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

Book 240: Cook Islands (English) – Vaka: Saga of a Polynesian Canoe (Tom DAVIS = Pa Tuterangi Ariki)

A black night, relieved only by spectacular sparkles of phosphorescence, found them in no better condition. There was no let up in the storm. Each man found ways of mentally overcoming moment by moment the endless waiting for the storm to abate. Some sat covered from head to feet, and never changed position. Others found enough room to stretch out and try to sleep, but most were denied this luxury by the movement of the vessels, the constant deluging, the shriek of the wind and the thrash of the seas. No one could tell whether it was raining. The wetness was all around and it mattered little that it was rain or salt water.

 

  The Cook Islands is a self-governing territory of New Zealand/Aotearoa. The local Polynesians are Maoris, the source of the Maoris of New Zealand, as we see in this story. Even though this is a novel, with an interesting story line, it has an incredible amount of factual information about traditional Polynesian voyaging, and life in general. It even has a comprehensive index. It ranges all the way across the vast Polynesian world, even to Fiji (although it doesn’t reach the Cook Islands until fairly late in the book), and across a long time span down through history. The author, Tom Davis/Pa Tuterangi Ariki, obviously knows what he’s talking about. The Polynesian voyages of exploration and settlement (they found every habitable speck in the vast ocean) are tragically, I would say criminally, neglected in Western history books. They were effectively the space exploration of their day. The points of the ‘Polynesian triangle’ (Easter Island/Rapa Nui, Hawai’i and New Zealand) are enormous distances apart, and their wider Austronesian relatives made it all the way to Madagascar (more than halfway around the globe through Indonesia from Easter Island). Despite this great distance in space and time, the relatedness of the languages is still quite obvious. And not only linguistically, but also culturally, the common givens are ubiquitous. The Polynesians made the Vikings and the Phoenicians look like landlubbers. The islands were often at risk of becoming overpopulated (Malthus would have been popular), and various solutions were tried, including infanticide, war, and abortion. But perhaps the most popular solution was emigration to another island, including discovering it if necessary! It’s obvious that to the Polynesians, the sea was their home and they were totally comfortable with it; it was their highway and they were happy to set out, almost casually, on enormously long voyages. They were aware that the world is round, and were expert in using signs such as currents, winds, birds, and the stars to navigate. Davis (rightly) puts paid to the debunked theory, advanced most prominently by Thor Heyerdahl, that the islands were settled from South America. The Polynesians had no problem sailing against the prevailing winds. Any sailor worth his salt knows to keep plenty of wind and tide in hand. Only landlubbers think that sailing down wind is the way to go to sea – but you may never get back. Sailing against the wind and the current allows the choice, if things are not to one’s liking, to run back home with ease. Calling these voyaging vessels ‘canoes’ is a bit of a put-down. The double-hulled vaka were really ships, fast, flexible and technically advanced for their time. This particular vaka goes through a series of owners, 12 generations, and 9 names (finally Takitumu), over 300 years. Over that time all its components were replaced (which brings to mind the Ship of Theseus, or the proverbial axe which has had both blade and handle replaced – is it the same item?) – except for the keel, although it was finally riddled with teredo worm and patched for as long as possible. It was originally built on ‘Upolu (Samoa), Its first big voyage is a malaga (visiting party) around Samoa, then with its series of owners it spends at least 15 years in Fiji, then Tahiti, then the Cook Islands. When no longer seaworthy, it ends its life beached in New Zealand.  At the beginning of its life, Te Arutanga Nuku covets the canoe, and sends his wife Te Pori to get it somehow from his father Atonga, which she does by making love with him (he renames the boat after her). It’s interesting to compare Polynesian colonialism with European. In the story there is a feeling of superiority among the Polynesians over the (Melanesian) Fijians, since the latter were cannibals, had less effective governmental structures, and were more prone to warfare. (As usual, it’s hard  to know how much of this  can be put down to racism). Sometimes the justification for colonialism sounds familiar: Ka’ukura…pointed out that it was not all of benefit just to the migrants. A large proportion of the communities already on these islands could see the benefit of more people. Some of the larger islands, he told them, were lying idle for want of people to develop them, and because the settling of these islands had been done without benefit of planning or organization, the people were often in strife with one another for lack of leadership and social structure to guide them. Like a Russian classic, there were too many names for me to remember (the Polynesians love genealogy) but that didn’t detract much from the enjoyment. Especially towards the end, the story veers into mythological territory (perhaps it is directly derived from there?), for example the fire-proof cloak. But on the whole, Davis keeps closely to known facts, and even avoids coming down on one side or the other of disputed issues (such as whether the rats the Polynesians brought with them were merely stowaways or brought deliberately… they were a food source). The story spends a lot of time in Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand. Perhaps (for present purposes) I could have wished for more time in the Cooks, whose origins are left a little vague, but perhaps I was thrown off by how the islands had different names from their current ones. I would say that this is a book that all Polynesians should read to understand and take pride in their heritage (perhaps not as a school text though… there’s a lot of sex, and some cannibalism, especially in Fiji!) Davis was the Cook Islands Prime Minister from 1978-83 and then from 1983-87. He founded the Democratic Party and wrote the music to the national anthem. He also founded the Cook Islands Voyaging Society and built and sailed in two replica Polynesian voyaging canoes. Davis, Tom, Pa Tuterangi Ariki (1917 – 2007), Vaka: saga of a Polynesian Canoe, Institute of Polynesian Studies; Polynesian Press; Samoa House; University of the South Pacific, 2^nd edn. 1999 (1^st edn. 1992), ISBN 982-02-0153-5

Book 237: Pitcairn (English) – Remembering Love (Nadine CHRISTIAN)

She’d closed the door on Jack’s heartbroken face early that morning, heart shattering into a trillion pieces. Sliding down against the door, she sat on the cold, hard floor and let her own tears and pain loose, crumpling in a boneless mess on the floor. She’d lain there until she was sure a puddle had formed from her tears, and there were no more left to fall. Dragging herself down the hall, she collapsed into her bed and stared into the dark, eyes dry, mind void. She thought she’d never sleep. She hoped when she did, she’d never wake. Her life felt so broken. Holly had no idea where to turn next.  _______________________________________________________________  

I have to admit romance isn’t one of the genres I usually read, so I wasn’t holding out much hope for this one, especially since Pitcairn is one of the world’s smallest political entities (population: 47) and Nadine Christian was the only Pitcairner (with that famous surname!) I could find who has written a novel. (Incidentally, also the only one who had given birth there for a very long time). But this book wasn’t bad at all. The story of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the settlement of Pitcairn Island must be one of the best-known (and most enthralling, dare I say romantic?) in human history – Fletcher Christian’s mutiny against his supposedly evil Captain Bligh, Bligh’s incredible non-stop voyage to Timor from mid-Pacific, the mutineers’ voyage in the Bounty to find an island to hide on and their incredible discovery of Pitcairn which had been misplaced on the map, its settlement by the mutineers (all but one of whom ended up being killed) and their Tahitian wives. Even though I’ve never been, and am sadly never likely to go, to Pitcairn I felt I was already familiar with some of the places in this story. Nadine herself knows Pitcairn too well, so more description of the island might be nice for those who haven’t been there (which is almost everyone). Still, I learned a lot about what it’s like to live on this super-isolated rock with its intriguing place names. (I always wondered who Ted was – none of the Bounty mutineers had that name – but thanks to this book found out that Tedside comes from ‘The Other Side’.) Pitcairn’s language is a fascinating mix of 18th century English (much of it nautical) and Tahitian. As someone who loves islands (and dreamed of owning one!), I think there must be a happy medium between having an island to oneself (and one’s girlfriend/partner/wife) and having a reasonable population number so that you have some privacy and autonomy. Tiny islands like this seem to be gossip factories, in fact the chief gossiper in this story is a real ogre! Obviously the population must also be very inbred? Like the heroine Holly, I rolled my eyes at myself for choosing a romance, but frankly there was little if any choice from this tiny island. (Holly seems to be always rolling her eyes at something – she should see a doctor about it). Speaking of her eyes, like Elton John, I was confused by their colour, which is earlier on described as green, later as blue. It’s self-published and has some of the usual self-published foibles (bad punctuation) but it wasn’t too bad in this respect. Some examples: “The tree’s thinned out” “the old biddy’s getting their knickers in a twist” “Holly laid her head on Jacks shoulder” “Tattoo’s radiated from under his singlet” “he light’s my fire” “Saturday’s were his day” “It’s hard to know who’s they are” “”a diary that not only had opened her eyes to her mother’s secrets, but obviously held some of his fathers” (presumably a very big diary!) At least at the beginning, there is a thicket of too many adjectives, which would be anathema to Stephen King! But overall it was much better written than I expected. Like the author, Holly is a writer and has lived in New Zealand. She was actually born on Pitcairn but had left it as a young girl. As the story unfolds, she learns the tragic story of her parents and why she ended up in NZ. The tale is about memory, and forgetting. As soon as she arrives she gets back together with her childhood friend, Jack, this time in a romance. Jack’s father has Alzheimer’s and is regularly helped by another of the locals, who is openly hostile to Holly, because of her supposed past. The story keeps clipping along, and on the whole it wasn’t a chore to read as I expected.

 

Christian, Nadine (1971 – ), Remembering Love, Santa Rosa, CA, Eternal Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-61572-855-8

Book 225: Tuvalu (English) – Edward Barry (Louis BECKE)

 

This letter was brought to Mrs. Tracey by a Tebuan native, who had received it from one of Barry’s men at the usual rendezvous. She opened it with an exclamation of pleasure and read it through. Then, with her hands lying upon her lap, she gave herself up to thought. Her two attendants, the girls Paní and Toea, watched her with their full, lustrous eyes as they sat on a mat in the centre of the house smoking their cigarettes of strong, black tobacco. Without all was silent, save now and then when an occasional footfall would sound on the path in front of the quiet dwelling as some native returned to the village from the beach, carrying a string of fish or a basket of sea-birds’ eggs for the evening meal. Straight from the open door the lagoon lay shining under the light of myriad stars, its placid waters undisturbed by even the faintest ripple, for the trade wind had died away with the setting of the sun, and the fronds of the long belt of palms fringing the inner beach hung as still as if they had been carven out of stone.

 

I’ve long been obsessed with Tuvalu for the perhaps eccentric reason that I thought it had collectively the most beautiful names in the world. But for this project it was one of the hardest nuts to crack, and like Palau, I was despairing of being able to find a novel written by someone from there or even someone who had lived there. Surely the Tuvaluans have stories to tell to themselves and the world (not least about what it’s like to live in a land threatened with being submerged by rising sea levels?) The novel Tuvalu by Andrew O’Connor has absolutely NOTHING to do with Tuvalu. I came across a series of children’s books – in Tuvaluan – published in New Zealand, but the publisher didn’t supply my request, and anyway I’ve tried to stick to adult or at least young adult fiction. Surely someone had spent time there – maybe Robert Louis Stevenson? (Apparently not). Then I stumbled across the almost forgotten Australian writer Louis Becke. He did live in what is now Tuvalu, then called the Ellice Islands, and he did write novels (although he turned out more short stories). And even if they’re not quite as good as the similar ones of RLS, I reckon they’re still pretty good!

George Lewis Becke, or Louis Becke, had a life which was as adventurous as his stories. He was born in Australia and claimed to have began his peripatetic career by running away from home twice before he was 10. At 14 he sailed to San Francisco and at 16 stowed away on a boat to Samoa where he worked as a bookkeeper – well maybe it wasn’t all exciting, but he did meet the notorious blackbirder and crook “Bully” Hayes there, and later sailed and was shipwrecked with him, and was arrested (and acquitted) for piracy – Hayes however escaped; and Becke wrote his biography. He tried his luck in a Queensland gold rush, lived in the Ellice Islands (Tuvalu) in the 1880s and ran a store there. He survived a shipwreck in the adjacent Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati) but lost everything he had. After living on some other Pacific islands and working on some more boring jobs back in Australia, he became a writer, winning a plagiarism case against T.A. Browne (‘Rolf Boldrewood’, most famous as author of Robbery Under Arms) with his lawyer A. ‘Banjo’ Patterson (a famous Australian poet). He later lived in Fiji, New Zealand, England, Ireland and France. (This is taken from the biography below.) He obviously spoke good Samoan, and apparently Gilbertese as well. On the other hand, ‘The Greek’ in this novel (who doesn’t get a name) is given a ridiculous accent (“Mova quicka, you dam blacka dog!”) And while we’re on language, Becke uses the ‘thee’ form inconsistently.

Three of his short stories were set in Tuvalu: ‘The Rangers of the Tia Kau’ (in By Reef and Palm, 1894), ‘The Fisher Folk of Nukufetau’ (in The Ebbing of the Tide (1895), and ‘Kennedy the Boatsteerer’ (in Ebbing of the Tide, 1895). I read and enjoyed all of these, but since I’m sticking to full-size novels for this project, I chose Edward Barry, even though it only mentions The Ellice Islands (Tuvalu) in passing. It’s the story of a voyage to an incredibly rich secret pearl bed in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia. They call in Tuvalu to collect expert divers. There is the threat of a mutiny from some of the crew. When they arrive in the Carolines they discover a white woman whose husband Barry had found murdered (purportedly having taken his own life in a fit of ‘melancholy’) in Sydney, also a victim of their plot (including Barry’s captain) which she had escaped. Once Barry realises what is happening, he comes up with a plan to thwart their dastardly scheme.

Like many European visitors, Becke seems to prefer the Polynesians to the Melanesians; here he describes the Solomon Islanders (they are actually actually from Buka island, in PNG) with what we would consider racist terms like ‘savages’, ‘niggers’, and ‘cannibals’. On the other hand, one of the heroes of the story is a Samoan crewman.

On the whole, it was quite a good adventure story, although I think Becke’s forte is with short stories rather than novels. Nevertheless, it was enjoyable and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of his oeuvre (bless you, Gutenberg!)

 

Becke, Louis (1855 – 1913), Edward Barry: South Sea Pearler, Unwin, 1900

Free e-book at Project Gutenberg: Edward Barry https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23440/23440-h/23440-h.htm

 

His Tuvaluan short stories:

The Fisher Folk of Nukufetau

Oh, the delight of urging a light canoe over the glassy water of an island lagoon, and watching the changing colours and strange, grotesque shapes of the coral trees and plants of the garden beneath as they vanish swiftly astern, and the quick chip, chip of the flashing paddles sends the whirling, noisy eddies to right and left, and frights the lazy, many-hued rock-fish into the darker depths beneath! On, on, till the half mile or more of shallow water which covers the inner reef is passed, and then suddenly you shoot over the top of the submarine wall, into deepest, loveliest blue, full thirty fathoms deep, and as calm and quiet as an infant sleeping on its mother’s bosom, though perhaps not a quarter of a mile away on either hand the long rollers of the Pacific are bellowing and thundering on the grim black shelves of the weather coast.

 

This short story describes a fishing expedition in Nukufetau lagoon, with beautiful descriptions, and I think a profound knowledge of native life.

 By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and other stories: ‘The Fisher Folk of Nukufetau’ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12798/12798-h/12798-h.htm#page045

 

Kennedy the Boatsteerer

This is the short story with the most plot (though the others are equally enjoyable for their descriptions of the native environment and life). A palagi (European) widower is offered to pick a girl as his wife, and he insists on Laumanu, who is tabu because she was promised to an absent islander, or no one. At the first chance they run off together, but fate overtakes them.

 The Ebbing of the Tide: ‘Kennedy the Boatsteerer’: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24896/24896-h/24896-h.htm#link2H_4_0011

 

The Rangers of the Tia Kau

The short story of a canoe wrecked on a reef.

By Reef and Palm: ‘The Rangers of the Tia Kau‘ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3818/3818-h/3818-h.htm#rangers

 

Biography of Becke: https://micronesia.csu.edu.au/people/LouisBecke/Bio.html

[NB Nukufetau is in Tuvalu, not Kiribati!]

 

 

Book 213: Tonga (English) – Kisses in the Nederends (Epeli HAU’OFA)

[Language warning!]

“He’s going to burst open!”

But Oilei did not; he merely bloated with gas then slowly subsided to normality as he fired away. His explosions tossed and bounced him around like a deflating balloon. Makarita pounced and held him down by the shoulders. Mere grabbed for his legs but was thrown back by a tremendous boom, which began the expulsion of the lecturer fart that soon filled the lounge. Both women rushed outside gasping for fresh air; Caesar streaked inside and out again as fast as his legs could move. All this lasted about ten minutes, by which time most of the lecturer fart had been expelled except for tiny pockets that remained trapped here and there. Oilei began breathing easily from both ends. The good fart had begun to take over. Every so often he would loudly blast out a mediocre pocket of the lecturer fart, and by midnight there was complete peace.

There are so many authors who have lived in many countries. If my criteria for this project included them being unambiguously associated with one place, so many amazing writers would be out of contention before the starting blocks. Hau’ofa has lived in several countries, including Fiji (for which the amazing Camila Navarro [blog in Portuguese] chose him), but because of his Tongan name (and, let’s face it, because I needed a novel to represent Tonga), for me, Tonga it is. And this one has been on my to-do list for far too long, given my love of the Pacific Islands and the sad paucity of novels from its writers.

As you can guess from the title, Kisses in the Nederends is both funny and scurilous.

Tonga is a small place where everyone knows everything about everyone, and gossips about it (the common greeting in Tonga is “Where are you going?”) This is one of the crosses you just have to bear when you live on a small island. (I couldn’t help wondering if this mightn’t have something to do with the paucity of writers from most of the Pacific – how do you write if you have no privacy and don’t want to appear ‘eccentric’.)

The invented island of Tipota, where Oiliei Bomboki lives, is very similar to Tonga. Oiliei has a fundamental problem. He can’t stop farting, and it is excruciatingly painful for him both physically and socially. In his suffering, he is compared by his Reverend to Job. He tries everything he and his family and friends can think of to cure his condition and tries to find the most unlikely causes for it (was it because his mother tickled him?) The way it is described is excruciatingly funny – he creates a whole mythology of a civil war going on inside his body. Among the desperate measures he is induced to take, he goes to see a Freudian Austrian doctor with an anal fixation, who is convinced it’s all the result of an Oedipus complex (of course); and a guru who gets him to do yoga – everything is interconnected, including his pain.

In the medical sphere, he tries everything. Another theme which recurs in my world reading is the status of what are disparagingly called in the West ‘witch doctors’. Here they get themselves international institutional recognition.

Hau’ofa’s personal and place names are also funny, if you’re in on the joke. (For example, Sydney’s Wayside Chapel becomes the Wayward Chapel). Hau’ofa’s own University of the South Pacific, where he taught, doesn’t escape the fun – teachers are apparently prone to ‘lecturer fart’. Sadly, not knowing Tongan or Fijian, most of the fun names went over my head.

Other comic highlights were his love at first sight, and mixing up Captain William Bligh with the poet William Blake. I deliberately don’t usually read prefaces (or, in this case, the editor’s note and author interview) until after finishing the work. In this case, reading it gave for me retrospectively a much deeper and more serious dimension to the story. I discovered that Hau’ofa knew what he was writing about – he had fistulae from an anal infection too. So, while it was very funny (like the other Tongan novels I’ve read, Hau’ofa’s Tales of the Tikongs, and No Kava for Johnny, though this is by Australian writer John O’Grady), this one has a painfully important side to it too, in airing (sorry) a problem no one wants to talk about. A wonderful little laugh-till-it-hurts novel.

Hau’ofa, Epeli (1939 – 2009), Kisses in the Nederends, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8248-1685-8 (first published 1987)

Book 206: French Polynesia (French) – L’arbre à pain = Breadfruit (Célestine Hitiura VAITE)

Materena knows that nobody else should read a diary except the person who writes in the diary. But she’s only going to read the first line, the first two lines, the first three lines, no more. Materena just wants to check how many pages [her daughter] Leilani has used in the diary she gave her. She might need a new one. Materena might also check if Leilani has ever written about her hardworking and loving mother.

And if the diary is locked, then Materena won’t insist.

A word of warning for fellow world-readers: if you use library books (as you should, otherwise buying a book from every country will cost you a fortune), make sure you write your review before you return it! For French Polynesia I had intended to review Frangipani by Célestine Hitiura Vaite, which I read a few months ago and absolutely loved, but when I went to borrow it again to do this write-up, the only copy had been withdrawn and no other libraries close by had it. In any case I wanted to read more by her, so I bought L’arbre à pain (Breadfruit), which turned out to be the first in the trilogy (Frangipani is second, Tiare or Tiare in Bloom is the third), and enjoyed it very nearly as much. I assumed that the French was the original, but it turns out that she wrote in English, and it was interesting to compare it with the English original. Vaite is a Tahitian writer who now lives in Australia.

Materena is a sort of Tahitian Bridget Jones. She and her friends and family may be nothing special, but ordinary people and everyday life are funny too in the hands of a great writer. She is a sort of cleaning superstar (as becomes more apparent in Frangipani) and a totally lovable character.  She is living with her lover, Pito, and their three children, and spends this novel trying to get Pito to commit to marrying her. Pito obviously has a lot of attraction for the super-tolerant Materena, but he comes across as lazy and commitment-phobic. She comes across as a realist, as well as a romanic (she is always listening to love songs). She also has a seemingly endless number of cousins, almost one for each chapter! The chapters come across as mostly self-contained short stories. So we follow her and her acquaintances’ grapplings with day-to-day life, and her campaign to get Pito off the couch and into the church.

Materena (along with Tahitians generally?) also has a lot of tolerance for societal norms, even though they cause her stacks of inconvenience.

As I mentioned, the novel was written in English and translated into French. But strangely I felt that the French version was better. It almost felt as if the French translation was reverse engineered. Apart from having a glossary (which the English one doesn’t), the French one was full of Tahitian words whereas there were only a few in the English version (not explained, and some not as accurately transcribed). I wasn’t sure why, since after all the author is a Tahitian. For example, ‘fiu’ (my favourite Tahitian word) covers a much wider range of sins than just ‘fed up’ as an English translation. (Materena is always feeling fiu!) Or the loan word ha’avitiviti (hurry up!) or its half French hybrid equivalent ha’avitesse (The prefix ha’a can turn a word into a verb, and vitiviti comes from French vite, vite!) I felt that having a greater amount of Tahitian added so much to the local colour.

Breadfruit, and Frangipani, are really delightful stories and quite funny. I can’t wait to get my hands on Tiare.

Vaite, Célestine Hitiura (1966 – ), L’arbre à pain, translated from English by Henri Theureau, Collecton Litteratures du Pacifique, Pirae, Tahiti, Au Vent des Iles, 2000, ISBN 978-2-9156-5404-2

In English:

Breadfruit, Australia, Text Publishing Company, 2000

Book 202: American Samoa (English) – Pago Pago Tango (John ENRIGHT)

Apelu was sitting in his pickup truck up at the abandoned tramway station on Solo Hill above Goat Island Point. There were seldom any other vehicles or people there. There were none today… The old tramway station was like an archaeological shrine to the idea of American-style progress on the island. From the top of a totally rusted-out and vine-covered iron tower still filled with the oxidized remains of its huge engine and giant wheels and pulleys, a single steel cable swooped upward toward a vanishing point atop Mt. Alava six thousand feet across and sixteen hundred feet above Pago Pago Bay. As a schoolboy Apelu had been told that this was the longest single cable car span in the world. He didn’t know if that was true or not. On the ground beside the tower was the cable car itself, overcome by weeds, its windows shattered, its rooftrop trolley carriage frozen with rust, reaching up like empty arms toward the sky. Along the road that ended at the station’s parking lot – now a place of broken beer bottles and infringing weed trees – lay miles of braided cable that had once hauled the cable car back and forth. The cable ran in and out of the weeds like some endless black and orange anaconda.

Any of you who have discovered the joys of video education during the covid epidemic might like to spare a thought for the American Samoans, who were your guinea pigs. At a time when television was a rarity in the Pacific, the Americans decided to try the experiment of educating the territory’s embarrassedly neglected children by TV. It wasn’t a great success (one of the many fascinating local asides explored in this novel), but it left the legacy of the TV tower on Mt. Alava, and the cableway high across the spectacular fjord-like bay of the main island Tutuila which was used in its construction and subsequently served for what must have been one of the most amazing cable car trips in the world. When I visited in 1980 on my trip around most of the South Pacific, and inspired by the picture of it in the Pacific Islands article of World Book, I was looking forward so much to taking that trip. Unfortunately, I just missed the boat (or rather, cable car). Earlier in the year, a US navy plane flew into the cable and then crashed into the island’s only hotel, the Rainmaker, leaving several dead. That was also the sad end of the cableway. (It’s hard to understand why such a fantastic tourist attraction wasn’t restored).

Apart from the amazingly beautiful bay, my main memories were of the non-stop rain – it was the rainiest place I’ve ever been (apart from Sydney this year!), and I read Somerset Maugham’s wonderful short story Rain, set here, while holed up in Pago Pago. The other memory is the horribly smelly fish cannery, the major industry, which is still there, on the so-called ‘dark side’ of the bay. It is another major character in the story and I learnt a lot about it too.

Like my Lao novel, The Coroner’s Lunch, this one gives enormous insights into the difficulties faced by an investigator working in less than ideal conditions and having to adjust policing methods to the local culture. The police here are very under-resourced compared with their American colleagues, and have to use a lot of diplomacy and judgement in a place where so many people know, or are related to, each other. Detective Sergeant Apelu has worked in San Francisco so knows how it’s supposed to work, but he is above all a realist. He tries to make the law work to the extent that is possible… but he is flexible (and he is happy to smoke pot with his friend…)

As in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, the Samoan love of oratory and singing (how is it possible that an entire race, the Polynesians, can sing so beautifully and inately?) is obvious here.

One of the things they never tell you about the paradisiacal isles of the Pacific is the dogs. I was attacked by one in (Western) Samoa. In French Polynesia every second house seems to have the sign ‘Tabu, chien méchant’ (ferocious dog). Apelu is wary but knows how to deal with them.

Again, as in (Western) Samoa, there is the importance of keeping up appearances. The local morgue is overflowing because the relatives of the deceased are saving up for exorbitant funerals to bury them.

As for the story – as usual with mysteries, I find it hard to say anything about the plot without giving something away and spoiling it. I’ll just say that while it may not be extremely thrilling, I enjoyed it very much. It starts with a break-in in a ‘white’ family’s home which turns out to signify much more than it seemed at first sight. It has a great title, although it doesn’t really rhyme (the ‘g’ in Pago is pronounced like ‘ng’ in ‘sing’, while the Spanish ‘ng’ in ‘tango’ is pronounced like the one in ‘finger’.)

Samoa, like Korea, is one of the world’s last divided countries as a result of the evils of imperial spheres of influence. The US, Germany and Britain had all sent warships to try to intimidate the others – all but one were destroyed by a 1889 hurricane, which cleared a few minds. In the washup, the US and Germany divided Samoa between themselves (the UK took concessions elsewhere), and New Zealand ended up with the German western half until it granted independence in 1962. American Samoa is still a US territory.

Enright, John (1945 – ), Pago Pago Tango, Las Vegas, Thomas & Mercer, 2012, ISBN 978612185002

Book 201: Samoa (English) – Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Albert WENDT)

Western Samoa was now an independent nation ‘founded on God’ so the national motto proclaimed. The national celebrations at Mulinuu Peninsula had been a dazzling, thrilling, sanctimonious, spectacular, spendthrift, pious, sometimes drunken, and verbose week, to which Tauilopepe, even though invited to most of the official functions, had not been a witness, but of which most of the mobile Sapepe population had been wonder-struck, laughing, awed, wide-eyed spectators who had spent their money as fast as the Independence flag had sped up the Independence flagpole, while the New Zealanders, who had come to realise that colonies were a thankless luxury, had sighed deep sighs of relief.

Samoa (then Western Samoa) was one of my favourite countries. When I visited in 1980 the way of life was still largely traditional, especially on Savai’i island (although there were no hotels, the people were so hospitable that it was almost impossible to walk down the road without being invited to stay in every house!) But change was obviously on the way, as evidenced by this novel, first published a year earlier (I read it a couple of years later, and it’s the only one in this challenge that I’ve re-read, after forty years!) This is a very different, uglier Samoa from the idyllic appearances, and I’m sure all the many problems it brilliantly covers (power, modernisation, greed, intimidation, revenge, religion, racism, sex – including what the Samoans call “night crawling”, facilitated by living in open-sided fales – , alcoholism, family dysfunction, corruption, environmental rape) are magnified for dramatic effect.

In this family saga we follow several generations, centrally the power-hungry Tauilopepe. His undisciplined son Pepe rebels against his father, school and society, and becomes a delinquent – banished and boycotted; yet after his untimely death he is remembered fondly by many in the village of Sapepe, in comparison to his more ‘responsible’ father. Tauilopepe spoils his son Lalolagi, sending him to study in New Zealand (“Please send more money!”) Towards the end, an avenging fury surprisingly appears in the form of Galupo, who may (or may not) have been Tauilopepe’s illegitimate son. Galupo is determined to revive his exiled clan’s honour and respectability, and to take over from the now old and debilitated Tauilopepe. But the latter is equally determined that Lalolagi will inherit, even though Galupo is obviously more competent and harder working, and generally very similar to himself. Who will end up out-smarting the other?

None of the (mostly male) characters here seems very likeable with all the power struggles going on, except for the new pastor who is a Solomon Islander. Nor are the papalagi (foreigners), though they’re on the periphery of the story. Tauilopepe’s ruthlessness made me feel that it was just as well the Mafia wasn’t in Samoa at this time at least! In a theme we’ll see in other Pacific books, the churches use (and are used in) these power struggles. For example, Galupo’s clan had converted to Mormonism, and Tauilopepe is determined to build an unnecessarily outsized church to assuage his guilty conscience over what happened to Pepe. (Travelling around the Pacific, you are always struck by the number of disproportionately large churches). Tauilopepe also uses sex as a weapon of revenge against this clan.

This is a fascinating snapshot of a time when (Western) Samoa is undergoing a shift towards a more cash-based economy and through independence from New Zealand (which Tauilopepe opposed). It’s one of, if not the, first highlights of Pacific literature and a brilliant drama.