Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

William Golding (Review of Rites of Passage)

Towards the end of William Golding’s novel — Rites of Passage — its protagonist Edmund Talbot remarks to a naval lieutenant that “life is a formless business, Summers. Literature is much amiss in forcing a form on it!” The notion is a central one in Golding’s work and also in any appreciation of it, for literature, we are now fully aware, cannot do other than impose a form, even when aping life at its most random and contingent. From one point of view Dean Jocelin’s vision and construction of his cathedral spire is a prolonged debate on the futility of the entire purpose of trying to shape and create something out of redoubtably intractable material — the writer’s problem no less than the medieval architect’s. Golding goes further than this. Not content with the struggle to shape and form he also seeks answers to grave and essential questions about the human condition: “the unnamable, unfathomable and invisible darkness that sits at the centre” (Free Fall). This overall seriousness of intent on Golding’s part — the sense that his novels are meditations on or dramatizations of life’s most seminal concerns — is at once his great strength and his weakness, an advantage and a constraint; some of his novels are immeasurably enhanced by it, others find the freight of significance too much to bear.

Perhaps the problem can be conveyed more precisely by recording a remark Graham Greene made. Greene complains that “I would like to ascend into myth but find my books so often muddy with plot.” This, I suspect, is not only a piece of self-criticism (misguided, in my opinion) but also a wishful indication of the way Greene would like his books to be read. It’s a plea for less popular assessment, a desire to be rated — or to write — on a deeper more elemental level. Golding, on the other hand, suffers from the opposite reaction. Not only in the reverential, solemn way people approach his work but also, from his fourth novel onwards, in some impulse governing the way he writes.

Most novels tend inevitably towards what we can call the world of history — the rich infinitely varied world of phenomena, of appearances and details. Indeed, it can be argued that there is something in the novel form itself that fosters and encourages this inclination. This is what Greene is bemoaning — the pull is too hard for him to resist. Golding, alternatively, has determinedly steered his fiction towards the other pole: that of myth, and all the more single-mindedly since Free Fall. Of course, in most serious fiction both elements coexist, but in varying degrees and, by and large, the mythic features are subordinate, the referential aspects of the form claiming most of our attention. This duality also applies to Golding. Lord of the Flies, he has related, started out primarily as an attempt to portray what children are really like, in opposition to the anodyne Victorian image in Coral Island. However, the novel is more than that, clearly — or at least became more than that — developing into the first exploration of now familiar Golding themes: an examination of innocence, the dark truth about human nature and a delineation of his particular Manichean vision of the world.

But what made Golding’s first three novels so remarkable (and I would rate Pincher Martin as high as any) was the extent to which he managed to introduce the mythic element without threatening the tenuous equilibrium that has to exist between the specifics of history and the generalities of myth. The Inheritors captures with marvellous ability a wholly realistic sense of the Neanderthal world as well as re-enacting on the wider level the confrontation between Innocence and Experience. So too Pincher Martin is at once the story of a real man marooned on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic as well as an elaborate parody of the Creation, an illustration of man’s immense ego and his futile heroism.

Many commentators see Golding’s first five novels as forming a homogeneous unit, but I would be inclined to mark the division after Pincher Martin. Both Free Fall and The Spire significantly tip the balance towards myth and concentrate attention rather more on the solution of what might be termed spiritual or aesthetic dilemmas. Significance is no longer tethered to fact. One is too conscious of the huge abstractions bulking beneath the narrative and its surface details. There is, at the back of the reader’s mind, an overpowering, and at times enervating, awareness of correspondence: the fact that nothing in these novels is offered for its own sake, but is there to serve the rhetoric of the mythopoeic impulse. In Free Fall and The Spire the mythical sous-texte of the novels dominates to the detriment of the fiction. There is on occasion a certain inflated, striven-for trenchancy in the prose (a failing Conrad was also prone to), as well as passages of great power. There simply isn’t enough “muddy plot” obscuring the vision. Not that the vision is ever crystal clear — Golding’s answers are never unambiguous and succinct — it is instead that one knows one should always be seeking the analogical matrix that lies beneath the prose, striving all the time to “see into the life of things.”

The two books that followed The Spire — The Pyramid and The Scorpion God — represented a hiatus in the Golding oeuvre. The Scorpion God consisted of three novellas and The Pyramid was an untypical, Trollopian novel recrafted from some early short stories. It wasn’t until the publication of Darkness Visible last year — after a self-confessed eight-year block — that the sequence of Golding novels proper continued. To put it at its most simple, Darkness Visible is an uneven, strained attempt to reconnect the twin worlds of muddy plot and myth that had diverged since Pincher Martin. To some extent it succeeds brilliantly, as in the opening chapter dealing with the blitz and the simple hero Matty’s exposure to the pentecostal firestorm, and the later chapters treating his life and education. However there is something disconcerting about the book’s self-conscious modishness — terrorism, paedophilia — and for once Golding’s superb organizational grasp of his material seems to have deserted him almost completely. There is no doubt that the writing of the novel was something of a purgative experience — Golding has stated that he has refused to read a single review of the book — and it will come to be seen, I suspect, as something of a curiosity — an aberration in what is otherwise a career of masterly technical control and authorial self-assurance. Its, so to speak, emetic properties have clearly proved efficient, and we now have, a year later, a novel which has not only won the Booker prize but, more importantly, reaffirms a memorable return to form and the literary stature of its author.

Many reviewers of Rites of Passage have qualified their praise, ranking it with The Pyramid, seeing it as something of a perfect minor work. It is far more than this: rather it’s a return to tried and tested techniques; in many ways a look back at what has come before and a summary of the preceding novels’ achievements. Golding’s best novels take place in a confined world: the island in Lord of the Flies, the rock in Pincher Martin, language in The Inheritors — further confined by the characters’ vastly limited conceptual boundaries. Similarly, Rites of Passage takes place on an ageing man-of-war, en route with a party of emigrants for Australia, at some point towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. The main burden of the narrative is taken up by a privileged young passenger called Edmund Talbot, who is recording the events of the passage in a journal for the benefit and amusement of his aristocratic patron. This journal in itself is a superb example of literary mimicry on Golding’s part, a feat of imaginative sympathy with the early nineteenth century that comes close to the intellectual efforts required to render Neanderthalers’ world-view in The Inheritors. Talbot is contemptuous and sneering about his fellow passengers, particularly an impoverished clergyman named Colley, who somehow manages to attract the disdain of just about everyone else on board. Talbot’s voyage and journal proceed with their unremarkable catalogue of seasickness, minor tiffs, a brief flirtation and sex-bout with a meretricious female passenger, and a tour of the bowels of the ship. Talbot has little out-of-the-ordinary to report until the Reverend Colley, in the course of delivering a sermon to the huddled masses in steerage, gets drunk on navy rum and makes an exhibition of himself capering about the deck semi-nude and finally pissing up against a mast in full view of the other passengers. Colley’s reaction to this inebriated display is, however, extreme. He lies face down on his bed in a kind of catatonic trance for four days before finally dying of shame. On going through Colley’s room, Talbot discovers a long letter that Colley had been writing to his sister and he duly transcribes it into his journal. The narrative point of view shifts and the events of the voyage are retold by Colley. This change in perspective completely alters our conception of events as Talbot has thus far related to us. Colley has been the victim of callous persecution at the hands of the officers of the ship and the captain himself. He has been humiliated in front of the ship’s company during the traditional crossing-of-the-equator ceremony. Colley’s idea of his own nature and his standing in the eyes of his fellow passengers is revealed as hopelessly and tragically inaccurate. Talbot’s journal and narrative have also to be reassessed and he sees himself as being unwittingly responsible for Colley’s bizarre demise. This sudden, final change of viewpoint causing a reanalysis of all that has passed before is a feature that occurs in all of Golding’s first three novels. Here it is handled with great skill and deftness, used not only as an instrument of humorous irony and a subversive literary technique (as remarkable as Conrad’s similar exercise in Under Western Eyes — a writer to whom Golding comes to bear more and more resemblance) but also as a means of focusing on the themes of guilt, persecution and delusion which were only intermittently apparent in Talbot’s self-opinionated journal. Now Talbot is able, with the aid of Colley’s letter and the impromptu inquest held after his death, to fill in the gaps in his own defective and subjective account of what has been going on in the ship. The hidden and unknown act which brought about Colley’s insupportable shame and eventual death is suddenly made clear.

Rites of Passage and Pincher Martin are the only two Golding novels where a revelation of what takes place at the end will completely ruin the reader’s enjoyment of the book — a sufficient testimony to the renewed status of muddy plot. However, Rites of Passage contains greater riches than pure narrative entertainment. Riches which, on the basis of only two readings so far, I can only hint at. Like Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, Rites of Passage has “at its back” another text. (For the preceding three, they are, respectively, The Coral Island, Wells’s Outline of History and Robinson Crusoe). In this case it is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” One comparison will have to suffice. Just before the Mariner is freed of his albatross he looks over the side of the ship:

Beyond the shadow of the ship

I watched the water snakes …

Within the shadow of attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gusht from my heart,

And I blest them unaware!..

The self-same moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea

Colley, just before his final ordeal, looks over the side of the ship:

I gazed down into the water, the blue, the green, the purple, the snowy, sliding foam! I saw with a new feeling of security the long green weed that wavers under the water from our wooden sides … It seemed to me then — it still seems so — that I was and am consumed by a great love of all things …

There are many other obvious echoes. Just as Golding challenges the dogmas of his literary starting points in his first three novels so he “deconstructs” Coleridge in Rites of Passage. To put it at its most brief, Colley is at once Mariner and Albatross, and the purgatorial sufferings which lead to redemption in the poem are pointedly, and with wicked irony, eschewed here. In the poem the Mariner confers his blessing on the water snakes and is freed from the albatross by his unselfish act. Colley, re-enacting the Mariner’s part with a more literal accuracy, goes on from this point to assume an albatross which leads to his squalid end. His geographical passage across the equator, his physical move over the white line painted on the deck to separate “gentlemen” from “people,” symbolizes his own transit from the factitious world of civilized appearance to the darker realms of the unconscious, which ultimately brings about his doom. This is a multi-layered and marvellously intelligent novel with endless subtle allusions and reverberations and effortlessly marshalled cross-references. It is also a witty and solidly realistic account of life on a sailing ship at the beginning of the last century. There is an exuberance and confidence about the book that signals the author’s own awareness of his return to former strengths. The balance is triumphantly right.

1981