Close Quarters
With an introduction by Helen Castor
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Lose yourself in an epic naval journey in the second novel in the Booker Prize-winning historical fiction Sea Trilogy by the author of Lord of the Flies.
This tropical nowhere was the whole world - the whole imaginable world.
A decrepit warship is becalmed halfway to Australia, stilled in an ocean wilderness of heat and sea mists. In this surreal, fête-like atmosphere, a ball is held with a passing ship: the passengers dance and flirt, while beneath them seaweed like green hair spreads omniously over the hull. Half-mad with fear, drink, love and opium, both vessel and passengers feel themselves going to pieces: and the very planks seem to twist themselves alive as the ship comes apart at the seams . . .
'Fantastic ... Gems tumble off the pages ... A strong sense of drama ... Much of the pleasure of reading his work is his original imagery.' Annie Proulx
'No living writer has represented the fragility of man's experience so marvellously as Golding.' AS Byatt
'It is in Golding's magnificent, therapeutic, terrifying descriptions of seascapes that the deepest meanings can be found.' Kate Mosse
'Stunning . . . As exciting as any thriller.' Sunday Times
'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' Daily Mail
'Tells an utterly absorbing tale, in language of immense force and subtlety.' Financial Times
To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy - Book Two
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What began with Rites of Passage (1980) continues with this second volume of a planned trilogy. Nobel Laureate Golding again displays his accomplished storytelling, not to mention an intimidating command of all things maritime at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Although it lacks deeper levels of significance, this is a rousing tale of the tragic misadventures befalling an 18th century fighting ship now converted to transporting cargo and passengers on the treacherous voyage from England to Australia. The novel is cast as a journal written by Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, a well-meaning, somewhat uncertain, slightly pompous officer and gentleman enroute to Sydney and a career in His Majesty's service. As a result of a green sailor's blunder, the ship's masts shatter, and it founders. Golding's principal achievement is the vivid, detailed depiction of a disintegrating vessel in the tropical seas, its progressive decay, and the wretchedness and despair of its passengers. None of this prevents a chaste, mannerly romance between Talbot and a sweet young thing. At the end, which Talbot himself calls "abrupt,'' it seems doubtful the ship will survive its ordeal. Howor whetherit does awaits the third volume.
