If you have not already read the first two novels of Golding's trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, the early pages of Fire Down Below may seem a bit confusing. One is plunged straight away into a scene of action on shipboard with characters who are not explained. But if you persevere with the voyage, then, like the narrator, young Edmund Talbot, you will be drawn into the relationships between crew-members and passengers, and be as overwhelmed as he is by the dangers and dramas of this calamitous journey from England to Australia in 1813.
The first volume of the trilogy is Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize in 1980. The second, Close Quarters, was not published until 1987, after which he began Fire Down Below straight away. It took three years, with three or four drafts and rewritings, which was Golding's usual way of working. He was at the height of his renown; he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and received his knighthood during the proof-correcting of Fire Down Below.
It was Lord of the Flies (1954) that had made his name, and it remains his best-known novel. The themes and structure of that book – with characters isolated from the world in a way that allows or forces the revelation not only of their true natures, but visceral issues of domination, cruelty, shame, and extreme humiliation – are echoed in the sea trilogy. In Fire Down Below the ghastly fate of the Reverend Colley (from Rites of Passage) and the horrific suicide of his servant Wheeler (from Close Quarters) are fresh in the mind of Edmund Talbot. In the trilogy Golding also touches on homosexual desires and behaviours among men cooped up together on shipboard, with cross-currents of both excitement and disgust. Talbot in Fire Down Below is preoccupied by his feelings for a crew-member, Charles Summers, while professing his consuming passion for Miss Chumley, whom he encountered in the previous volume.
Talbot is an immature sprig of the English upper class, who sets off on the voyage with a haughty assumption of entitlement which antagonises everyone on board. But in this last volume he, like everyone else, undergoes a 'sea change'. He serves in emergency as a midshipman, and wears 'seaman's slops', startling young Mrs Brocklebank, with whom he has some rather ambiguous sexual contact. He himself is startled by the appearance of the ex-governess Miss Granham, also in seaman's slops, i.e. in trousers. 'Costume was proving to be a test of society.' Mr Prettiman, a visionary radical, dreaming of establishing a utopian community, seemed a ludicrous figure to Talbot at first, but by the end of Fire Down Below he finds him an inspiration. In the course of the novel Mr Prettiman marries Miss Granham, whom Talbot despised but whom he now learns to revere. There are times, writes Talbot in the journal he is keeping, when it seems 'I threw off my upbringing as a man might let armour drop around him and stand naked, defenceless, but free!'
Readers of Patrick O'Brian's sequence of Aubrey–Maturin novels, set at sea in the same period – towards the end of the Napoleonic wars – will find themselves making comparisons between O'Brian and Golding. One difference is their sense of humour. There is humour in O'Brian, but in Golding the humour has a lunatic quality, often in this novel based on physical indignities, on the instability of the decrepit ship in bad weather, and the ensuing slipping, sliding and staggering of the passengers and crew. There is a schoolboy slapstick about it, mingled – in a way that is quite disconcerting, and characteristic of Golding – with real passions and real danger to life. The ship is falling apart, its timbers strapped together; it is leaking; and the foremast is splitting at its base. How to secure the mast, by means of hot iron which contracts and holds the wood fast as it cools, is one strand of the plot-line, as is the problem of calculating longitude. But what you remember long after finishing the book are the two great dramatic high points: the great storm which all but reduces the vessel to splinters (just reading this makes you seasick), and the terror of the ice cliff against which it is nearly smashed to bits. Golding's powers of description are awesome, and include some lyric evocations of the beauty of moonlit nights on a quiet ocean.
Patrick O'Brian reviewed Fire Down Below when it came out (London Review of Books, 20 April 1989), and criticised it for its inauthenticity. The internal geography of the ship was confused, the language and technicalities wrong, the history inaccurate. Golding, he wrote, obviously did not care about any of this, and he concluded that the novel was 'a truly noble achievement'. Golding's biographer John Carey (in William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies, 2009) confirms that Golding did almost no historical research, and relied on his imagination, even though he was an experienced sailor. In the introduction he wrote for the revised single-volume edition of the trilogy (1991), on which this text of Fire Down Below is based, he concedes that a novelist generally finds research 'such a bore!' He corrected some mistakes he made about historical fact and nautical terms, but left in anachronistic language in conversations: 'But a novelist will claim – must claim – that any word must be in use for at least a generation before a lexicographer pinned it to his page.' That will not work for his use of 'intellectual snobbery', not recorded in the OED until the 1900s. Golding put the phrase in inverted commas in the novel, perhaps wilfully reinforcing the fact that his nameless ship is sailing in a world of the imagination.
Talbot feels the voyage has been something more than just 'a simple adventure'. It was a voyage towards self-knowledge. 'We all change,' Mrs Prettiman says. 'It is danger, I suppose, which shows us all in our true colours.' But then Golding cancels out any thematic pretensions by having Mrs Prettiman tell Talbot later that the voyage 'is no type, emblem, metaphor of the human condition', but just a 'series of events'. Talbot himself suddenly throws everything, even the events, into doubt, as he thinks up different possible endings for his account – finally awarding himself a romantic happy ending, which we want to believe. Golding, though he trained as a scientist, is drawn to the irrational. He, like his novel, is ambivalent, unresolved, walking a tightrope between reason and spirituality and between tragedy and comedy. That is what makes Fire Down Below so compelling and disturbing, and much more than just 'a series of events'.