From Publishers Weekly
The conclusion of the trilogy he began with the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980) and followed with Close Quarters (1987), Nobel Laureate Golding's densely complex, subtle and exacting latest novel tussles intriguingly with thematic and formal problems that have occupied the author in his previous works. The present trilogy enriches itself by self-consciously playing off its fictional precursors in a number of dimensions, including, most obviously, that of the voyage of self-discovery. In relating an almost year-long voyage (in the Napoleonic era) from England to the Antipodes of a motley band of passengers and the crew of a decrepit former man-o'-war as they experience many of life's dramas, the trilogy evokes tales by Melville, Voltaire and Homer among others. And the novels may be further interpreted not only as the Bildungsroman of aristocratic young narrator, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, by means of myth's revelatory reversal that exposes the disjunction between appearances and reality, but also (given the autobiographical details) as a means to Golding's own ironic self-discovery. The narrative's beautiful, otherworldly descriptions of the sea and air, as the ship, twice damaged by errors of judgment on the part of its younger officer, flounders in terrifyingly heavy seas, evoke a metaphysical, mythic dimension. This rich and problematical text resists facile interpretation even as it delights through Golding's witty and poetic evocation of the language of the period.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This novel completes the Nobel laureate's trilogy about a voyage from England to Australia in the early 19th century. Neither Close Quarters ( LJ 4/15/87) nor this volume achieves the formal unity of Rites of Passage ( LJ 10/1/80), but the story Golding tells is engrossing and psychologically acute. Just as the beleaguered ship can serve as a microcosm of English society, so the voyage functions as an allegory of a more primal passage, as young Edmund Talbot progresses from "the objectivity of ignorance" to "the subjectivity of knowledge." Equally noteworthy is Golding's description of a horrifying storm off the Cape of Good Hope. These volumesthe best sea fiction we've had since Conradbelong in most fiction collections. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
