Rites of Passage

Edmund Talbot, a young gentleman of good connections, sails for the Antipodes in the early years of the nineteenth century and keeps a journal for the amusement of his godfather, the nobleman whose patronage has secured him a post in the colonial administration. He is pleased with his own powers of observation, and Golding lets him be, so that everything the reader understands must be assembled from what Talbot does not. The ship is a rotting former man-of-war under a captain with a violent contempt for the clergy. Among the passengers is the Reverend Robert Colley, an ungainly, obsequious man of low birth and clerical presumption, whom the crew determine to make sport of. What is done to Colley during the ceremony at the crossing of the line, and what Colley does himself in the forecastle afterwards, is revealed in a letter of his own that Talbot reads at last. The shift in voice is devastating. Golding's novel is a study of class as a system of licensed cruelty, and of a young man who is not wicked, merely careless, and who arrives at the end with the beginnings of shame.