Few in recent years can have written better than William Golding about the sea and bullies. Pincher Martin, that terrifying metaphysical sermon, was marvellous about the action of water, the way it moved in the sun or under rain, when lapping that awful rock or being hurled at it in a storm. As for bullies, Lord of the Flies is a sort of treatise on the variety in which they come: and The Inheritors a statement about the supersession of an earlier, gentler human being by Homo Sapiens, your original hooligan.

Rites of Passage brings these strands together in a new fashion. Some time early in the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot, a young man of aristocratic background, is on his way from England to Australia. It's an odd ship he's on: a man-of-war switched to passenger-carrying. He's keeping a journal for the eye of his godfather, a peer...