One More Paradise

Book Review:

1F you liked James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, you will probably be interested in his second Pacific book which his publishers, with American single-mindedness, have labelled Return to Paradise. (Most American books about the Pacific include Paradise somewhere in their title and then set out to show that it can be anything but.) The Tales, which concerned Americans and their South Pacific war to the ex clusion of all else, and in which the Hebrides and Solomons were merely the stage properties against which the story unfolds, was one of the most entertaining books of the Pacific war period.

Return to Paradise, however, concerns mainly Australians and New Zealanders at home or in their Islands, and Mr.

Michener, although his observations are penetrating and shrewd, does not yet know everything about these wild men.

Nonetheless, The Return has been chosen in America as the Book of the Month, and the story of preseht-day Guadalcanal has been reprinted in the Readers’ Digest.

A great many of the stories in the current volume have appeared in the American magazine Holiday, for which publication the author made a tour of the Pacific islands about two years ago.

Between each factual account of the various islands is a fictional story, based

on some aspect of life therein and in this medium one feels that the author is happier; it also has the result that a measure of sex, ingredient indispensable to the interest of the American reader, is added.

ONE gets the impression, particularly in respect of what he writes about such places as New Guinea, that Michener took a fearful ear-bashing at the hands of numerous of the so-called Old Timers.

So strong is this impression that one can almost attribute certain passages to various gentlemen who, in the past, have bashed one’s own ears on similar subjects.

This feeling—that the book is based on hearsay rather than the author’s own experience—gives it a certain super ficiality, but it does, on the other hand, allow some of the Islands’ hoariest stories to be dished up in new and interesting fashion.

The opinion of Papua-New Guinea residents on the subject of Anthropologists is well-known, and it is generally held that their pre-occupation with the sexual habits of the savage bodes no good, and that in their investigations—during which they live almost native—their enthusiasm is likely to carry them to any lengths.

Much dark muttering has gone on about every he or she Anthropologist who ever visited the Territory.

The fictional story of New Guinea con-