CLOSE QUARTERS
William Golding
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987
246 pp., $16.95
William Golding has never before written a sequel to one of his novels. It is the last thing anyone could have predicted. Maybe that is why he did it. Doing the unexpected has been his habit ever since his first novel, Lord of the Flies, brought him worldwide fame in 1954. That fable about schoolboys turning wild on a desert island challenged comfortable ideas about civilization and was followed a year later by, of all things, a reconstruction of the culture of Neanderthal man, The Inheritors. Each novel since then has been equally surprising. Golding is a problem solver, so he continually needs new challenges - and that is why the subjects he writes about look, in retrospect, such a jumble.
But his latest novel, Close Quarters, takes up and continues the story that he seemed to have finished in Rites of Passage (1980). To those who know the earlier novel, that will seem doubly surprising. Rites of Passage is, of all Golding's books, the most elegantly symmetrical in design - as precise and polished as a Renaissance diptych. For Golding to tear it open and fix a new slab of fiction to its outer edge seems tantamount to vandalism. So it is best to say at once that it succeeds miraculously. Up to his old trick of being new, Golding managed the unmanageable and found roots for a fresh adventure in what had seemed to be the smooth perfection of a sealed artwork.
The symmetry of Rites of Passage arose from its having two narrators. Set aboard an old sailing ship bound for Australia during the Napoleonic wars, its plot is communicated to us via the journal of Edmund Talbot, a patrician youth, the godson of a nobleman, who is traveling to the Antipodes to take up a position in government. Haughty Talbot describes the other voyagers - all of them his social inferiors - and records for our amusement the humiliations that are heaped upon the most woebegone of them all, the shy young clergyman James Colley. After poor Colley has been driven to his destruction, however, his own journal comes to light, written for his sister back in England, and Golding sets it before us so that we can retrace the events of Talbot's narrative from another point of view. The contrast is spectacular. Talbot's journal was an Augustan document, secure in its classical learning and its eighteenth-century rationalism. Colley's is like the outpourings of a Romantic poet, brimming with pain, fear, and ecstasy, and responsive to the wonders of the natural world that Talbot's aristocratic aloofness never allowed him to notice.
Colley dies of shame. Spurned by Talbot and the other respectable persons on board, and tormented by his erotic longings for the brawny crewmen, he ventures in the sailors' quarters one day and is overwhelmed by a carnival of drunkenness and sexual abuse, before the appalled gaze of his fellow passengers. After that, he can face the world no more, pines away in his bunk, and is buried at sea.
Since Colley is the most interesting character in Rites of Passage, his removal at the novel's end makes the chance of a worthwhile sequel seem even more remote. Whoever, you wonder, wants to spend another three hundred pages in the company of smug, pompous Talbot, especially as his lack of sympathy
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