'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.
News & Articles
New podcast episode: Darkness Visible
The latest episode of the William Golding podcast focuses on Golding’s 1979 novel, Darkness Visible. Dr Nicola Presley, Publicity and Media Manager for William Golding […]
'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