Fire Down Below

Talbot and his companions at last reach Australia as their ship smoulders threateningly to their near-destruction. The Sea Trilogy finally reaches its thrilling conclusion.

  • “Everywhere about us and for many hundreds of miles – perhaps thousands – the bottom, the solid globe was miles away down there under the majesty of the liquid element.”
  • “Suddenly I felt a great weariness. It was not hunger, not seasickness. It was a dreary awareness of our peril and the greatest test which our crazy old vessel was about to face. I desired nothing so much as oblivion.”
  • “She was smiling delightedly and shaking her head as if in disbelief and then fanning away flies – I suppose I was grinning like an idiot or laughing like one […] We spoke but as people in trances.”

A decrepit warship sails on the last stretch of its voyage to Sydney Cove. It has been blown off course and battered by wind, storm and ice. Nothing but rope holds the disintegrating hull together. Inside, the claustrophobic passengers battle erotic desires, masculine rivalry and violent power struggles. And after a risky operation to reset its foremast with red-hot metal, an unseen fire begins to smoulder below decks.

Golding’s eventual biographer, John Carey, met Golding shortly after the publication of Fire Down Below and asked him if Edmund’s vision of the Prettimans at the end of the novel were based on memories of Golding’s own parents. Golding replied instantly that Carey was right.

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