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REVIEWS, Page 73BOOKSCannibal Country
By JOHN ELSON
TITLE: The Happy Isles of Oceania
AUTHOR: Paul Theroux
PUBLISHER: G.P. Putnam's Sons; 528 PAGES; $24.95
THE BOTTOM LINE: Another excellent adventure by the great
grump of travel writing.
It was a journey that began, at least symbolically, on a
gloomy Sunday in Christchurch, New Zealand. Cooped up in a hotel
room so dreary that he drank the contents of the mini-bar, Paul
Theroux was continents away from his London home, newly
separated from his wife, afraid that he might have cancer (not
so, it turned out) and depressed by the prospect of war in the
Persian Gulf. "Get me out of here," he said to himself and
headed for the wilderness -- because, he wrote, "as long as
there is wilderness there is hope."
The result is Theroux's ninth and possibly best travel
book, an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip
that took him to 51 Pacific islands, from New Guinea to Easter
Island to Hawaii. His goal was to retrace, in part, the bold
voyages of early Polynesian seafarers who gave this vast area
a common culture, now corrupt and moribund. Theroux took the big
hops by plane or ship. But his preferred mode of travel was a
collapsible, 16-ft.-long French-made kayak, which he paddled --
carefully -- through dangerous waters infested by crocodiles,
sharks and stinging Portuguese man-of-wars.
Theroux was bothered less by the terrifying fauna than by
many of the people he encountered. The ethnic put-downs of The
Happy Isles might be considered racist were it not for the fact
that the author is clearly an equal-opportunity disdainer. New
Zealanders are shabby and provincial, he complains. Aussies are
rude, foulmouthed and drink too much. Tongans are lazy,
quarrelsome and mean to their children. Samoans are greedy,
hostile and obese, perhaps because their junk-food diet consists
mostly of "Cheez Balls" and corned beef saturated with hippo
fat. (Did their liking for the latter, Theroux wonders, derive
from their ancestors' enjoyment of "long pig" -- that is, human
flesh?) And almost everywhere he found God-swanking
missionaries, usually Mormons or Methodists, who seemed
mesmerized by the thought of preaching the gospel to islanders
who were once notorious for practicing cannibalism.
"Missionaries and cannibals," Theroux muses, "make perfect
couples."
Food was terrible everywhere in the Pacific, Theroux
discovered, although he was bemused by such oddities as omelets
made from enormous eggs laid by the megapode birds of Savo in
the Solomon Islands. (His verdict: "The yolkiest eggs I had ever
seen.") To be sociable, the author occasionally took swigs of
kava, the mouth- and mind-numbing intoxicant of the islands,
which is made by chewing the root of a plant known as Piper
methysticum and then mixing the blob with water. The best kava,
connoisseurs assure him, comes from root masticated by pretty
teenage girls.
Theroux's title, of course, is heavily ironic. Instead of
happiness, he mostly finds apathy, ugliness and poverty -- not
to mention once pristine waters fouled by industrial and human
waste. The nearest thing to the imagined paradise of Hollywood
sarong epics is the Big Island of Hawaii, where last July he
watched an eclipse of the sun. The experience, Theroux writes,
was akin to "the onset of blindness." When the sun returns, he
kisses the woman next to him. "Being happy was like being home,"
he exults, and every reader will know why.