Children of Darkness

WILLIAM GOLDING HATES children. They are ignorant monsters who savagely destroy each other, worse than adults, who at least recognize the evil inherent in man. When Golding's children lose their innocence, they pass out of one destitute world of sin and darkness and enter another.

The author totes these children about from one scene in his novels to the next, packing them off to infernal rites of passage. The tensions between youth and adulthood fascinate him and unify his often wandering plots. The most poignant moment of his now classic Lord Of The Flies occurs when the Navy officer appears on the island and confronts a helpless Ralph. He has become an adult only by coming to grips with the darkness in man's heart.

As the title suggest, Golding's latest work also contains darkness--but this time it is visible from the outset. As the drama unfolds, a child emerges from the London blitz, scarred by the violent flames. The child, named Matty in a hospital, is Hell personified, soon to become Golding's "man in black." The author unravels Matty's story slowly, with detours to introduce other sordid children and wicked adults. Fires predominate in Darkness Visible, as a great bomb blast at the end complements Matty's fiery furnace. All of Golding's characters in one way or another are ravaged by these unyielding flames, which serve as bookends for this allegorical tale.

Golding's attention to fires--with their Promethean connotations--is not incidental. Matty's only background is the fire, whose flames have virtually given birth to him. Like Prometheus, Matty must live separate from the rest, with an "unchildlike smile." He weeps adult tears--but much earlier in his lifetime than Ralph.

Matty's character and Golding's story are more abstruse than Ralph and his plight in Lord Of The Flies. Unlike his earlier work, Darkness Visible is totally inaccessible to pre-teen-agers. Wrought with more blatant sexual imagery and a convoluted cast of characters, Golding's latest novel demands greater analytic skills and literary knowledge. No teacher could spoonfeed Darkness Visible to eager sixth and seventh graders the way he might have Lord Of The Flies. For example, the Miltonic overtones, from the title's derivation in Paradise Lost to the satanic qualities that possess so many of his characters, must be perceived for Darkness Visible to succeed as the literary achievement that it is.

The author's preoccupation with the tensions between child and adult is most dramatically exposed in the vivid journal that Matty keeps and Golding shares with us. This journal allows the reader to climb inside of Matty's distressed head--and is equally the crowning stylistic accomplishment of Golding's narrative. Matty asks: "Can it be that what I am for is something to do with children?" Quickly we realize that Golding is up to his old tricks again, leading us through a labyrinth of original sin, passing characters stained with the blackness of humanity along the way.

Matty doesn't understand if he is child or adult, savage or saint, and this conflict epitomizes the struggle in Golding's fabel. Golding fuses the traits of Ralph, Simon, and Jack--the three major characters in Lord Of The Flies--into one persona, further complicating Darkness Visible. Matty's internal voices insist he is "at the centre of an important thing and has been always." Such mystical thought resonates throughout Matty's journal.

Golding deserves a great deal of credit for his portrayal of Matty and his world. He has colored Matty's soul with just the right amount of blackness, not so much that he cannot let glimpses of light flash over and through him. Matty does not command the violent hatred from Golding that other characters do, perhaps because he straddles the delicate line of adulthood. Others are less successful indodging the malicious want of this master of allegory. For example, Golding draws Sophy, one of a pair of terrorist twins that Matty encounters, less precisely, and her character suffers as a result. She "puzzles over the darkness inside her," just like Matty, but the author fails to define the nooks and crannies of her evil character. Golding resorts to contrived description:

Sophy looked monstrous, huge, black-eye-hollows and the Hitlerian moustache of shadow caught by the light under her nostrils.

CAN WE CHALLENGE such an overwritten characterization? Not really, though Golding descends to verbose depths more than once, at one point calling his Hell the "inchoate unorchestra of the lightless spaces." He gets away with such a weird combination of words and images only because it parallels the confusion and discomfort that his characters express in their infernal discoveries.

In the end, we marvel at Golding's versatility despite such small deficiencies in clarity. He's perhaps the only author with whom Salinger, Joyce, and Milton would equally enjoy a conversation: Salinger for his views on children, Joyce for his ability to turn revelation into destruction, and Milton, for his vision of evil. If this hypothetical dialogue were to take place, Golding would sit back comfortably and invoke lines similar to these near the end of Darkness Visible:

We're all mad. The whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

With a start he'd reach back into the fiery furnace of his imagination, only to pull out more infernal children for his fables.