Books like Rites of Passage

Well, William Golding, sir. You achieved something that not many men have done. You brought me very close to tears.This novel really produced an amazingly strong emotional response in me. Odd, in that it keeps the reader at arm's length for much of Edmund Talbot's narrative. Young William is a prig and a stuffed shirt and a snob and awfully skilled at self-deception and there was no greater desire in my ungenerous heart than for him to get his comeuppance. When it arrives though it is in the realisation that he has been unknowingly, and yet not entirely blamelessly instrumental in the kind of public humiliation that a sensitive man cannot survive. So Talbot's pained self-knowledge that I so wished upon him comes at the cost of a man's life. Does that make me complicit?