Wasn’t I supposed to write about Golding’s Darkness Visible? Didn’t I write some notes on the inside cover as I read it over a number of afternoons in a cool room in Portugal? It began unpromisingly, didn’t it? – I couldn’t help but compare those opening pages with a bunch of conscript firemen in a bombed out London of the second world war (was it London?) with Henry Green’s Caught. Golding didn’t compare, that was until the story really began – Matty’s story, the child who came out of a fire with half his face burnt away. Who emerged, walking in a straight line, determined.
The story follows Matty now, and leaves the firemen behind, and it’s magnificently quick – sentence darts after sentence. Sentence moving quickly after sentence, and what a story, events piling on events in quickness. It’s a bit like Coetzee’s Michael K., I thought to myself. A kind of outsider character, a kind of husk, who undergoes adventures where all he does is – survive. Where he is fated to survive as though it was decided before him by the gods. Only it’s better than Coetzee’s book, which is too much like a hagiography, especially when that second narrative voice comes in, when is it, in part two or part three, the officer who captures the protagonist, who watches over and observes him in a manner too close to Coetzee’s nameless narrator. And besides, Golding’s prose is, though smooth, more rugged that Coetzee’s – it weighs more. It comes from the old earth, from the gods, from Greek tragedy and the like. There is a pagan sensibility to Golding that’s even older than the Greeks.
And so I rushed along reading, surprised, continually surprised by events. Matty’s in Australia! Matty’s been castrated by an aborigone! Matty’s back in England! Matty’s back working at a school like his old school! All wondrous, in the rush of the story. And then the marvellous passages from Matty’s diaries: he believes himself to be visited (to be called before) supernatural beings, who charge him with a supernatural task. These are pages of high imagination, who would have expected them at the unpromising beginning? What work of strange imagination! What a peculiar sensibility is Golding’s!
And then the first part of the book ends. The second part, seemingly unconnected to the first, has the same narrative momentum. It’s Sophy’s story – we don’t know who she is, but the narrative conjures her up marvellously real, beginning at her twelth year or so. But it is like reading another novel – how are these incidents related to Matty’s, and where is Matty? what’s happened to Matty, who’s quite won as over whether as protagonist of a third person narrative or as a writer of diaries. But on the story ploughs through the earth, and we still trust Golding, for Sophy is rendered very real, too marvellously, concretely real.
What happens next? Part three, and another narrative perspective. Talk starts, a great deal of windbaggery, and it is here, for me, the story has begun to scatter. Too much talk! And who cares about these characters, these dreary little-Englanders? Already we’ve had intimations of how the story of Sophy (and her twin) will join up with Matty’s. And we’ve even had a few more marvellous, moving passages from Matty’s journal (essential pages, blessed pages). But the story scatters itself with the talk, the endless talk, and now I’m thirty pages from the end, and wondering. I should go on, I know that. But I feel ill-used by Golding. Feel tricked and cheated. I want the rush of the narrative again, not talk. I want to read pages as forward-running as the best pages in Lawrence, want a story written by the most unique of sensibilities, the rarest of writers (I look at Golding’s picture for a clue to his strangenesses: I can find nothing). But the talk, the endless dreariness!
I have the book in my bag here in the office. Must finish it, I tell myself. Must finish it and put it away with The Spire, which I read only this year, very late, and that seemed to me the finest postwar English fiction I have read, and which excited me because it was English, and because I expect nothing from English letters. Must – but I feel too betrayed, too let down. So much dreary talk! I put it down in Portugal, but should pick it up back here, this grey morning, But haven’t I begun another book since (Saramago’s Blindness), and finished another (Buchner’s Lenz)? Don’t I want to begin another Golding (Paper Men, perhaps?) And isn’t there still Pincher Martin to read, a very visual novel that demands too much of one like me who can never be brought to see what would be presented to him in words?
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