The Mercies of Wind and Sea CLOSE QUARTERS

By Paul Gray

This novel, William Golding's tenth, picks up where Rites of Passage (1980) left off. Sequels ordinarily suggest the path of least resistance, the easiest way for a writer to capitalize on past accomplishments. Indeed, Rites of Passage marked one of the happier points of Golding's long career; it won the Booker Prize, England's most prestigious publishing award, and three years later its author received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Small wonder that Golding might want to extend a book that earned so much acclaim. The greater surprise is that he succeeds.

Rites of Passage ends with a bang that would seem to preclude much in the way of a continuation. Edmund Talbot, a smug, upper-class young man sailing from England to the Antipodes in the early years of the 19th century, concludes the private journal he has been keeping for his godfather and patron back home. Talbot's shipboard jottings have coalesced into the remarkable story he witnesses at sea: the long scapegoating and mysterious death of Robert James Colley, an Anglican clergyman.

Close Quarters thus begins in anticlimax. The unnamed old warship is wallowing through the torrid zone west of Africa. Talbot buys another book of blank paper from the ship's purser and resolves to continue writing without quite knowing why: "There is an inevitable difference between this journal, meant for, for, I do not know for whom, and the first one meant for the eyes of a godfather who is less indulgent than I pretended. In that volume I had all my work done for me." His surviving fellow passengers do not strike Talbot as promising heroes or heroines for his second installment, nor do any of the more prominent naval officers in charge: dour Captain Anderson or the affable but proper First Lieut. Charles Summers. The journal keeper takes up his pen with scant inspiration: "There is no story to tell now."

Of course there is, as Talbot quickly discovers. Thanks to the neglect of a drunken officer, the ship is trapped in a sudden squall, "taken aback" in nautical terms, crucial sails shredded and masts splintered. Talbot reacts first not to the danger but to the words used to describe it: "What a language is ours, how diverse, how direct in indirection, how completely, and, as it were, unconsciously metaphorical!" Next, the wounded vessel encounters the Alcyone, another British ship, bound for India and bearing news. The endless war with France is over. Napoleon Bonaparte has been driven into exile on the island of Elba; long live King Louis XVIII! Celebrations follow. Talbot is invited to dine with Sir Henry Somerset, captain of the Alcyone, and meets Lady Somerset's protegee, Miss Marion Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley). The diarist not only falls in love but also must struggle hopelessly to find some fresh way of describing his feelings: "Forgive a young man, a young fool, his ardours and ecstasies! I understand now that the world will only give ear to them in the mouth of genius."

For a mad moment, Talbot considers abandoning his extensively planned future: his post in the service of the British governor of Australia, which will in time bring him back to England, election to Parliament from his godfather's "rotten borough" and prospective glories beyond. And to throw all that away, he reminds himself, for a "parson's penniless daughter!" But the Alcyone is gone the next morning, and Marion with her. Talbot wakes up, hung over yet drunk with infatuation, to face the alarming likelihood that the ship carrying him toward his appointed destination will sink.

Golding, 75, carries off the impersonation of a polished but callow young blade of the period as convincingly as he did in Rites of Passage. For all of Talbot's well-heeled stuffiness, he constantly betrays, sometimes in spite of himself, his capacity for growth. Prolonged exposure to the "whole imaginable world" of his ship rattles his aristocratic preconceptions. The white line painted across the deck at the mainmast, segregating the common seamen and emigrants fore from the officers and better class of people aft, comes to seem ridiculous as the peril shared by everyone aboard increases. First Lieut. Summers reassures him, "This voyage will be the making of you, Mr. Talbot. At moments I even detect a strong streak of humanity in you as if you was a common fellow like the rest of us!"

Close Quarters is more than the education, under duress, of its narrator. The novel is a vivid historical reconstruction of what it once felt like to set off for the other end of the earth relying on nothing but the mercies of wind and sea. This experience is an archetype of Western literature (Genesis, The Odyssey), fraught with several millenniums of encrusted expectations. For the most part, Golding is content to let the symbolic dimensions of his tale remain implicit. "What a world a ship is! A universe!" Talbot exclaims at one point, but the energy he might have devoted to metaphysical speculations on this insight pour instead into keeping himself upright on the heaving decks and avoiding mal de mer.

"The reader will have grasped that I, at least, survived the voyage," Talbot writes near the end. Indeed. But "that self-confident young man who had come aboard" at the beginning of his first journal has now hardened into not only a seagoing veteran but a self-conscious author as well: "I am in half a mind to publish!" Since three volumes seem commercially more promising than two, Talbot breaks off his narrative while he and his ship hover on the brink of disaster. Unlike its predecessor, Close Quarters advertises its own sequel. And that seems well worth waiting for, not only to see what happens to Edmund Talbot but to watch a Nobel laureate, the wind at his back for the final leg, sail on.