Rites of Passage
by William Golding
Summary
Edmund Talbot, young, aristocratic and pleased with himself, sails for Australia at the end of the Napoleonic wars to take up a colonial post arranged by his godfather. He keeps a journal for that godfather, and the journal is the novel: arch, snobbish, extremely funny, and written by a man who believes he is observing everyone shrewdly.
The ship is an ancient converted warship, stinking and rotten, and the classes aboard are stacked fore and aft with a white line painted across the deck that nobody may cross. Among the passengers is the Reverend Robert Colley, a clergyman of humble origins and appalling social instincts, who irritates the captain and then commits an offence during the crossing of the line ceremony that Talbot records only glancingly, being asleep for most of it.
Then Golding hands you Colley's own letter, written to his sister, and everything Talbot has told you reorganises itself into something shameful.
The novel is written in convincing early nineteenth century prose and takes a chapter or two to settle into. It is short, savage about the English class system, and its central event is an act of collective cruelty that nobody involved will name. It is the first part of a sea trilogy.
At around three hundred pages it is one of the shorter winners and the structural trick, giving you the same events twice from opposite ends of the ship, is executed perfectly. Best for readers who like Patrick O'Brian and want something considerably nastier. Golding's control of the period voice is total, and the comedy of Talbot's self regard survives even once you know what the book is going to do to him.
Historical Context & Significance
Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize in 1980, when William Golding was sixty nine and had been famous for Lord of the Flies for a quarter of a century.
The 1980 shortlist produced one of the prize's better anecdotes: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers was widely expected to win, and Burgess declined to attend unless told in advance that he had.
Golding continued Talbot's voyage in Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, collected as the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, a decision the Swedish Academy has since been reported as having reached over internal objection. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993, leaving the last novel of the sea trilogy as his final completed work of fiction.