'We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions…
we're all mad'.
Darkness Visible
The struggle between good and evil is set in a modern context mixing terrorism with naive saintliness, sexuality, and incessant attempts to escape from the mundane. Matty, dreadfully maimed by fire, suffers and survives in a cruel world. He and the twins Sophie and Toni, who are equally maimed spiritually, move towards a climatic reckoning amid another fire.
Darkness Visible won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979.
Judy provides biographical background for Golding's most disturbing novel
Timeline
James Tait Black Prize
Golding was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for fiction for Darkness Visible in 1980. This prize was the first of many for Golding in the 1980s.
Resources
Australia
Golding visited Australia in 1975, and he was fascinated by the country, describing it as a place of ‘clear light and clean emptiness’. He was […]
News & Articles
The Spire and the Burgess Ninety Nine Novels podcast
Golding’s The Spire features in an episode of the wonderful Ninety Nine Novels podcast from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. In 1984, Burgess published a list of […]
'It is the most powerful, and strangest, of all William Golding's novels, and one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth-century English novel'.
Philip Hensher
'Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion and the luck of writers, prove to be the most powerful thing in the world'.
William Golding, Nobel Lecture, 1983