'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.
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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 Booker Prize 1980
On 21st October 1980, forty years ago today, William Golding was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage. Golding was 69 and until 2019, […]
'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