FIRE DOWN BELOW
by William Golding
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
313 pages; $17.95
The 19th century hero of this seafaring novel finally completes a laborious journey from England to New South Wales. In transit, Edmund Talbot grows weary of "this seemingly endless voyage"; safely ashore at Sydney Cove, he marvels that he has been at sea for nearly a year. In fact, the trip has taken much longer than that. William Golding first shoved Talbot off dry land in Rites of Passage (1980), which went on to win the Booker Prize, Britain's most coveted award for fiction. After receiving the Nobel...