Fire down below
"William Golding's great sea trilogy--which started with Rites of Passage (1980) and continued with Close Quarters (1987)--makes a landfall at last with Fire Down Below, which completes a gripping masterpiece of contemporary fiction. In this concluding novel the old warship, her decrepit timbers held together now by ropes, lurches and lumbers towards Sydney Cove in the Antipodes. Driven sometimes by waves that are green mountains of water, driven sometimes by winds that grab the voice from throats and the wheel from the helmsman's hands, the old ship rolls and pitches and wallows towards her destination. Precariously, she still contains her cosmos of human beings, those sparks of God wracked by the ecstasies, torments, and torpors of living. There are panics, crises, agonizing decisions. There is a marriage at sea. She! Edmund Talbot, the narrator, is surrounded more and more by females of one kind of another, from the Dear, Distant Object of his Passion to the wooden womb from which they hope to be born, and continues his slow progress towards some sort of understanding and perspective, towards a realization of how very complex the world is, and of his own sad, astonishing, ridiculous, and happy place in it"--Dust jacket
Print Book, English, 1989
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1989