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Lost (and Found) at Sea
| Article
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16278 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
4,009 Words |
| Author
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John Carey
John Carey is Merton Professor of English Literature at
Oxford University and is the editor of William Golding: The
Man and His Books. |
FIRE DOWN BELOW
William Golding
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989
224 pp., $17.95
On July 14, 1967, William Golding nearly died. He was sailing across the English Channel on his yacht Tenace with his wife, daughter, and two friends, when a Japanese tanker ran into them. Golding's party was fished out more or less unscathed, but the Tenace went to the bottom. Golding blamed the two copies of James Joyce's Ulysses that his daughter had brought aboard in her luggage. No boat could remain buoyant, he maintained, lumbered with such a cargo.
Despite this banter, Golding was, it seems, badly shaken. He never sailed again--though up to then small-boat sailing had been one of his crazes. Maybe it was the Tenace's fate, and his thoughts about how much worse the disaster could have been, that led him to set the trilogy of novels that he began with Rites of Passage in 1980 abroad a sinking sailing ship. As for the Ulysses factor, Golding's trilogy could not more thoroughly repudiate James Joyce and all he stands for. The self-involved complexities of modernism's archpriest gain no footing here. We are closer to Treasure Island than to Ulysses. Storms rage, sails strain, tars clamber in the rigging. You would scarcely be surprised if a pirate ship would come into view and run up the Jolly Roger. Suspense, adventure, and romance abound. At one point Golding jokingly suggests, through one of his characters, that an apt title for the trilogy would be Saltwater Soap.
Of course, Golding is never as simple as he looks. The questions that hang like storm clouds over his native nautical ups and downs have nothing to do, in the end, with seafaring, but everything to do with good and evil, and how remarkably easy it is to mistake one for the other.
The first volume, Rites of Passage, contrasts two young men: the narrator, Edmund Talbot, and a clergyman, the Rev. James Colley. Both are passengers abroad an ancient, leaky sailing ship--a decommissioned man-of-war blundering through heavy seas from England to Australia in the year 1815. Talbot is a nobleman, the godson of a peer, bound for Australia to take up a position in government. The novel consists of his journal, which he intends to dispatch to his esteemed godfather at the voyage's end. Every facet of it--language, ideas, feelings--reflects his patrician upbringing. Accustomed to respect from his social inferiors--which means, in effect, everyone else
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