Rites of Passage, by William Golding, 1980

Rites of Passage is an account of a voyage by sea to Australia. Set in 1812, at the end of the Napoleonic war, the voyage is undertaken by a group of Britons in search of a new life in Australia. The ship is a converted man-of-war, an aging battleship. The story is told in the form of a journal written by Edmund Fitzhenry Talbot, a young aristocrat. We are told this journal is being written to entertain Talbot’s godfather, who is apparently a very influential man, and who has arranged for Edmund to work for the Governor of New South Wales in the colony. Talbot describes the ship’s layout, its crew and passengers, and the mainly weather-related incidents that comprise the voyage. He loses track of the days at sea when he falls ill, but as the ship approaches the equator the narrative slowly focusses on the fate of one other passenger, Reverend Colley, and something that happens to Colley when the ship crosses the equator – the rite of passage in the novel’s title.

Colley’s role in the novel is largely one of scapegoat. He accidentally offends the ship’s captain by intruding on the quarterdeck without permission, something forbidden in ship’s orders. Colley makes clumsy efforts to repair his relationship with the captain, but is rebuffed. He becomes a focus for the crew’s attention, and is hazed during the crossing the equator rituals. These central events happen ‘off-screen’ – Talbot the novel’s principal narrator isn’t present when they happen, and is only vaguely aware of them (his focus is on chasing a young woman of negotiable affection around the ship) and in the subsequent journal pages written by Colley they are only alluded to tangentially and ambiguously. Whatever happens, Colley then gets blind drunk and there is a further incident with the crew in which sexual activity with one or more of the ship’s crew is hinted at. Struck by shame Colley retreats to his cabin, refuses all food and drink, and eventually dies. In the nineteenth century shame could be fatal, apparently.

Golding seems to have based this incident on the well-documented practice of humiliating crew members when they cross the equator for the first time. If the Wikipedia entry is to be believed this practice continues in navies around the world to this day. It seems likely in the nineteenth century these ceremonies would have been less restrained than they are now. A record of the second survey voyage of HMS Beagle describes the crossing thus:

As they approached the equator on the evening of 16 February 1832, a pseudo-Neptune hailed the ship. Those credulous enough to run forward to see Neptune “were received with the watery honours which it is customary to bestow”.[2] The officer on watch reported a boat ahead, and Captain FitzRoy ordered “hands up, shorten sail”. Using a speaking trumpet he questioned Neptune, who would visit them the next morning. About 9am the next day, the novices or “griffins” were assembled in the darkness and heat of the lower deck, then one at a time were blindfolded and led up on deck by “four of Neptune’s constables”, as “buckets of water were thundered all around”. The first “griffin” was Charles Darwin, who noted in his diary how he “was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. — They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. —a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. —at last, glad enough, I escaped. — most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. — The whole ship was a shower bath: & water was flying about in every direction: of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.” 

All good fun but the element of humiliation is never far off.

For a novel about a sea voyage there is surprisingly little about sea-voyaging in Rites of Passage. Yes, there’s plenty of description of the ship and its working, and Talbot devotes a lot of time to learning ‘tarpaulin’, which he claims is the sailors name for their slang and technical terms about the working of the ship. But for a voyage half-way round the world, the novel is in many ways claustrophobic, confided within the narrow constraints of the ship. There’s no mention of the ship ever docking for supplies for example. At the end of his journal Talbot describes it as: “some kind of a sea-story but a sea-story with never a tempest, no shipwreck, no sinking, no rescue at sea, no sight nor sound of an enemy, no thundering broadsides, heroism, prizes, gallant defences and heroic attacks. Only one gun fired, and that a blunderbuss!” which is about right.

This is largely because the novel isn’t really about the voyage at all. It ends long before Australia is reached for one thing – the destination and the new world it represents is unimportant. This novel is really much more interested in the social structures which govern life on board. The ship as a metaphor for society is an image that goes back as far as Plato. In case the reader has missed the point, Golding names his ship Britannia. The passengers and crew are carefully stratified into a class system distributed through the ship’s decks, with strict codes of conduct and conventions (which of course Colley is punished for breaking).

Ostensibly Rites of Passage is a straightforward story of a sea-voyage. But as you might expect from a Nobel-winning novelist there’s plenty more going on than you are initially led to believe from the flawed narrative voices. But the novel also felt very old-fashioned. It could easily have been written by Conrad in the first decade of the twentieth century, o, earlier. People dying of shame tends not to happen in novels written towards the end of the twentieth century! The narrative structure, based around Talbot’s journal, felt forced to me, harking back to the early epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. For all his status and education Talbot is an unobservant narrator, never able to get to the bottom of what causes Colley’s death. The text within a text, Colley’s fragmentary notes which Talbot discovers in his cabin and pastes into his journal, are written in a more authentic, accessible voice, and came as a bit of a relief.

I can’t honestly say this was an enjoyable read, with the archaic language and the claustrophobic setting combining to give the novel a constricted, stifled atmosphere. It is is the first in a series in which Golding continued the voyage towards Australia, and we find out more about the characters he introduces here. Once again I find myself hesitant about investing more time in a trilogy, although this time for very different reasons than when I finished The Ghost Road!