Rites of Passage

In the early 1800s, Edmund Talbot, a young and rather priggish Englishman, takes passage on a boat heading for Australia where he is to be an official in the colonial government. In addition to Talbot, many of the eccentric passengers--a sexually predatory sailor, the aging coquette Miss Zenobia Brocklebank, the ship's tyrannical captain--undergo profound changes in the course of the voyage, during which a naive clergyman is victimized and, finally, pushed to suicide. These events are described in the diary Talbot keeps en route. "Rites of Passage" won the Booker McConnell prize in 1980.