Product Description

In the cabin of an ancient, stinking warship bound for Australia, a man writes a journal to entertain his godfather back in England. With wit and disdain he records mounting tensions on board, as an obsequious clergyman attracts the animosity of the tyrannical captain and surly crew.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39490 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Funny, sad and entertaining- dark side of humans
Golding continues the theme of the inherent barbarity that lurks under mans' facade which he illustrated incredibly well in The Lord of The Flies. ROP is not LOTF equal- there is some confusion with the narrative and the two main characters are not easy to sympathise with. However Golding uses this to ask questons of the reader and creates brutality and humanism in unlikely places.
This is a fab book though not always pleasent. I would recommend it to someone who wants something a bit more deep than the normal paperback but still needs an engaging story that has the capacity to really move.

wonderfully evocative and moving
I read this book when it was first published and have since revisited it a couple of times. It is a wonderfully imagined account of a sea voyage to Australia at the time of Napoleonic Wars. The very mixed group of emigrants experience conditions aboard which are completely convincing - cramped, unpleasant, smelly and highly dangerous - with an equally covincing hierarchy of naval personnel. Everyone is interesting, everyone is fully characterised. Mostly it is seen through the eyes of young Mr. Talbot, who is on his way to make a distinguished career in the colonies.
He has nothing but contempt for the apparently ridiculous clergyman, Colley, but in that he sadly mistaken, as he discovers when he finds and reads Colley's journal, and it is in Colley that the tragedy in the book lies. This is a most original book written by a very great novelist, and it deals as always with Golding with the great theme of good and evil revealed through the characters, their attitudes and how they behave. It won the Booker prize and was a very worthy winner. It is just as powerful today as it was then.

Stunning exploration of enlightenment
This marvellous novel explores the beginnings of the development of the central character from a prissy, snobbish, upper-class boy to a rather more enlightened, broad-minded young man. This at a time when British society was also being forced to go through a process of discovery. The characters involved seem to represent the various strands in British culture at the time. The tragedy of the Rev Colley that emerges only helps to develop our young (anti-)hero and to expose the hypocrisy of the society he inhabits. This book, along with two subsequent volumes, are perhaps one of the greatest contributions ot English literature in the 20th Century and deserve to be seen thus.