Showing posts with label island. Show all posts
Showing posts with label island. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Serpent In Paradise by Dea Birkett

Towards the end of Serpent In Paradise Dea Birkett offers a personal confession. “We all hold a place in our hearts – a perfect place – which is the shape of an island. It provides refuge and strength; we can always retreat to its perfection. My mistake was to go there.” It may have been another mistake to have written about it. Serpents In Paradise is a perfectly good read. It is well written, if a little clumsy here and there. Personally, I blame the editor. It’s a travel book, relating the history and experience of the author’s quest to Pitcairn island.

At the time of writing, just over two hundred years had elapsed since sine the famous mutineers on The Bounty had stumbled upon a wrongly-mapped island in the south Pacific. Thus they found their own perfect hiding place, so they burned their bridges, in their case a ship. It is largely their descendents who still inhabit Pitcairn and it was in this society that Dea Birkett sought her own personal paradise. Getting to and from Pitcairn is an adventure in itself. It has no regular services and no harbour. A visitor has to make an application to the island’s authorities – basically the entire population – for permission to land. 

And Pitcairn islanders don’t like writers. Dea Birkett’s ruse to gain access was a project on the Island’s postal service, whose stamps and franks are both rare and in high demand from collectors. Then you have to find a freighter, usually out of New Zealand, over three thousand miles distant, that happens to be charting a course near to Pitcairn and is planning to pause there. When this happens, the Island’s entire population turns out. There are supplies to be delivered, fish to sell to the ship, trinkets to sell to the crew. Occasionally, there are people to transfer up or down the rope ladder. The author made it into the pitching longboat below, but initially failed in several other feats during her stay. 

What she did accomplish was the creation of a rather light, impressionistic view of life within a dwindling island community. We are on first name terms form the start, but strangely most of the characters we meet retain an anonymity. As we read on, an explanation emerges. Dea Birkett eventually records how this community usually seems to act as a single entity. They share tasks, forage, fish and cultivate in groups. Decisions emerge out of communally chewing over an issue, apparently without ever confronting it directly. They are driven by their religion, Seventh Day Adventism, to impose restrictions on possibility, but then not everyone takes the rules seriously, hence the local division of inhabitants into “old and young”, effectively traditional and modern. But the tradition came from foreigners in the late nineteenth century, and the modern involves imported beer. And it was into this largely biblically-literal society that Dea Birkett brought her serpent. 

As in the original, it was temptation embodied. Forbidden fruit were tasted. There was a fall from Grace. And yet the author does not tell us whether there were consequences as a result of her island fling. She does, however, continue the quote at the start of this review as follows: “Dreams should be nurtured and elaborated upon; they should never be visited. By going to Pitcairn, I had vanquished the perfect place within myself.” And thus we reach the nub of the problem. With the printed word, the medium is not the message. This always has to be disentangled, revealed and understood. In Serpent In Paradise, we have a perfectly good read, a well-described travel experience, but it may be too focused on a journey within to really take us there. View this book on amazon Serpent in Paradise

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Lord Of The Flies by William Golding

A review of a book as iconic as Lord Of The Flies should surely only offer comment, not mere description. It is over fifty years since its publication in 1954 and, it should be remembered, the story is set in wartime. So, while the marooned boys apparently descend into a mould of pre-civilised behaviour, their adult compatriots are engaged in it full time in the world outside. Jack may paint his face and display an identifying insignia, but so, probably, does his father at that time, a display he might call a uniform, and the insignia a flag or regimental banner.

It is perhaps coincidence that William Golding casts a casualty of the nearby war, dead, but re-animated by natural elements, the wind in his parachute, as the intruding beast that terrorises the stranded boys. Where this imagery falls down, of course, is at the end, when a suitably British naval officer rescues the lads. We assume they will promptly be returned to their besieged wartime homeland, no doubt to live happily ever after.

Of course, there is the question of who saves the adults, whose war is the merely the same as the boys’ limited creation on their island. But this element of the book perhaps reads less convincingly fifty years on from its publication, when the general reader would have needed no reminder of how horrid an experience the recent war had been.

Ralph’s character poses something of a dilemma. He clearly believes he was born to lead. When he finds his authority both undermined and then by-passed, it appears he cannot cope with the demotion, his continued assumption of status blinding him to the obvious. At the time this surely would have been interpreted as a reference to the British class system.

Fifty years on, the allusion is less than obvious. If anything, Piggy presents the modern reader with the most problems. He is the epitome of the know-all, the swot, the annoying brat that always has something to say. But he is also the idealist and realist in one. He has few skills, perhaps fewer physical contributions to make to the group’s survival. But he has a technological vision. He is an inventor of ideas, ideas that others, under direction, may realise. Hence he is also the visionary, the philosopher who not only knows what should be done, but also why it should be done. Significantly, his spectacles provide the only technology the community needs since, unbelievably for the period, none of them seems ever to have been a boy scout and so they cannot make fire. But it is eventually Piggy, for all his analytical and intellectual skills, who seems a total prisoner of stereotypical assumptions. He seems to assume that “British” is a synonym for “civilised” and that all black people are automatically savage. 

The reader is left in some doubt as to whether these opinions are sincerely held, satirical, representative of the society from which the boy hails or merely hyperbole promoted by the panic of their situation. To some extent, they have to be accepted and dealt with rather like an opera-goer must accept Wagner’s anti-Semitism as historical fact, rather than essential opinion. Lord Of The Flies has weathered its half century remarkably well, but there are flaws which now seem more obvious than they would have been in the years that followed the book’s publication. The power of the book’s observation, however, remains. It is already iconic, its permanence assured.