the conversations that characters spoke. Maybe somebody could untangle them for me. I do not think that William Golding was pessimistic in presenting us with so much evil. It is a reality after all. And in the end he is suggesting that we human beings are the ones who have to steer the worst of us into being something better.

Footnote: Just a suggestion here.  Most of the novel is set in the 1970’s. I wonder if Golding, now ageing, presented the environs and the city so negatively because he was reacting to new mores that were alien to him. Just a thought.