Word: talbot
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Nine students have joined the newly formed Princeton men's field hockey team. Sophomores Talbot Logan and Keith Weng founded the team with Butler College resident faculty member Douglas Kincade...
...moment, Talbot considers abandoning his extensively planned future: his post in the service of the British governor of Australia, which will in time bring him back to England, election to Parliament from his godfather's "rotten borough" and prospective glories beyond. And to throw all that away, he reminds himself, for a "parson's penniless daughter!" But the Alcyone is gone the next morning, and Marion with her. Talbot wakes up, hung over yet drunk with infatuation, to face the alarming likelihood that the ship carrying him toward his appointed destination will sink...
Golding, 75, carries off the impersonation of a polished but callow young blade of the period as convincingly as he did in Rites of Passage. For all of Talbot's well-heeled stuffiness, he constantly betrays, sometimes in spite of himself, his capacity for growth. Prolonged exposure to the "whole imaginable world" of his ship rattles his aristocratic preconceptions. The white line painted across the deck at the mainmast, segregating the common seamen and emigrants fore from the officers and better class of people aft, comes to seem ridiculous as the peril shared by everyone aboard increases. First Lieut. Summers...
...mercies of wind and sea. This experience is an archetype of Western literature (Genesis, The Odyssey), fraught with several millenniums of encrusted expectations. For the most part, Golding is content to let the symbolic dimensions of his tale remain implicit. "What a world a ship is! A universe!" Talbot exclaims at one point, but the energy he might have devoted to metaphysical speculations on this insight pour instead into keeping himself upright on the heaving decks and avoiding...
...reader will have grasped that I, at least, survived the voyage," Talbot writes near the end. Indeed. But "that self-confident young man who had come aboard" at the beginning of his first journal has now hardened into not only a seagoing veteran but a self-conscious author as well: "I am in half a mind to publish!" Since three volumes seem commercially more promising than two, Talbot breaks off his narrative while he and his ship hover on the brink of disaster. Unlike its predecessor, Close Quarters advertises its own sequel. And that seems well worth waiting...