A story of the sea, travel, tension and the ultimate power of shame. The first book in The Sea Trilogy.
Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient warship, where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the crammed spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the awkward Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and something happens to bring him into a ‘hell of self-degradation’, where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.
Golding was writing Rites of Passage at the same time as Darkness Visible, which is certainly some achievement! During the revising of the final drafts in 1979, he reread all of Jane Austen’s novels, which surely influenced the hugely successful social comedy scenes in Rites of Passage. Golding won the Booker Prize for this book in 1980.
If you enjoyed the mix of genres in Rites of Passage, try The Scorpion God, a collection of three novellas depicting very different worlds.
The sea is a frequent presence in Golding’s writing; it represents isolation for the boys in Lord of the Flies, and...
William Golding: The Faber Letters reveals the remarkable literary collaboration between William Golding and his editor of more than forty years,...
On 19th June 1993, William Golding died at his home in Cornwall, looking out of the window, perhaps watching the rise...
This introduction, also published in LitHub, rightly details the comic nature of the book, and Proulx writes that ‘literary gems...
On 21st October 1980, forty years ago today, William Golding was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage. Golding was 69...
Love and romance are not themes that are usually associated with Golding’s writing! But one particular romance that stands out...