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Title: The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0-449-90858-5 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: November, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.27 (37 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointment in Theroux' book
Comment: I read this book a couple of years ago and am still galled by Theroux' writings. Although I have visited many of the islands of the South Pacific, I will contain my comments to Fiji alone.
I have visited many, many times and lived in Fiji for over five years with my family (my mother lived there for almost 20 years). What is written about Fiji is almost fiction. I don't know how Theroux interpreted the islanders as threatening. Their smiles could light up the world.
I've been married to a Fijian (man) for over 20 years now and Theroux' take on the people couldn't be further from the truth.
Finally, his section on the two coups that occurred is so far from the truth as to be fiction. He must only have spoken with the Indian faction to get such a one-sided slant. My mother was there during the coup and there was no threat or danger to anyone. In fact, very little "uprising" to say the least.
I've been waiting for a forum to vent my anger over the Fiji section of the book and I thank you for the space.
Rating: 5
Summary: Mouldy & Insightful
Comment: I lived in Suva (the capital city of...) Fiji for a year during and just after that island nation's first 'bloodless coup d'etat" in 1987 (good ol' Sitivini "Steve", to his closest pals, Rabuka, and his racist henchmen- the leader of that response to a native India-Indian/Fijian man having won the last democratic election held in that archepelago) and on up into a remote village in Ra for the next year as a health education Peace Corps Volunteer.
It took me all those 2 years living fully immersed within Fijian culture and among an interesting( and it must be said oddly racist, even amongst themselves) bunch of humans as one is ever likely to meet - to start to make sense out of their very complicated ways and mores. Paulie T. got to the crux pretty much immediately.
Personally, I got to hate running into locals who had recently encountered tourists - as it always made interactions more complicated for me. Thus American, Aussie and Japanese toursists were a big headache for me. They would over pay for everything and scamper about scantily clad - tweaking at the Fijian moral compass, developed, ironically, directly from the teachings of those good ol' late 1800's Christian missionaries - who, at least had a hand ;-) in helping Fijians stop eating each other.
He nailed the Fijian culture - and I am assuming he does the same to the others described. Who said traveling was pretty? Sure, it can be if one takes great care to insulate oneself from the local actualities - but where's the fun in that?!
I travel to see how the rest of the world lives. Although, one time I went to the b.v.i. to lay about on the beach completely cut off from reality - and you know what? THAT ain't half bad either!
Rating: 5
Summary: The happy wanderer
Comment: This is one of the books I have taken, along with Lonely Planet's guide to Fiji, on a voyage, which may be one-way, from Chicago to Suva (Fiji's capital) and Fiji. I recommend this book, wholeheartedly.
Paul Theroux is clearly on the right side of that well-worn distinction in travel writing, between the tourist and the traveler. Although many excellent guides (notably those from Lonely Planet) try to cater to both sides, in general, travel books are either written by tourists who've been hornswoggled by the locals, or by real travelers.
One genre of tourist book is the right-wing tirade against the society visited by the writer. It is an offensive American habit to announce one's bien-pensance by traveling the world and finding fault with the sanitation and architecture of other countries.
P. J. O'Rourke is an amusing fellow but ultimately rather dreary in that he blames the victim in his book Holidays in Hell. As it happens, writers on the right, who blame Third World capitals for crumbling architecture, or nonworking toilets, would do well to reflect on the simple physical properties of materials in heat and humidity, or the exorbitant trade school fees that parents in underdeveloped lands must pay, for their children to be educated in plumbing trades.
Which isn't to say that Theroux fails to identify negative features of the Pacific islands, which, for him, include its anti-intellectualism and the colonialist dependence most apparent in American Samoa, where a government, in order to secure the territory, does indeed kill traditional custom and future initiative (as a conservative would predict) by a system of thoughtless handouts...made after all in self-interest.
People in developed countries first romanticise the indigneous and are apt, when encountering its anti-intellectualism and suspicion of the outsider, to switch, like Mistah Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, and Brando in Apocalypse Now, to the horrorshow view. Theroux is far more nuanced and this allowed him to deal with the sort of frightening scene he encountered both in the wilds and in American Samoa, of bullying of an adult loner by a group of local kids.
Being torn apart by children is a nameless fear of intellectual loners; Robert Crumb has a panel in which a kid announces to his father, "hey, Pop, we burnt a bum at recess." Theroux is exceptional, in facing this fear as did brother Adorno, in Adorno's essay "Fascism is the nightmare of childhood".
However, Theroux does not regard indigneous people as Fascists and instead accounts for their dislike of the outsider as a rational need for family and clan cohesion, the most important fact of their lives.
To maintain a generally positive outlook on people with a healthy critical spirit is a rare accomplishment. It is easier to adopt the pose of Shakespeare's Jaques and to conclude the worst from one's travels.
Americans, at least before Sep 11, were friendly travelers who liked everybody. Far rarer is the traveler who judges but based on observation. One type of South Pacific denizen Theroux does not like was manufactured by the triumphalism of Reagan and the elder Bush, and Bob Hawke of Australia, he of the cockatoo's pompadour.
This is the Aussie, Kiwi, Brit or American prone to make generalizations about other groups and nature itself, the bore of the saloon bar. The most attractive features of the matey Australasian personality of the 1960s, who voted instinictively for liberals as long as they promised swagmen a fair shake was erased by CIA disruption in the 1970s (this is fact, not paranoia) and replaced by a property-owning swagman democracy.
Property-owning swagmen democracies are better than most political arrangements. We Yanks invented the idea of expropriating the toffee-noses and becoming utter swine in our turn: but expropriation results in insecurity which often emerges in boozy conversations in countless pubs and distraction from distraction by distraction, as the antics of powerless Royals, and Governor-Generals in pantaloons, conceals the sort of raw work one has seen in the US CIA's Australian monkeyshines, the silencing of British Labor on the war, the French nuclear nonsense, and the elimination of New Zealand's David Lange, who Theroux met in the Marquesas.
Of course, the above paragraph might be read as complementary to and effectively the same as the worst kind of saloon bar rhodomontade and ordinary people may well ask, where does Theroux get off, or a fortiori, where do I (the answer at this writing is Suva Bay.) People who don't as a rule read books, including many sun gods and goddesses of the South Pacific, are apt to call such writing "generalization" and to remark, with passion, that it might hurt someone's feelings, one of the writer's occupational hazards, along with late checks and the bottle, being the bearer of bad news that hurts strangers and their Mum.
But if the charge sticks, then any kind of writing outside of sailing manuals would have to disappear.
There are curious parallels between Theroux's situation, and my current situation. He wrote at the time of the first Gulf War, I write this review after the end of the second. He was recently divorced (a strike against him in the traditional cultures of the South Pacific, where I've already been asked my marital status) and I started reading Theroux at the time of my own divorce. Today, far more so than in 1981, the culture makes no provision for the divorced man who is expected to do Protestant penance, or else wander the isles gibbering and capering in the tropic moonlight.
No provision, today, is made for the partially shriven, and partially lost, soul. Instead, the Americans would convert him to Yankee salvation and go-ahead schemes. The sturdy sons of England, Canada, and Australia would buy the old lad of the castle strong drink. Distant drummers are after all unheard by one's mates, who can't figure out what makes yer go. In consequence, your old lad of the castle becomes set apart in thought.
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Title: The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0449910857 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Dark Star Safari : Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0618134247 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels of Paul Theroux by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0804111227 Publisher: Ivy Books Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0140071814 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0804104549 Publisher: Ivy Books Pub. Date: April, 1990 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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