The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific

I do not recall where I first heard of Paul Theroux's non-fiction account of his voyages throughout Oceania, but it sounded interesting enough that I decided to purchase a copy when I was unable to obtain it from the library. The fact that I had paid good money for this book made me determined to keep reading, even when boredom threatened to overwhelm me. It is not a bad book. It is simply a very, very long book (528 pages) for the topic (author takes kayak to faraway land and kayaks around the boys, inlets, and motus, while ruminating on the culture, language, and history of the various Oceanic peoples - repeat 51 times, including two identical jellyfish stings).

Admittedly, I couldn't help but compare it to J. Maarten Troost's hilarious tales of his travels in many of these same islands, Getting Stoned with Savages and David Quammen's fantastically researched, beautifully written The Song of the Dodo (which covers many more of the earth's islands than those found in the Pacific, but still). Happy Isles also suffers from age: Theroux wrote this book in the opening years of the 1990s, so I could not help but wonder, often, whether various statements or descriptions (for example, a lack of resorts on one island or lack of tourists on another) still hold true. While I certainly don't fault the author for the passage of time, I was nevertheless distracted by these musings, and admittedly the book simply felt more dated than Troost's or Quammen's, owing to the different approaches the three authors took.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that this book has going for it is that many of Theroux's travels occurred during the first Gulf War. It is interesting to read the concerns many islanders express in the run-up to that war, remembering the hell that World War II wrought on their corner of the world. These exchanges with islanders (not least Theroux's meeting with the King of Tonga and former Prime Minister of New Zealand) are the highlight of the book and lend it the most character. Unfortunately, I found such encounters to be fairly limited - undoubtedly the result of Theroux preferring to keep to himself when possible - and to be vastly outnumbered by his descriptions of the islands and paddling conditions. Not surprisingly, at least on the page, the islands and their people closely resemble one another in chapter after chapter (each chapter being a different island), giving the book a monotonous, rambling quality.