A Second Chance [to fail]
Hello everyone. Hope you're all having fun reading (and posting) to this rant board that you found courtesy of the fine user who created this wonderful place. Thank you to whoever you are in the real world.
Down to business. I thought for my first bookfail post I should start with a real stinker. And for me, in all my reading experience of being the avid consumer of books that I have been since a young age, the worst of all of them has been the "masterwork" of William Golding, the man who brought us the atrocities of Lord of the Flies: his book entitled Darkness Visible.
First, why I read this in the first place. See, I was made to read LotF in 9th grade, and I hated it with every ounce of my body (but for no good reason--no rationale, so I won't go into that here). However, I could recognize that Golding COULD write, and write well. So, many years later I stumbled across this in a bookstore--Darkness was his book of re-emergence to launch him back onto the writing scene after a long sabbatical. I figured, if the man wrote a good book, it would be this one--I should give such a talented writer a second chance to win me over. After all, I was pretty young when I read LotF, so I may just have not appreciated his style, right?
Wrong. Oh so wrong. Thankfully only 300pgs of wrong, but it felt oh-so-much-longer than that.
First off, the beginning of the book is wonderful. A point to Mr Golding. Naked little boy walks out of the fires of London alive, miraculously, but horribly burned. Awesome--thus we meet our protagonist. So, maybe he'll be sensitive, or have special powers, or maybe he'll simply be very intelligent and misunderstood. He'll be different in some way that justifies the power of that first scene, right?
Not so much. He does alright in school. He has no friends except the teacher who tries to make the scarred little kid a 'special kind of friend' like the teacher has done to a lot of the prettier boys in the school. Does this confrontation allow for the obvious inherent goodness and force contained within the angelic scarred boy to come out? No. Coincidence, odd occurrence, and nothing interesting. Pure shock value with nothing to back it up.
Unfortunately the shock value moments are the only interesting parts of the book. When we lose track of the main character and go off with some of the secondary characters, everything seems to lose focus and we don't know (as readers) why we're learning all these mundane details about characters that seem to not relate to the main character's story.
There is one scene that will forever exemplify this book for me. One of the secondary characters who you think, for a while, is an inherently good character, decided she wanted to be evil (and do I mean evil), and so clearly the best way to do that is to go kidnapping children for fun along the way. One scene in particular goes into brutal detail as she is molesting a little boy, and she is about to carve him up when she snaps to, and the author reveals that she had just been fantasizing for the last 25 pages or so and none of it had actually occurred. And no one told us. Thanks, William Golding, not only for grossing us out for no reason, but for then telling us "Don't worry, it's just a bad dream--go back to sleep now."
Bottom line: For a novel that's apparently wrought with detail, metaphor, and examination of the human condition, and the nature of good and evil, I found a book filled with powerless characters held to the mercy of the whims of those around them while we as audience are allowed to watch in the hope that it will "inform" us as to the nature of man. There is no message, there is no hope, and the wheel does not come around again. To him, or to us.
Dear Mr. Golding, I think you missed your own point.