Word: englishman
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FIRE DOWN BELOW by William Golding (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $17.95). The last leaf of a trilogy begun back in 1980. An arrogant, young 19th century Englishman survives seaborne hardships to arrive in Australia -- and at some condition of self-knowledge...
...wife are transporting a printing press with which they hope to stir change in the convict colony. Talbot reprimands stiffly: "And you, sir, travelling with the avowed intention of making trouble -- of troubling this Antipodean society which is created wholly for its own betterment!" Yet the young Englishman could become dry tinder for Prettiman's incendiary rhetoric: "Imagine our caravan, we, a fire down below here -- sparks of the Absolute -- matching the fire up there -- out there...
...inhabitants of this Country," wrote William Dampier, the English sea dog who in 1688 became the first Englishman to record his impressions of Australia, "are the miserablest people in the World . . . Setting aside their humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes." Early this year, English journalist Auberon Waugh, who seems to have inherited his father Evelyn's racism if not his genius, visited Sydney for the Australian bicentennial. "They had no form of civil society at all, beyond whatever social organization may be observed in a swarm of locusts," he wrote of the Aborigines. Their art "must be judged...
...Olympic Games for those who want to play at being kids again. They begin by sneaking around the back of the Olympic stadium just before the opening ceremonies, to get close-ups of the athletes, out of line and out of synch, as they prepare to march in, an Englishman sporting his I SPEAK ENGLISH button (ah, that British irony!), the Jamaicans holding their heads high while across the world their island was being laid waste by Hurricane Gilbert. They continue at the Han River festival, where an American pulls off a major upset in an ineffable local version...
...into this abrasive parable of sexual frustration comes Martin (Gary Oldman), an Englishman who feels like an orphan, an alien in America -- the man who fell to earth, into a lonely woman's dream. She needs a son, so he'll be one, a cross between Dennis the Menace and Oedipus. He will play on her longing and guilt, in baby talk that moves her: "You never cuddled me, did you? . . . And you never let me follow your finger along the line of nice big $ words ((like)) 'Once upon a time.' " He will relive what was never his, "my American...