Golding's most recent novel, Rites of Passage, appearing so soon after his long awaited seventh novel, Darkness Visible, raises anew the conundrum of having to evaluate yet another "new Golding" in terms of already hardened critical hypotheses about the nature of his fiction. Although Golding's novels elude easy categorization, after nearly three decades of literary discussion it has become a critical commonplace to describe him as a religious writer. Even when he seems intent on fostering the illusion of actuality as in Free Fall, The Pyramid, or Darkness Visible (a novel so panoramic in its portrayal of 20th-century English society that it possesses characters enough to embarrass a Russian realist), he gives us a world unpopularly insistent upon the spiritual. Unlike much contemporary British fiction, Golding's occupies itself with what is perennial in the human condition, looking at man in relation not alone to his society, but to his universal situation.