William Golding is a militantly spiritual Englishman who seems to have inherited … the fearless Puritanism that still shakes souls. Golding, like a Hellfire lay-preacher, attacks with words and shows no mercy for the ignorant, the weak, or even the arguably innocent. He does not blanch before the Puritan doctrines of total depravity and predestination, the cruel certainty that some will be damned regardless of what is done. To this reviewer's mind, Darkness Visible is a black novel made darker still by the fact that Golding permits, with the eloquence of a rhetorician holding out a vision of Paradise to exhausted sinners, one ray of hope to enter his tale before he slams shut the tomb on its tormented characters.

Yet this darkness is in keeping with Golding's career, indeed has marked him through six previous novels as one of Britain's two most compellingly original novelists since World War...