[Darkness Visible] is a difficult and in many ways a painful novel to assess…. The melodramatic plot, unwisely borrowed from Iris Murdoch, escalates frantically and becomes, at the end, not even trashily cinematic so much as electronic: Sophy and her kidnapper cohorts, Toni and her clichés about freedom and justice, are imaginable, if not credible, only as elements in a situation comedy gone askew. (p. 32)

Golding's embarrassing fictional stereotypes … and his heavy-handedly ironic attempt to create a visionary-moron … might be halfway redeemed if presented, as Iris Murdoch's similarly caricatured people often are, in witty or cogent or intelligent prose; but Golding's style here is flaccid and indifferent, and appears at times to function as little more than a means for revealing the author's contempt for his characters….

Golding's theology, presented fairly explicitly in his earlier, more parable-like novels, does reduce, of course, to an extremely pessimistic view...