This is a dark book illuminated by fire. The struggle between good and evil is set in a modern context mixing terrorism with naïve saintliness, sexuality, and incessant attempts to escape from the mundane. The picaresque hero, 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 climactic reckoning amid another fire.
This novel marked Golding's re-emergence as a novelist, twelve years after his previous novel was published.
On its publication in 1979, Darkness Visible won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
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