Rites of Passage

The Crossing and Colley’s Fate

Sometime in the early nineteenth century, a converted warship carrying passengers and crew is making its way from England to the colonies at the far end of the earth. Edmund Talbot, a young gentleman with a letter of introduction to the Governor and a godfather of sufficient rank to have arranged his passage in some comfort, is keeping a journal. He writes with the easy fluency of an educated man who has never seriously examined anything—observant within the limits of his class, amusing, occasionally kind, and entirely unaware of what his unexamined assumptions are doing to the people around him.

The Reverend Colley comes aboard as a passenger clergy: low-born, earnest, visibly not a gentleman. He is assigned quarters near the fo’c’sle, below the social boundary that divides the ship’s world. Talbot notices him with mild curiosity and occasional condescension. The crew notices him with hostility. The captain, Summers, loathes him for reasons that are never entirely clear. The ship’s social hierarchy—rigid, enforced through the daily rituals of rank and place—makes Colley’s position exposed in ways he does not understand.

When the ship crosses the equator, the traditional “crossing-the-line” ceremony becomes the occasion for Colley’s destruction. What happens in the fo’c’sle—the specifics of which Colley records in the letter he writes after the ceremony and which Talbot reads only after Colley has died—is one of the great revelatory moments in late twentieth-century British fiction. Colley dies of shame, quite literally: the shame of what he did and what was done to him, in the same moment, is more than he can survive. Talbot, reading the letter, slowly understands what his own class performed upon a man he could have protected.

Edmund as Unreliable Narrator

Golding’s formal achievement in Rites of Passage is the construction of a narrator who cannot understand what he is witnessing—not from stupidity but from the specific limitations imposed by his class position. Edmund Talbot is intelligent, observant, and well-read. He is also so thoroughly formed by the assumptions of English gentility that he cannot register the cruelty those assumptions produce because that cruelty is invisible to him: it is simply the way things are.

The reader, reading slightly past Edmund’s narrative, reconstructs what Edmund cannot see. When Edmund records with mild amusement that the crew seems hostile to Colley, the reader understands that this hostility has been organized and licensed by the ship’s social structure in ways Edmund has participated in without awareness. When Edmund notes that the captain finds Colley ridiculous, the reader sees that the captain’s contempt is a permission structure for everything that follows.

The journal form is essential to this effect: we see only what Edmund chooses to record and understand only what Edmund’s framework allows him to understand. Golding controls the gap between what Edmund sees and what the reader sees with extraordinary precision. The moment of revelation—when Talbot reads Colley’s own account and realizes what the ceremony actually involved—is devastating precisely because Talbot had been there, had witnessed the ceremony, and had recorded it without understanding what he was watching.

The To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy

Rites of Passage was published in 1980 and won the Booker Prize for that year. It is the first volume of Golding’s final major work, the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy, completed by Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). The three volumes were published together as a single novel in 1991. The later volumes follow Talbot and the ship further into their crossing, developing Talbot’s limited self-knowledge—he becomes slightly less blind as the voyage continues—while introducing new characters and dangers. Most readers find Rites of Passage the strongest of the three and a complete reading experience in itself.

Golding received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, between the first and second volumes of the trilogy, with the committee citing his ability to illuminate “the human condition in the world of today” through novels that have “the clarity of a realistic narrative and the diversity and universality of myth.” Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most read novel, but many Golding scholars consider Rites of Passage his most perfectly executed: the control is total, the construction airtight, and the moral is arrived at through the reader’s own labor rather than stated by the text. For readers who have already encountered Lord of the Flies, Rites of Passage offers a Golding of equal force and considerably greater technical sophistication.

Rating: 4.1/5 — Golding’s Booker Prize winner is his most precisely engineered novel: a ship-crossing that becomes a complete social world, with an aristocratic narrator whose class blindness makes him complicit in a destruction he cannot see—and forces the reader to see it for him.