I have … never met a more melancholy example of an author yielding to the intrinsically worthy impulse to tackle the world's problems and, by so doing, wrecking his own book than that represented by William Golding's [Darkness Visible].

I read the first part in a trance of admiration. It tells how a boy, nameless but later informally christened Matty, walks out of the heart of flame which is London's firebombed East End. Golding's prose flares white and rose with the blaze and plods with the charred victim. It groans with the long agony of his surgical restoration, brightens with the rare tenderness he encounters and peals with compassionate mockery at the scorn his repaired but still-ghastly countenance arouses. This prose delicately and impeccably fashions itself to the evocation of Matty's strange story.

It puts forth fronds of sophistication to generate Mr. Pedigree, a tormented, demonic paedophile to whose...