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.