Fire Down Below: With an introduction by Kate Mosse

by William Golding, Victoria Glendinning (Introduction)

Overview

Introduced by Kate Mosse, lose yourself in an epic naval journey in the final novel in the Booker Prize-winning historical fiction Sea Trilogy by the author of Lord of the Flies.

I think there has been death in my hands.
On the last stretch of its epic voyage from England to Australia, a disintegrating warship inches towards land. But there are still trials ahead, as the vessel is smashed against an ice cliff and blasted by a great storm, while the claustrophobic passengers battle erotic desires, masculine rivalry and violent power struggles - all experiencing a sea change in their natures. And when an unseen fire begins to smoulder below decks, the other side of the world has never seemed further away ...
'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

'A truly noble achievement'. Patrick O'Brien
'The best novel I've read this year ... The language fizzes and spits.' Daily Telegraph

'Reeks and resounds with authenticity ... The epic imaginative enterprise [is] as formidable a feat as the year-long odyssey it charts.' Sunday Times
'Golding writes the past as present [with] uncanny skill and tremendous intuition.' Ben Okri
To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy - Book Three

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571267446
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	346 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated in Marlborough and Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and invasion of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'slush pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. www.william-golding.co.uk
William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'reject pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. www.william-golding.co.uk

Editorial Reviews

The conclusion of the trilogy he began with the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980) and followed with Close Quarters (1987), Nobel Laureate Golding's densely complex, subtle and exacting latest novel tussles intriguingly with thematic and formal problems that have occupied the author in his previous works. The present trilogy enriches itself by self-consciously playing off its fictional precursors in a number of dimensions, including, most obviously, that of the voyage of self-discovery. In relating an almost year-long voyage (in the Napoleonic era) from England to the Antipodes of a motley band of passengers and the crew of a decrepit former man-o'-war as they experience many of life's dramas, the trilogy evokes tales by Melville, Voltaire and Homer among others. And the novels may be further interpreted not only as the Bildungsroman of aristocratic young narrator, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, by means of myth's revelatory reversal that exposes the disjunction between appearances and reality, but also (given the autobiographical details) as a means to Golding's own ironic self-discovery. The narrative's beautiful, otherworldly descriptions of the sea and air, as the ship, twice damaged by errors of judgment on the part of its younger officer, flounders in terrifyingly heavy seas, evoke a metaphysical, mythic dimension. This rich and problematical text resists facile interpretation even as it delights through Golding's witty and poetic evocation of the language of the period. (Feb . )

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This novel completes the Nobel laureate's trilogy about a voyage from England to Australia in the early 19th century. Neither Close Quarters ( LJ 4/15/87) nor this volume achieves the formal unity of Rites of Passage ( LJ 10/1/80), but the story Golding tells is engrossing and psychologically acute. Just as the beleaguered ship can serve as a microcosm of English society, so the voyage functions as an allegory of a more primal passage, as young Edmund Talbot progresses from ``the objectivity of ignorance'' to ``the subjectivity of knowledge.'' Equally noteworthy is Golding's description of a horrifying storm off the Cape of Good Hope. These volumesthe best sea fiction we've had since Conradbelong in most fiction collections. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.

Library Journal