1,100 Years And 1,000 Pages With Michener

The Month's New Reading

With Judy Tudor

If James A. Micheners latest novel “Hawaii”, had been his first, we imagine that book-reviewers would have tumbled over themselves to pronounce it a masterpiece. As it is, they (or those in this part of the world, anyway) have tended to be niggling about this prodigious piece of writing, 1,000 pages long and never a dull line in the lot of it.

r[IS is probably more than mere desire to tear down the success ful. Australians have never been able to take Michener seriously since he allowed himself to inter polate a great deal of tripe into ty’hat was otherwise a fairly accurate account of Australian life in Return to Paradise.

The righteous feel, too, that he has been inclined to commercialise his art in undignified pursuit of the dollar—as for example in thq qurrent and awful TV series about a sort of cruising-yacht, nautical Perry Mason type who floats around from Pacific Island to Pacific Island solving mysteries.

Michener lends his name to these pieces which go under the blanket title of Adventures in Paradise, and are the worst form of Islands exploitation since the days of the blackbirders.

But even if some reviewers down here are inclined to damn his latest piece of real writing with faint praise, we doubt if it is troubling James A. Michener over-much Having seen something of his busi ness-like method of working when he was here years ago collecting material for Return to Paradise, we imagine that he is more interested in the fact that Hawaii topped the best-seller list in the States for months.

Great length

Michener obviously intended this book to be a saga of importance and any other writer with less horse-trading sense than he would have produced it in four volumes, on the score of its length alone.

He serves up the whole kitchen in one meal and relies on his techni cal skill to keep the appetite of his reader continually whetted.

It is obvious, too, that it was deliberately written to be a best seller and the fact that it is, is probably the point where erudite reviewers sniff: No book that has pretentions of being an “important work” has any right to be so con sistently entertaining!

And lastly, he uses it as a vehicle for carrying an idea —the idea that

out of the racial melting pot that Hawaii became in the 19th and 20th centuries, has emerged a special human being—the Golden Men of his novel. This theme is the pivot upon which the five stories of the novel swing. How much Michener genuinely subscribes to this idea— and it is a Golden Man of universal thought rather than a mingling of different blood; or how much of it can be attributed to the fact that his present wife is Japanese, it is impossible to say.

The novel covers about 1,100 years, from the time the Tahitians supposedly settled Hawaii, until roughly the present. Most of the action, however, takes place in the last 150 years, beginning when the first New England missionaries, in a tub of a sailing ship, under incredible conditions, fought their way round Cape Horn to save the

souls of the Hawaiians for Calvinistic God and their bod; from the rapacious whalers a sandalwooders.

Mission Background

The section on the ea missionaries, of novel-length itself, portrays the best and .1 worst of the early 19th centv concept of Christianity—a conci that in the fullness of time broug missions into head-on collision w more liberal thinkers in most; the Pacific Islands.

From this early Hawaii missionary group, some individu inevitably broke away and wh still honouring God, honoui Mammon as well. It was thi people who laid the foundation Hawaiian wealth—wealth that w nevertheless, held tightly within i enclave of following generations these same families.

In order to work their sugar fie they had to have labour, and the Hawaiians were useless in t: capacity, they followed the w« worn pattern and imported it fr abroad. In this way Chinese w introduced to these islands s when they deserted the fields urban shopkeeping, the Japan came in their stead.

Separate Stories

This is the background of i novel, and employing the sai technique he used in Tales of i South Pacific, Michener tells separate stories through cent characters.

In the story of the missionary

it is whispy Abner Hale, whose religion was terrible in its ignorance and rigidity although it turned what should have been a rabbit of a man into a raging lion at the first whiff of what he conceived to be “sin”.

In the Chinese story, the action hangs around Char Nyuk Tsin, who lived 105 years and, escaping every peril from being sold into a brothel to contracting leprosy, founded a dynasty. Officially never more than a concubine; officially never a mother (she took the title of Wu Chow’s Auntie to her grave); she bore five sons and left her stamp on a Hawaiian century.

And in the Japanese story there was Kamejiro and his wife Mori

Yoriko, perhaps less dominant characters than the others, but part of the sum that added up to the Golden Men.

Through the stories of these three peoples, Europeans, Chinese and Japanese, and down through the generations, there runs like a thread, the descendants of the 300 lb chieftainess Malama Kanakoa, who had welcomed the missionaries on their arrival and who, in Hawaiian fashion, was married to her own brother—a fact that, above all others, horrified the New Englanders.

When all the strands of Michener’s novel are tied up in the end, in his Golden Men, it probably matters little to the theory

that the only direct descendant Malama is Kelly Kanakoa, Honolulu beach-boy whose ch function in life is sleeping w: Reno divorcees and keeping thi happy.

Whether you accept the authc theory that Hawaii has produc the Golden Man who can see be East and West; that Hawaii is microcosm what the rest of t world could, or should, be probably neither here nor tin against the undeniable fact tl this is one of the most ext] ordinary novels produced by contemporary writer.

The size and scope of the no are nothing of themselves; but a to them the ingredient of sustair technical excellence and it is m quibbling to deny the talent of 1 person who produced it. (HAWAII. Published by Seeker i Warburg. Australian price, 37/3.)

New Light on

An Old World

IT is just over 101 years since man named Edwin E. Drake, a little town in Pennsylvar USA, showed the world that mine: oil that had been. trapped in i earth millions of years before coi be recovered by drilling and lig the lamps of civilisation.

In 1859 people were, of coui interested in nothing m revolutionary than getting bet oil for their lamps than render* down whale blubber. But Drat discovery was to be far-reachii in fact it made-over the world.

One of the most interesting bo* received this month is a publicat; produced for the Petroleum : formation Bureau of Australia call This Age of Oil. It tells ini magnificently produced book, i full story of oil, particularly as applies to Australia, from the fi oil lamps to the latest £4O mill! refinery.

Probably even more fascinat; than the stories in this huge ba are the ancient illustrations a advertisements from the days wf the “horseless-carriage” was novelty that many believed “wo< not last”, and a liquid cal benzine came in two 4-gallon lots in a pine case.

Only slightly less quaint is story of early aviation and pictures of primitive aircraft be? fuelled by hand from drums earn in a horse-drawn dray.

Closer to us in time are the : much more than 35 m.m. si:i monsters that ruled our lives tween 1941 and 1949—the thrii cursed petrol coupon.

Pictures of these, of the war-ti: queues for ration tickets, and ■ devices with which we tried over-come the shortage—the tent charcoal-burning “gas-produce and the unwieldy barrage-ballo

gas bag—bring back unhappy norles.

Motorists who had expected that end of the war would auto ;ically bring about the end of oning . . . were disappointed and i irritated when it appeared that r ould continue indefinitely,” says narrator with considerable erstatement. It was the power )il on this occasion that swept the Labour Government, which rished rationing, in the elections the end of 1949 and gave the izies’ Government, which nised its abolition, a land-slide ory. (Petrol rationing ended '’ebruary, 1950). rhe rancour which post-war oning aroused,” says our story, i depressing experiences with producers are apt to stick in memories of citizens after the achievements of the wartime nisation of the industry are otten.” hich is a polite way of putting In retrospect, the scrounge for ol coupons, and the brewing of octions of kerosene, wood hoi, cleaning spirit or embalm fluid to keep the family car itioning, outweigh all of the r discomforts of the war-time ie-front put together. After ilities ended, and nothing vital at stake, the bartering, selling borrowing of petrol coupons sloped into a large-scale racket, even the most law-abiding of ens had scruples about these ie coupon troubles, the fact that the oil companies combined to uce unbranded Pool Petrol, and amazing discovery made by irists that their cars would run the most unethical mixtures, another effect on the post-war ;ralian motorist that This Age HI does not mention, fore the war, most motorists “sold” on one particular brand >etrol and demanded it. But ' eight years when any petrol “good” petrol, and probably far rior to the mixture they had in • tanks, they were never so sold u Probably the one-brand dI station, that is so much a of the present Australian e, has had something to do it. In the days when stations :ed all brands, you could play fancy. These days you go to nearest or most convenient and ly take what they’ve got. [is AGE of OIL. Published by i and Robertson. Ltd., for the Pet n Information Bureau, and obtain from either at 30/- Aust.)

e's Progress,

in Style

ROL FLYNN’S last gift to an mgrateful world, My Wicked, wicked Ways, was obviously en by a fellow who was so ; d stiff that posterity would

quickly forget his sms that he was determined to have something in printed, permanent form to establish the facts once and for all. No one is likely to be so astounded at the wickedness of Flynn as Flynn , , Early in the 386-page, soul-baring he states that to the public he was the everlasting phallic symbol, and 1S nicl^med to blame upon this much of his unorthodox behaviour. At the same time, he implies that the fact that he was forever cast in swashbuckling roles, when in his innermost heart he yearned to show that he had great gifts as a dramatic actor, frustrated and frazzled his nerves to the point where he was driven to sexual, alcoholic and other excesses. In fact, according to Mr.

Flynn’s book, Mr. Flynn had a

pretty terrible time, pushed relent lessly down a narrow lane from which there was no relief or escape except in making a fool of himself, This conception of himself as the victim of Life itself, persuades him reveal all—even down to two attacks of gonorrhoea, one from a Kavieng mary and the other, New York type—in an endless recital of his more disreputable adventures that in the end become merely boring.

It is probably the lack of subtlety in this woman-by-woman descrip tion of Flynn’s progress, that gsts it by the censors who come down so flat-footed against the Lolitas and the Carlotta Mcßrides. It Is doubtful if My Wicked, Wicked Ways could be held to “tend to de prave and corrupt”, as the Police

i have it. Flynn manages to ;e a life of sin sound about as resting as an unrelieved diet of ?d yam. scording to Flynn, he spent five s in New Guinea, 1927-32, and is remembered by some old lents —mostly, of course, be e he became a film star later, fact that he devotes about one of his book to this section of life seems to show that the itory made some sort of im ;ion on him, although any re liance between events as Flynn them and how they really lened is crystal-pure coincid e passages that appeared in the rican edition of this book, de ing an imaginary massacre of rs in the Madang District, a iive expedition in which Flynn he took part, and the subse t hanging of the native ring irs—all of which was raising the f old Territorians some months -have been left out of the UK m which is the only one avail in Australia. e only massacre of miners t that time occurred in the Britain District. Flynn was not igst those who went in to ?hend the murderers, nor were natives ever hanged for this j—but this particular flight of 7 was only one of many Flynn >ver New Guinea. describes, for example, how ent shooting Birds-of-Paradise )utch New Guinea and was ;d by a Dutch District Officer t to the banks of the Sepik ” which Flynn and his boys i and thus escaped to the “Aus n side”. It is a pity he couldn’t looked at a map of New Guinea fresh his memory before writ hat one. i he tells how he finally got >f New Guinea, with the help s father’s friend, an anthro ist called “Charley Chimery”— we can imagine the real r . P. Chinnery being pleased that, although, according to , he wasn’t to know that the i shaving-brush handle was if “stolen jewels”. ; finally Flynn did get off having arranged at “Barclay’s in Rabaul to send his last nces of “Edey” Creek gold to m; and having invested in a 1 of cut and uncut diamonds an IDB—lllicit Diamond Buyer ) turned up on Rabaul wharf, 1 unlikely places. ;eems that having let 27 5 between the time he per id in the Territory and when :ote his life story, he was apt •nfuse what he had actually in P-NG with what he had someone else had done in i Africa. ; although what he wrote New Guinea is largely piffle, “though, by his own telling; he ;lf broke almost every written unwritten law while he was

there, he nonetheless manages to leave the impression that New Guinea was run by a team of pin headed bureaucrats devoted to the worst principles of “colonialism”.

It’s about the only subtlety in the book; and heaven knows what the New Guinea of that day did to de serve it.

(My Wicked. Wicked Ways. Pub

lished by Heinemann, Ltd. Australian price, 26/-.)

Amongst the MG's

And Aston Martins

BY and large the sport of motor racing is not popular in Aus tralia to the same extent that it is overseas. Possibly because there are not so many of the idle rich here; nor the big manufac turers who give a backbone to Con tinental racing with their “work’s teams”.

Nonetheless, David McKay, by de voting a large section to European racing and another to long-distance touring, manages to get a full-sized book out of it, which he calls Behind the Wheel. (McKay road-tests cars for Sydney Sunday Telegraph and Motor Magazine.) By and large this is a book for the devotee, as most of it is written in a language that the layman wots not of; but even if you are not passionate about pistons, valves or revs; or don’t know a big-end from a Bugatti—you still might squeeze a bit of entertainment from this book.

The only motoring events that have really captured Australian public imagination were the Round Australia Trials, sponsored by some of the oil companies. These kicked off with the most famous of them all, the Redex Trial of 1953, and continued as an annual event for about five years until even the public got bored about expensive cars be ing smashed up on outback roads by professional and amateurs alike.

McKay drove in most of these

events, and even if you have in hibitions about beating up a brand new car on the very odd chance of winning a cash prize and glory, he makes it sound entertaining.

In 1954, seeking a wider field, he and his wife drove a Volkswagen Kombi van—which they christened the Carton—from Sydney to Europe or at least, from Sydney to Perth: and from Bombay to London (by way of Kashmir. Teheran, Ankara.

Athens, etc.) The project was de signed to get them to Europe in time for the 1955 summer racing season, and the big moment of the whole adventure was to be when they drove up to the VW works in Wolfs burg, Northern Germany, and re ceived the full, red-carpet treat ment.

That’s what they thought. But what actually happened was that they were met outside the prison like factory by a Gestapo-like guard who had never heard of them, and were finally allowed entrance to the Export Division which had never heard of them, either. (McKay had notified the company several times en route of his progress and time of arrival).

They sat in a freezing ante-room for an hour and then were approached by a harassed little man who said it “wasn’t a tour of the plant day” but if they liked, he'd show them something of the factory and they could get lunch in the canteen.

When a few uncomplimentary Australian things had been said about VW’s public relations, he scuttled away for 15 minutes then came back and said the Kombi could be greased, oil changed and throttle repaired—but nothing more.

No one was interested in the van, or that it had been driven 15,000 miles and was still reasonably healthy. No one even looked at it. (BEHIND THE WHEEL. Published by Ure Smith Pty., Ltd. Australian price, 25/-.)

All Done

By Sorcery

Christopher Landon S Ice-

Cold In Alex got the whole treatment when it was published in 1957—800 k Society recommenda tion , Saturday Evening Post and Argosy serialisation and was then made into a successful film.

It is unlikely that his current thriller The Mirror Room, will meet the same kind fate. It has most of the tested and tried ingredients, but then proceeds to fall apart at the seams when the author mixes the old identical-twins routine with a Burgess and McLean flit behind the Iron Curtain.

The Communist master-m in d somehow fails to be as frightening as the actions of his victims sug gest; and the antics of the good twin, Hugh, when rushing in and out of the Eastern and Western zones of Berlin trying to snare the

defectionist twin, Paul, makes vei little sense at all.

But probably the thing that w make even the most hardem thriller reader gulp is the metlu Hugh employs to pin-point t] whereabouts of missing Paul. I gets out a map of Europe and plumb-bob arrangement, and hoi the latter over the former. By sor occult power, when he gets “he the plumb-bob swings madly in circle, and he is thus able to tra his brother to East Berlin, Mr. Landon may not have be standing on such shaky ground you might think, of course. Recent when New South Wales was in t throes of a kidnapping case, a N Zealand man flew the Tasman ( his own expense) and toured t State and beyond (also at his o' expense) equipped with a divini rod with which he reckoned could trace the missing child.

Nonetheless, such sorcery see: a pretty poor gimmick for a mode thriller where the possibilities j bounded only by the limits of img ination. It’s a bit like whistling a broom-stick, when it would be 3 easier to catch the latest jet. (THE MIRROR ROOM. Published ; Heinemann. Australian price, 18/9.)

Love Game

In AAilano

IT is rare these days for any no to be a straight-out love sto in the old-fashioned sense. I Marcia Davenport (The Valley Decision , East Side, West Side, et comes reasonably close to it w The Constant Image, an exotic pi< set in, of all places, Milan duri the wet, cold and fog of that cit own hideous type of winter The reason for this setting probably that Miss Davenport 1 these many years, forsaken Amer for a villa on Lake Como.

The type of love practised aron Milan is distinctly Continental type. The women (of the up; classes) are cosseted and spoils metaphorically live on strawben and cream and sit on satin cushio) occasionally they have discr affairs but are otherwise stric dedicated to preserving the fac? of the family even when it me* turning a blind eye to or husband’s peccadillos.

There are more rules to this ga than there are to internatio! diplomacy. The light and airy tor is essential; the word “love” ne mentioned; nor one’s affections s* cusly engaged.

Miss Davenport’s heroine, beaut:: young American divorcee Har.

Piers, knows some of the rules finds’ the game difficult to play' the first instance, and impost in the end. This may not hi mattered so much had not . partner—a local industrialist, vete:‘ of a dozen years of marriage t countless extra-marital adventu

oken the most vital rule himself, re moral of this novel, if it can »aid to have one, is that the tinental idea of marriage as a ranent institution only in ;tly concerned with the emotion d love, has much to commend rer the American institution of •iage for love followed by easy :ce if it doesn’t take. ie writer probably has a point; mgh her brand of society is not y to function easily where the ,le feels she is as good, if not r, than the male. [E CONSTANT IMAGE. Published by m Collins, Ltd. Australian price, - es Islander as

ig White Boss

DSE who are trying to visualise he future of the Melanesian aces will find a lot to interest in White Man’s Shoes, a very ible new novel by Olaf Ruhen, ;w Zealander who has become uccessful writer ( Land of >ri, Naked Under Capricorn) who now lives in Sydney, e scene of this interesting is in the Torres Strait Islands, sen Australia and Papua; and tale is woven around the ities of pearling luggers, onaries and administrative ils. The writer has spent much among the pearlers—there is l lively description of little n features of that industry, central character is a native tain who acquires European and viewpoints and operates ssfully as a trader and pearler. :arries on an illicit trade in ", and seeks a sultan’s rights any woman he fancies. On events, Mr. Ruhen hangs i provocative comment about real place of the “advanced” e in the competitive Western There are scores of men women in Papua and New 3a who could be greatly stirred )me of the sentiments which lovelist puts into the mouths 3 characters. unusual, diverting kind of by a skilful writer and modern er.

ITE MAN’S SHOES. Published by nald, London. Australian price,

5 Deaths

i One

3ELLENT characterisation and nooth writing rather than [implicated plot and the gim i s frequently employed as ner-bait, make Necessary End >re than ordinarily satisfying of contemporary American 3 author, Anita Rowe Block, be well known in her own -ry although she is new to us;

and the somewhat nebulous title, picked out of the middle of a quota tion from Julius Caesar (“. . . see ing that death, a necessary end will come when it will come’'), sets the theme of the story.

Scott Powell, head of a vast pharmaceutical business, may not be typical of all American business men, but no doubt there are plenty of him in existence. He was a man of keen mind, extraordinary drive, wrapped up in his business but

happy domestically—and with it all, idealistic. The policy of his business is dictated by idealism rather than desire for increased profits—in part, probably, because it is now large enough to be so run—but there are human elements in the organisation that make it clear to Powell that if his hand were removed, rabid com mercialism soon would be allowed to take over.

It is at this critical stage, when he is still in his mid-40’s, that he

heart attack that is diagnosed ?ina. If he tosses aside every that formerly made the kind e he enjoyed, to become a nvalid, life may be prolonged tiitely. er the circumstances in which ids himself at that moment, luite a choice but he tries it ix months, surreptitiously ing the mechanisms that once his dynamo-like existence, it revealing the cause—only d that there is more to it that. vegetable-like existence has i strains and frustrations, and all it has Cathy, his wife.’ who almost overnight from the impanion of 20 years of suc i marriage, into a terrified ot dedicated to his diet and jriods, and whose determina o spare him irritations and ninor problems drives him to ge of desperation, the end Powell faces the ct squarely and comes up lis own solution. As Shake said: ds die many times before • deaths; aliant never taste of death once. . . ?SSARY END. Published by Mac md Co. Australian price, 20/-.) ) La! ►ne who was born earlier than (0 should attempt to read ything as other-dimensional ie, translated from Raymond iu’s French into English a bara Wright. And judging by ilogies all around the dust

jacket, the publishers seem to be a bit doubtful about it, too.

Zazie is one of these French moppets who not only know all the facts of life but most of the varia tions on the same theme as well.

Up from the provinces for two nights and a day, while her mother attends to some peculiarly Parisian business elsewhere, she industriously persists in being a gamine for the full length of the book.

To some this may be just every thing they feel a French novel should be (like it says on the dust jacket). But personally, we can t see what the French have done to de serve this one. • ZAZIE. Published by Bodley Head. Aus tralian price, 15/6.)