Book 245: Easter Island/Rapa Nui (English) – Easter Island (Jennifer VANDERBES)

Dozens more toppled moai littered the coast below. From a distance, some simply looked like rocks. Through her binoculars, though, the slope of the shoulders and the indentation of the eyes fixed to the ground became clear. The twenty-foot statues of volcanic tuff had all been carved with identical features – they looked like slender giants with huge rectangular heads. They were neither lifelike nor ornate, but the size of them and the sheer number was impressive. She could see why they had captured the imaginations of Roggeveen, González, Cook, and La Pérouse. This was more than art, this was industry. Carving hundreds of stone giants, then positioning them along the island’s coast – impossible to imagine.

This is another placeholder – since as far as I could find no Rapanui person has written a novel, and the minuscule population doesn’t leave me holding my breath. As for non-fiction though, I think it must have had more words written about it per square metre than any other place on earth (and I feel like I’ve read most of those books!) Even if I hadn’t been there, it would seem as if I would know the island like the back of my hand. The island has also suffered an endless series of misfortunes, of which the dreadful fire is only the most recent – the initial poverty of natural resources caused by its sheer distance from anywhere else, the further impoverishment caused by deforestation (whether deliberate or accidental), introduced diseases, the 1862 Peruvian slaving expedition which kidnapped half of the islanders including all who had any knowledge about the moai statues…

This one was sitting around for a long time waiting to be read, since I bought it in a discount book shop (Sydney used to have such things!) I automatically buy almost everything about the Pacific Islands. When its time came, it turned out to be a really good novel. It has so many themes, all well-handled – and not superficially. What I most loved about it was that there is a lot of real science in it but it’s not dumbed down, nor boring.

Vanderbes comes up with possible answers to such diverse problems as the mystery of why the moai (statues) were created, how they were transported, what happened to the rongorongo (tablets with the mysterious undeciphered script), why German Admiral Graf von Spee’s fleet came to meet its fate in the Falkland Islands during WW1, and what was the world’s first flowering plant? Some of these answers are speculative, others factual (as far as we know). In the mix there is also sibling and spousal rivalry, feminism and especially the difficult but slowly improving position of women in science, along with a bit of romance, linguistics, plant evolution and history. It sounds like too much for one story, but it didn’t feel that way.

There are two parallel stories that we follow. Elsa Pendleton in 1912 enters a marriage of convenience with much older (English) archaeologist Edward Beazley; she is torn between her loyalty to him and to her younger sister Alice (who has mental problems) which severely limits her life choices. They travel to Rapa Nui so that her anthropologist husband can study the moai for the Royal Geographic Society, but she herself becomes more interested in trying to decipher the rongorongo. Easter was even more isolated then; they hadn’t even realised that WWI has broken out when the German fleet arrives.

In the other strand, Greer Sandor (American) in 1960 marries botany professor Thomas Farraday, goes to Easter Island in 1973 after their marriage breakdown – her husband had plagiarised her own research work without acknowledging her contribution, and she herself got unfairly blamed for plagiarism. (Both of the women are in some way betrayed by their spouses.) She is a palynologist who came to take core samples to study ancient pollen and thus the plant history of the island.

She gets around the island by horse – more sensibly than me. I hired a bicycle, and managed to get right to the far end of the island when I had a puncture – there are sharp volcanic stones everywhere – and had to wheel it the whole way back to the only village, Hanga Roa, on the other side. But I loved the island, especially its peacefulness – coming from a slightly crazy Brazil which was about to win the 1994 World Cup. I stayed a week because at that time there was only a weekly LAN-Chile flight between Santiago and Tahiti (I think now there might be only 2 or 3 domestic flights to Santiago a week).

Elsa’s relationship with von Spee and the fictional story that Vanderbes adheres to the factual history of his voyage was the only part I thought was stretching things a bit. Otherwise both the stories and the scientific aspects seemed totally believable. Readable and thought-provoking.

Vanderbes, Jennifer (1974 – ), Easter Island, London, Abacus, 2004 (first published 2003), ISBN 0 349 11795 0