Something Old

 

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.      

              “FIRE DOWN BELOW” by William Golding (published in 1989)

 

So after Rites of Passage and Close Quarters we come the third and final part of the trilogy, Fire Down Below, even though William Golding had originally not meant to write a trilogy at all. But here it was, now best known in an omnibus as To the Ends of the Earth. The situation is as it was in the first two novels. Edmond Talbot narrates the whole story though once again [as in Close Quarters] most of the idea that he was writing to send to his wealthy godfather has been ditched. Only towards the very end of Fire Down Below does Talbot revert to using a more formal style. So we are simply getting a first-person narrative.

There are three major threads that run though this novel.

First there is Talbot’s maturing when it comes to seamanship. After all, he is not a sailor but an aristocratic young man on his way to an official position in Australia. In the course of the voyage he, for the first time, with the help of Lieutenant Charles Summers,  learns how to climb at least part of the way up a mast. He learns how fickle the winds can be as they near the southern oceans. He becomes more aware of how unstable the old ship can be; and from lieutenants, midshipmen and common sailors he hears ideas about what is wrong. At one point he is allowed to join the night-watch and sees the ocean by moonlight, which almost knocks him into a poetic fugue. Indeed this makes him once more to think of young Marian, Miss Chumley. He hears long conversations about the system of “dead reckoning” and the new systems of navigation. When the ship comes near to Antarctica, Talbot thinks he is seeing the dawn rising… only to be told that the ship is heading for titanic ice. The ship is in peril. There is panic among the passengers and among some of the seamen too. Only by careful seamanship and the orders of Captain Anderson does the ship avoid sinking… and in telling you this I have brought you to later incidents in the novel.  After the escape from ice, the rest of the novel is plain sailing towards Australia – indeed, Golding hurries things along so that the last chapters hastily bring us to Sydney Cove.

Second there is the problem of Lieutenant Benet. As was made clear in Close Quarters, Benet had become Captain Anderson’s favourite, with his knowledge of new machines and ideas. The mainmast had been broken in a gale. Various ways were suggested to fix the mainmast. Benet knew the most recent science, and worked out a system of using hot iron and wood to force the broken mast together. This involved fire in the lower decks. [hence the novel’s title Fire Down Below]. When the work was over, the ship moved at a faster pace. Talbot’s friend Lieutenant Charles Summers remains sceptic and worried how long it would be before the ship would sank. Captain Anderson eventually calls Summers out for spreading such ideas. Then there is the ongoing animus between Lieutenant Benet and Talbot. As was made plain in Close Quarters, Talbot dislikes the half-French Benet with his poetry and his sophistication when it comes to intimate things. More than anything, though, Talbot believes that Benet has not told him all the truth about Miss Chumley, whom once again he idolises. What Benet tells him what he knows, it is ambiguous at the best - but Talbot still thinks Benet is slandering the young woman. In fact, at one point the two almost come to blows as both of them had come up with the idea of using hammocks to calm passengers when the sea was particularly rough. 

Third there are Mr. Prettiman and his partner  Miss Granham. They were introduced to us in Rites of Passage, wherein Mr. Prettiman showed himself to be an atheist, a free- thinker, and who was eccentric enough to try to kill an albatross to prove that it was mere superstition to believe that shooting an albatross would bring bad luck. Prettiman is apparently in very ill health and confined to his cabin. In a struggle, Talbot and Benet fall over Prettiman’s bed and harm him so badly that Miss Granham curses Talbot and says he has killed Prettiman… but later, Talbot comes to talk with Miss Granham. With Captain Anderson presiding, Prettiman and Granham are married… and later, Talbot comes to talk often with Prettiman, who lectures on Talbot’s priviledges and how the common people suffer and the evil of power. They bandy Greek and Latin epigrams, for Prettiman may be a commoner but he is well read. Prettiman is going with his wife to Australia to set up a utopian colony where there will be free thinking and no hierarchy.  In all this, naïve though he may be, Talbot perhaps for the first time in his life discovers that there can be a scale of beliefs quite different from his own. And gradually Prettiman restores his health… but, in a later conversation, Lieutenant Charles Summers speaks with Talbot and points out all the evils of the French Revolution and radicalism with which Prettiman has been polluted

The ship reaches Australia. They come to Sydney Cove… and here Golding almost stoops to neat melodrama. When passengers and all cargo have left the ship and the ship is decommissioned, the old ship catches fire, in which Charles Summers dies… even though Talbot tries to rescue him. [Was this caused by Benet’s infernal machine which Summers detested?? Just a thought.] And then Golding gives us a sort-of happy ending. Miraculously, Lord and Lady Somerset turn up with Miss Chumley. They have been to Calcutta…. And after some time working in Australia, Talbot gets married to Miss Chumley in India. Coyly, Golding [or perhaps Talbot who is supposed to be narrating all this] tells us that good stories have to have happy endings, referring to the likes of Jane Austen.

For the record, I have to note that this synopsis misses out many characters in the novel, but if I were to deal with all of them, this would be an extremely long synopsis.

At which point, I alert the reader who has to consider the dreaded “unreliable narrator”. The three novels are, after all, narrated by Edmond Fitz Henry Talbot. In his preface to To the Ends of the Earth, Golding remarks that Talbot is “an intelligent but brash and optimistic young man”. The “brash and optimistic” part means that Talbot is naïve about some issues. Near the end of the novel, Talbot proclaims that he will forever admire England and in conversations with Lieutenant Charles Summers he lauds the idea that the gentry and the aristocrats are the only ones who should hold power. At the very end of the trilogy, he is on his way to having a rotten borough. This does not mean that he is a bad person. It means he was brought up in the gentry and speaks as a man of his time and class. Going along with this there is in him a streak of xenophobia. He obviously hates the French – partly because the Napoleonic Wars are in progress -  but this flows over when he encounters Lieutenant Benet and they quarrel over Miss Chumley, and he more-or-less sides with Summers over the possible danger of Benet’s machine down below. He has missed the daring of the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, although Prettiman talks naively of a Rousseau-ish Utopia he is going to set up in Australia, he does say some truths about poverty and the misuse of the law which Talbot hears and ponders… but he quickly manages to brush them out of his mind. Unreliable? Certainly. But how else could an English squire think in the early 18^th century? 

 

Footnote: Back in 2006, the B.B.C. produced a three-hour-long version of the whole trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, neatly divided into three separate parts Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below. Benedict Cumberbatch played the leading role as Edmond Talbot. Having read the three novels, I was able to catch up with the series. It certainly gives a real sense of the peril of seafaring in the early 19^th century, the cramped quarters, the sordor  and lack of hygiene, the segregation of the upper-class and the poorer emigrates, and the severe discipline imposed by the captain and the lieutenants. Having said that though, as is always the case when novels are turned into films, much of the nuance was lost. The complicated conversations between main characters were boiled down, some events were glossed over and the ending was quickly rushed through. A very good primer for William Golding’s work, very watchable, but not the real thing.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“THE SPIRE” by William Golding (First published in 1964)

Seen at first glance, William Golding’s fifth novel The Spire is a very simple fable. Pride comes before the fall. Arrogance leads to destruction. But read closely, it is much more than these old saws. The Spire is a complex analysis of a certain sort of temperament, and the limits of religious belief. Golding’s first four novels, Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and Free Fall all told us why and how we human beings are deeply flawed, more-or-less referring to the Biblical “Fall”. All but The Inheritors raise notions of God and religion, no matter how sceptical Golding himself could be. There is the prophetic boy Simon in Lord of the Flies who understands what real Evil is. There is the drowning seaman who directly curses God in Pincher Martin. There is the soul-searching of a man in Free Fall who has had a bad religious upbringing but rebels against it… even if he eventually understands the need for faith. Golding is not in any way proselytizing. He himself was very much a sceptic. But he does suggest that most human beings yearn for something greater than themselves, a desire very like what is now often called the  “God-shaped hole” that is left when religion has been set aside.

In The Spire, Golding deliberately puts his characters into a very religious context. It is medieval England, perhaps somewhere in the 13^th or 14^th century. Jocelin is the Dean of a cathedral – he can over-rule the other clerics. Against the wishes of some of his colleagues, Jocelin has ordered that the old cathedral’s spire be made much higher, reaching to the heavens. He is obsessed with this project, “a construction of wood and stone and metal” four hundred feet high. But the Master Builder, Roger Mason, has great misgivings. When he and his hired workers dig deep down, Roger hits mud and realises that the new foundations would not be able to support the huge spire that Jocelin has ordered. Jocelin ignores Roger’s warnings and orders him to get on with his work. The stones and wood that make up the cathedral begin to shake and make creaking sounds, to “sing” as Roger calls it. But the building goes on and the workers have to climb higher. Joselin is buoyed when, from a bishop in Rome, he is sent a sacred relic, a Holy Nail, which he believes will protect his spire. But the gales and the rain come and the situation worsens. Roger begs Jocelin to let him and his workers be relieved and allowed to quit the project, but Jocelin threatens him and makes him honour the contract he has signed. The great building shakes. It can only end in catastrophe, and eventually it does.

This is the flimsiest synopsis that I have yet concocted.  The Spire is about much more than an impending disaster. Golding has clearly researched the nature of medieval cathedrals and he examines closely the ambulatory, the transept, the cloister, the buttresses, the Lady Chapel and all the other parts of the cathedral. The images Golding presents are sometimes linked to the majesty of the cathedral; but more often medieval life is not glamourised. Gritty dust hovers around as the builders cut and smash rock and plaster and sometimes break statues, not to mention filling the ground with sawdust. Foul smells rise from the mud and filth down where the foundations are supposed to go. In this environment, fewer worshipers come to Mass. There is also the matter of different social classes. Jocelin is very upset by the way the artisans go about their work whistling or singing bawdy songs they have picked up from ale-houses; there is drunkenness and sometimes fights.  Near the cathedral is a poor man, more-or-less the cathedral’s caretaker, called Pangall who lives with his wife Goody. Pangall is regularly harassed and ridiculed by the workers. It is not clearly spelled out, but  seems Goody later in the novel she dies in a sort of riot. Roger Mason’s wife Rachel is barren – like the Rachel in the Bible. She is pious but in her own way she is very assertive. This is  something that Jocelin does not like in women. Rachel separates from Roger and as the situation gets worse Roger takes to drink [yet they later get together again.]

As for Jocelin, he himself has to face the criticism of his fellow priests. A “Visitor” [a senior priest who had the authority to examine the state of cathedrals] interrogates Jocelin. He points out that Jocelin has neglected some of his duties. He has not been to confession for months. He has been so concerned with the spire that he has not said mass as often as he should. He has in effect turned people away. An older priest Father Adam tells Jocelin that the prayers Jocelin has told him, of an angel that directed him, could really be merely a matter of his self-promotion – or what we might now call his ego flattering himself. And later, most cutting of all, Jocelin’s confessor, a mild priest called Father Anselm, reminds Jocelin that much of his community dislike him because he had been promoted up in the hierarchy only because he had connections with wealthy people.

More important, though, is that Golding emphasises Jocelin’s private thoughts. He believes the Devil himself is fighting him but an angel is protecting him. He speaks to a woman – his aunt – who tells him about his family’s trials… but when he speaks with her she has long been dead. He is sometimes haunted by women and market girls and their bodies and the Devil. He thinks of Rachel and her forthrightness. And he thinks of the horror of a woman giving birth…. And after all this, he at last understands that Roger Mason was right about the spire. So he tries to apologise to Roger for his folly. But Roger is now a very sick man, drunken, who has lost his job, lost all the men who worked for him, Rachel has left him, and he curses Joselin for putting him though the torture of trying to create an unstable spire.

Joselin  staggers into the street. When he is nearly dying of “a wasting, a consumption of the back and spine”,  he is half awake, half  his mind rushing though his memories and weighing his life. What has he achieved? Father Adam comes to give him his last rites. He sees Joselin’s lips moving a little and thinks Joselin is saying “ God! God! God! ” so he lays the host on the dead man’s tongue. Golding apparently liked ambiguous endings  [see the ambiguous last words of his novel Free Fall]. In this case we could say Joselin was piously reaching for God… or, like Pincher Martin in the novel of that name, he could be cursing God.

The most common interpretation of this novel is that it is a matter of hubris. Like the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel which over-reached itself, so Joselin over-reaches himself  in trying to make a monument for himself with his spire. At the same time, Golding is in some way pitting the faith of Joselin against the practical sense of Roger… or maybe religion against science. Yet both of them are radically flawed, Joselin with his obsession and Roger with his temper and drunkenness. The human race in short – never perfect.