Long Haul

By Paul Gray

FIRE DOWN BELOW

by William Golding

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

313 pages; $17.95

The 19th century hero of this seafaring novel finally completes a laborious journey from England to New South Wales. In transit, Edmund Talbot grows weary of "this seemingly endless voyage"; safely ashore at Sydney Cove, he marvels that he has been at sea for nearly a year. In fact, the trip has taken much longer than that. William Golding first shoved Talbot off dry land in Rites of Passage (1980), which went on to win the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the author got back to Talbot's story in Close Quarters (1987). Fire Down Below completes Talbot's memoirs and provides a glimpse of the older man who wrote them. He has evidently done well for himself: "Only the other day the Prime Minister himself said, 'Talbot, you're becoming a deuced bore about that voyage of yours.' "

That is too harsh, although this final leg sometimes displays the enervation of a long haul. When last seen, Talbot was in a severely damaged and leaky old warship. Now the weather turns ornery. Talbot mentions this to his new friend, the ship's first lieutenant Charles Summers, and receives a scary response: "You have seen nothing yet, Edmund. There is something at the back of this wind."

But sea changes are only half the story. Talbot himself continues to undergo mutations. He is no longer the haughty young gentleman, secure in the protection of an influential godfather, who set out to take his place on the staff of the Governor of Australia. Talbot has become aware of suffering -- his own and that of his fellow passengers, the crew and the poor emigrants huddled "forrard" in the heaving ship.

His prejudices are further unsettled by his growing interest in Aloysius Prettiman, a figure of caricature in the earlier books but now a man, seriously ill, who attracts Talbot's sympathy. Prettiman, a political radical, and his new wife are transporting a printing press with which they hope to stir change in the convict colony. Talbot reprimands stiffly: "And you, sir, travelling with the avowed intention of making trouble -- of troubling this Antipodean society which is created wholly for its own betterment!" Yet the young Englishman could become dry tinder for Prettiman's incendiary rhetoric: "Imagine our caravan, we, a fire down below here -- sparks of the Absolute -- matching the fire up there -- out there!"

Talbot is not the only entity who might go up in smoke. There is a fire down below in the ship as well; red-hot iron bars have been inserted into the huge block of wood that supports the wobbling foremast in the hope that the constriction of cooling metal will stabilize the structure, allowing for more sails and greater speed. A sluggish progress suddenly becomes a race against time.

Landfall should provide a relief and a letdown, but Golding has saved a number of surprises for his bittersweet conclusion. Among them: Talbot's sense of bereavement at being freed from all the people with whom he was cooped up on board. He pays a call on the Prettimans and finds the wife stern. "In fact," she lectures him, "you should not be here at all." When Talbot tries to reminisce about the voyage, she stops him: "Do not refine upon its nature. As I told you, it was not an Odyssey. It is no type, emblem, metaphor of the human condition. It is, or rather it was, what it was. A series of events."

That small speech may be Golding's sly response to complaints, dating back to Lord of the Flies (1954), about his itch to allegorize. If so, Mrs. Prettiman deserves a hearing but not total assent. For the Talbot trilogy is both a stirring, sequential narrative and an image of humanity adrift in tides and time. The adventures have ended, but their shapes remain, the outlines of communal Western legends.