Fire Down Below - post I

Apologies all over the place today. Working from home denied me the opportunity to do any major reading and the concept of a lunch hour also disappears when you work through.

The other problem is juggling several books at once. Ambitiously, I took the option to start the third in the Golding trilogy so here are some thoughts on that. Tomorrow will get back into Wise Children and start a lunchtime read book for this week.

The most obvious comment to make after the opening couple of chapters is to wonder what on earth the point of the summary was at the end of part two, Close Quarters. Those few pages indicated that the voyage was successful in terms of getting to the destination and despite the loss of the main mast the ship did not sink.

So you half expect this book to start with the main character Edmund Talbot detailing the work he is doing helping the governor run one of the far flung parts of the British Empire. But things start almost exactly where they left off. There is something reassuring about the old characters but you do wonder where it is going. Bearing in mind how slow the second book took to get going you wonder if this is more of the same. Probably not but it is not the start that was expected.

More tomorrow…