Volume 26, Number 19 · December 6, 1979
Smiles in the Dark
By Nigel Dennis
Darkness Visible
by William Golding
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pp., $10.95
We are shown a provincial hardware store of the type every Briton loves. Founded early in the nineteenth century, with nooks and crannies showing 'notches, cuts, grooves' in their beams from medieval days, and sprawling through the 'lofts and attics, galleries, corridors' of one-time private houses and shops, the store is by now a vast warehouse in which the inquisitive perambulator may find delightful rarities—carriage lamps (for the stage coaches that once halted in the town), a sawyer's frame, a set of jacks for an open fireplace, 'even a deformed packet of the first snuffless candles.' Stained old wooden pigeonholes show amazing collections of 'pins or tacks or iron or brass screws and bolts' surrounded by a clutter of 'broomsticks,…galvanized iron buckets,…rows of wooden-hafted tools' and more rows of 'identical paraffin lamps.' There are many strange objects (apart from the ancient employees in stiff collars) which were once 'sold at the rate of perhaps one out of every half a dozen ordered, while the other five rusted.'
Review, 1572 words
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