Darkness Visible

"That’s quite a challenge. It’s a complicated story. It is basically formed of two stories, which intersect at the end. On one hand, it’s the story of this boy Matthew Septimus Windrove who walks out of an impossibly hot fire during the Blitz, the bombing of London during the Second World War. He walks from a fire so hot it could melt metal. How he survives is not explained; in fact, you’re invited to puzzle about it. He’s maimed—one side of his face is scorched, and some people can’t bear to look at him. At some points in his life he’s virtually mad, and he doesn’t have normal human interactions. He’s very religious, very concerned about what he’s ‘for.’ He has visions. Many figures in my father’s writing had visions. He is visited by two beings whom he interprets as messengers of God. They seem to tell him that he must just wait. The second story is about a girl called Sophy, one of a pair of twins who are both very neglected by their father. Somehow this creates a kind of vacancy in their minds that they fill with disruptiveness. Sophy has progressed to a position that is not even nihilistic—it’s worse than that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My dad looked very, very male. But he was always interested in what it was like to be a girl, and actually his portrayal of Sophy is quite intriguing. Especially, you know, to his daughter. In the end—I won’t spoil it—Matty discovers what he is for, and his and Sophy’s fates intersect. That’s the resolution of the story. I hope I’ve been clear. It’s very complicated, but immensely readable. It’s the only one of my dad’s novels that is large and slightly baggy. He tried for years to write it, had massive drafts which he carved bits out of, and revised. In his journal, he said something like, ‘all of a sudden it came over me the sheer ludicrousness of not believing in God.’ So I think he did believe in God, but he found organised religion not to his taste. For a while my brother was extremely religious and my dad found it hard to live with. I think he didn’t like being located within a system of belief; he liked to move around in it. But he was fascinated by religious thought and had many books on it. He also said at one stage that ‘the most interesting thing in the world is saints.’ I think he felt that Matty was a saint, in the same way that Simon in Lord of the Flies was."