Tales Of The South Pacific (1984) - Plot & Excerpts
Miochener kicks off with a four page piece that characterizes the war in the South Pacific as mostly waiting around, and depicts a general in a sort of innocent humiliation that makes me think of Aphrodite and Ares trapped by Hephaestus in the Iliad - the gods as comic subjects. The next piece is set on Norfolk Island. This one appeals to me, with its pitting of the war imperatives against a beautiful double row of Norfolk Island Pines that holds specific, almost sacred, meaning to the natives. Of course, the war wins. After this, the book deteriorates into gossipy relations between Navy officers (and sometimes enlisted men) and Navy nurses. Tony Fry continues to mix it up a bit, but overall I can tell I don't need to read any more Michener after this one. Old fashioned, implicit, unselfconscious racism and sexism pervade this book. Michener is a benevolent racist - he means no harm by his complacent assumption of his presumed, privileged place in the hierarchy. In fact, at the end he condemns personal, malevolent, deliberate racism in the person of Commander Hoag's replacement on Konora. Nevertheless, the old mindset grates at times on a twenty-first century ear.Michener's prose is workmanlike, often hackneyed, in two or three sentences inspired. Overall, the value of the book is its authentic representation of its mindset and its autobiographical portrayal of a junior naval officer's experience (mostly far behind the lines) in the South Pacific in WWII. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose briefly mentioned graft and massive theft of military supplies as systematically depriving the men doing the actual fighting of basic necessities and comforts. In South Pacific, those doing the theft are main characters, and no one seems to be aware that someone else might suffer for lack of the goods stolen. Michener does a good job portraying the logistics of planning and preparing a major operation, and reducing a small Japanese-held island and building an airstrip for bombers in preparation for the main event. And I appreciated "Passion", in which a stiff Dr. Benoway regrets his inability to pour lively affection into a letter to his wife. His junior officer's letter is deeply duplicitous in every way, but its romantic gushing impresses Benoway so much that he copies a lot of it into his own letter. At the end, he removes it, instinctively preferring his own reserved and formal, but truthful and sincere, prose to the facile falseness of another's.The book delivers the main event, the costly invasion of fictional Kuralei, in few pages, thereby preserving the sense that most of a sailor's time in the war was not the fight itself, but waiting and preparation. The final chapter provides a reflective moment at a naval cemetery on Konora. The setting is idyllic.The authorities will eventually transfer these physical remains to cemeteries in the States, though, as one caretaker remarks, if the dead could know and speak, they might prefer to stay where they are, among the men they worked and died with. In the last sentence of the book, one caretaker says of the other, "Doan' you mind what Denis say. Denis, he quite a cutup. Sometime he run off at the mouf." If it came from a more artful writer, I would take this as a playful warning to the reader to not take the author too seriously. But not here. Did Michener feel compelled to lighten the gravity of the scene? The overall structure of the book makes it not only a collection of tales, but a single tale, the Pacific war represented in miniature. All the waiting and preparation does have a point. The bomb that is built and stored is eventually carried to a destination and dropped on a target. Minor actions prepare the way for major objectives, and eventually to the biggest objective of all, reduction of Japan to vanquished enemy.
There are two problems with this collection. One is that it is Michener's first attempt at fiction...and it shows. Some of the stories are mere prose workings of military strategy and campaigns in World War II's South Pacific theater. This is interesting sometimes, but at other times Michener's ham-handed prose turns topics that ought to be exciting into rather bland and boring summaries of events. The second thing that is wrong with this book is that when Michener decides to try to break out of the mere recounting of events and actually write a story, too frequently he clumsily attempts to fill the story with significance by using symbols. Rather than being a subtle technique, which more accomplished writers would have been able to do, Michener more or less throws the symbols at the reader's head without heeding their effect (for example, in one story the American soldiers meet a man with elephantiasis, a disorder that swells the testicles to enormous size, so that the character is literally forced to wheel around is genitals in a wheelbarrow in order transport himself around his island home). This monstrous symbolic growth in regeneration or fecundity is contrasted sharply with the stripped down skeleton of the mysterious Englishman who had been informing the Americans of Japanese movements before being discovered and executed by Japanese soldiers. Sex and death, a quite obvious Freudian contrast of symbols, but Michener's use of them shows his lack of literary experience (and serves his ultimate political/discursive purpose): while the "native's" morbid state symbolizes reproductive ability (and the fear of it in "non-whites," an unfortunate trope that runs throughout this work), it is sex in the service of degeneracy rather than civilization. Michener's narrators and characters, while believing they are not racist because they are not prejudiced against African-Americans, treat the "Tonks," the islanders they have invaded and conquered, as objects of contempt and sexual commerce, a people who are, as several characters note, the lowest rung on civilization's ladder, a culture that has never produced anything of value and never will. Instead, the productive pole of the sex/death binary is the corpse of the Englishman, who feeds the ants and thus keeps the natural life od the island functioning and living. Having said all that, there are one or two good stories in this collection, particularly "Dry Rot" and "Cemetery at Hoga Point." But otherwise, this is a book which was appreciated by a generation who fought a war against fascism, but which today is merely a curiosity that displays the biases and former racist discourses of a by-ggone age.
What do You think about Tales Of The South Pacific (1984)?
TALES OF THE SOUTH PACFIC by James Michener is a rare book which communicates what it felt like to be involved in WWII. The budding genius author Michener had the privileged viewpoint of being "embedded" with the Navy during the war. He then lightly fictionalizes, organizes, and distills his experiences into 19 highly varied short stories which communicate something about what it felt like, and what it meant.I am fascinated by WWII and, have read probably a hundred books by historians, memoirs by soldiers and sailors, and so forth. Those are wonderful books but, they are nonfiction and fairly dry. They tell you a lot about what happened and why, but not much about how it felt.For example, take WAR IN THE BOATS by William Ruhe. This is a WWII Pacific submarine memoir and an exact contemporary of TOTSP. The difference is, Ruhe is not a novelist. He tells you as best he can, what it was like but, one must be a mature reader to project context, feelings, and meaning onto the (indisputably incredible) story he tells. That is to say, Ruhe gives you the skeleton but it's quite dry to read. As I get older I often prefer more facts and less embellishment but, that's because I am better able to fill in the details myself, and also the embellishment is often poorly done and ends up reducing your trust in the author and detracting from the story.Michener is talented enough that, he embellishes terrifically and, is becoming one of my special authors:I first read Michener's HAWAII during a trip to that isle. Intrigued, I dug into Michener's origins and discovered TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, published in 1947. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted by Rogers & Hammerstein for the musical SOUTH PACIFIC. After this amazing beginning Michener went on to become one of the 20th century's most prolific authors, writing huge historical epics (HAWAII was the first).I found TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC to be more literary than HAWAII. Whereas Hawaii was a "historical epic genre novel", his ambition in this book is more intimate and personal, and more true, like literature is true, with difficult to express real human situations, and great breadth.Michener, an orphan raised by a Quaker, made very good use of his fortune, to the point where in wikipedia I read: "Michener became a major philanthropist, donating more than US$100 million to educational and writing institutions."I haven't read his other epics yet although I think THE SOURCE may be next on my list.
—Kevin
I have always wanted to read this, being a HUGE fan of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical adaptation. The only thing I had heard about it was that the adaptation was very loose and that the book was pretty racist, reflecting the times. I found both to be true. It took awhile to get into it, but then you meet such compelling characters as Bus Adams, Luther Billis, and Tony Fry, as well as the narrator, whose voice I thoroughly enjoyed, and you are hooked. It is a book about people, and these people are well-written and intriguing. Some you like, some you hate, some repulse you, others amaze you, and each one could be a real person. Were they? I don't know, I don't know if Michener actually was in the South Pacific, or even in WWII, I know nothing about his life, perhaps they are composites, or "inspired by actual events", I'm not sure. I do know that I can appreciate the movie even more now, having the backstory.
—Heather
Here's a book I've heard about all my life, maybe more so the musical, and an author who couldn'tbe more popular. He was a favorite of my grandfather's. I get the sense that his narrative voice may have been similar to the voice in my grandfather's head- the same matter-of-fact, US white male dominated world-view that pre-dated the 70's. Yet, still sensitive to all people and empathetic to the human condition. It was interesting to read this just after Guard of Honor- same war, same time period- 2 very different waiting games but with similar relationship tensions among genders, classes, ranks and ethnic groups. I applaud Michener for the sensory experiences he can manufacture and for playing around with narrative structures- chronology and narrators were unpredictable.
—Roxanne Russell
