The romantic

side of navigation

The Navigator is a very good novel, which is what we should expect from the gifted pen of the famous Australian writer Morris West.

It is cast in the Central Pacific, and t „ iinri is based on a g y somewhere in the blank part of the chart between the Kermadecs and Rapa Island, and roughly 600 miles south or Rarotonga.

The title of the book comes from the rather transient figure of Kaloni Kienga, a venerable Polynesian navigator of the legendary arts in the Marquesas, whose mana descends to his half-caste grandson Gunnar Thorkild, an assistant professor at Hawaii, who becomes the central figure of the story.

It involves the sailing of a millionaire’s yacht, with the millionaire as master and Thorkild as mate, a small native crew and a nolygiot group of their friends, ostensibly off to study Polynesian cultures but really to pick up the venerable navigator in the Marquesas and take

him t 0 a pos i t i on in mid-ocean from whence he can travel alone in his canoe to his tryst with death on the legendary Island of Navigators.

After that is done, the yacht is free to search for the island, but it is wrecked by a tsunami or seismic tidal wave in the reef entrance, and the remaining two-thirds of the book deals with the problems of survival on a tropical island, and the plans to get back to civilisation, all made more desperate by psychological factors.

The island mainly consists of an ex tinct volcano with a fertile valley in a cleft of the cone, and a high gallery where the bones of the generations of sacred navigators bask in the bosom of the god Kanaloa, oblivious of the

lively play of passions down below on the beach.

When the book ends, the survivors number six men, seven women and two new babies. While there is a plan to build a canoe for escape or to ob tain rescue, the various characters seem to have come to terms with the possibility of living out their lives on the island and of carrying on their racial mixtures into the future, which is left to the whims of the reader.

Morris West has made his story authentic in detail, with some use of Polynesian words, and his characters ring true from the Pacific scene. The few necessary references to ancient Polynesian navigation appear to owe their authenticity to the researches of Dr David Lewis, as published for the first time in his book We, the Navigators. So Morris West has add ed another dimension and scene to his already great reputation as a writer of genius and uncanny perception.

Brett Milder.

(THE NAVIGATOR. By Morris West. Published by Collins, London $8.95.)