BBC 2 has broadcast a three-part television adaptation of Golding’s trilogy To the Ends of the Earth in May-June 2005. The adaptation stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Neill, Victoria Hamilton and Jared Harris, and was filmed partly in South Africa, near Capetown.

Golding began work on Rites of Passage, the first volume of A Sea Trilogy, in 1976. It was published in 1980 and won the Booker Prize later that autumn. His acknowledged starting point was an episode in Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Wellington, a terrible story which made it necessary, Golding said, for him to try to understand how someone could die of shame. But the tragic story of the Reverend Colley, though central to Rites, is set in a context which had pre-occupied Golding for most of his life − the world of the sea, and the ships which sail on it. A lifelong obsession for him, as well, was the diagnosis and delineation of the English disease of class. Golding fills the unnamed old ship, where Colley suffers and dies, with a ‘village’ of characters from the multifarious and precisely anatomised layers of English life.

His narrator and hero, Edmund Talbot, youthful nephew to a Lord, is carefully and sympathetically drawn − not a caricature, however comic his good opinion of himself. His emergence from callow, highly educated ignorance is funny but also moving, and gives the trilogy something of an optimistic tone. Many other characters, eccentric, cruel, arrogant, or merely desperate, provide a more ambiguous picture. The ship, a lumbering old vessel from an earlier epoch, continually at risk and tried severely by storms and mishaps, has the capacity constantly to surprise the reader. Golding’s lifetime of seamanship, and his decades of reading about the navy from the time of Nelson to that of World War II, enable him to guide the reader round the ship with ease. It was a matter of some pride with him that he never did research for a novel. His journal shows that he made some exceptions for the Sea Trilogy, but much of what he needed was already in his mind, ready to be re-imagined and re-created.

Several years after the publication of Rites of Passage, Golding returned to the ship and its characters. He declared that he ‘had left Edmund Talbot, a ship and a whole ship’s company, to say nothing of myself, lolloping about in the Atlantic with their voyage no more than half completed’. He also admitted that he kept thinking of silly things for Talbot to say. The voyage continues through Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, though it might be true to say that some aspects of Golding’s seascape mellow in these volumes. Golding enjoys himself (he always felt critics wilfully ignored his capacity for comedy), though the Golding world can never be all sunshine and good humour. Nevertheless, the end of the voyage, and the trilogy, brings much happy resolution. Talbot, in love, humbled, and still so ignorant of his own feelings that he is constantly surprised by grief rather than joy, is a marvellous narrator.

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