On Expeditions and Polynesian Colonisation...... Kon Tiki and Easter Island

“Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.” – Thor Heyerdahl

Thor Heyerdahl is one of history’s most famous explorers.  The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by balsawood raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl's book; upon which an award-winning documentary film chronicling his adventures was based, as well as the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  He later completed similar achievements with the reed boats Ra, Ra II and Tigris, through which he championed his deep involvement for both the environment and world peace.

Walking round the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo recently, I was captivated by the story of the expedition, how it came into being, the sometimes unlikely chain of events. I had a copy of Heyerdahl's book for a good while before I eventually sent it, along with a number of other books which I selected whilst pruning my collections at Winterborne K, to a charity shop.  My trip to Oslo and the museum re-kindled that instinct that caused me to buy the book originally.  There are numerous editions with a variety of dust jacket designs.   I easily found a second-hand copy and read it. 

What I thought:
I thoroughly enjoyed Heyerdahl's account.  It was so very readable.  I was amazed at the courage and resourcefulness of the six men...….. and the parrot!  Of course they would neither have seen themselves as courageous, or particularly resourceful although it was fascinating the way they managed to source everything they needed and the support of foreign politicians, dignitaries and naval services.   There was almost a Swallows and Amazons feel to an adult escapade!  They survived the crossing with some tales to tell, and the account of their landing on the other side of their 4000 mile sailing was heart in the mouth but humorous too.  For something different, a read out of your normal boxes, try this book.


Also in the Museum there is a section given over to Easter Island.  The connection between Heyerdahl and Easter Island centres around his investigations into the mystery of the Easter Island giant statues, or moai, (created by the early Rapa Nui people)  how they made, how they were oved and what was the origin of the native legend that the statues walked.  Easter Island is one of the most remote places in the world and Heyerdahl wanted to determine whether the island had been originally colonised by people who sailed from South America across 2,000 miles of ocean. 

Returning to the island over thirty years later Heyerdahl investigated the ruins of the island’s unique statues: monolithic human figures carved from rock, and experimented with techniques that could have allowed a pre-industrial culture to create and move such enormous figures. Heyerdahl wrote a unique history of Easter Island, based on his own research, and an interpretation of the mystery of the island’s statues that presents an individual view of world history. 

I have wanted to visit Easter Island ever since I saw a fascinating TV documentary by David Attenborough, entitled The Lost Gods of Easter Island  .  Attenborough’s documentary starts with a small wooden carving which he buys at auction and which he identifies as being one of a pair, that are figured in a publication that links the carving he acquired to another, and which he tracks down to a Museum in Russia (from memory), both being associated with Captain Cook.  Now is the time to revisit this documentary……
  

In the course of scrolling around the internet I found a novel called Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes.  Checked it out.  Here is the Amazon blurb:  

Set on the cusp of World War One, and in the 1970s, EASTER ISLAND tells the passionate, heart-breaking and ultimately redemptive story of two remarkable women.

Elsa, an Edwardian Englishwoman, is forced by circumstance to leave the man she loves and agree to a marriage of convenience. The marriage enables her to fulfil her great dream: to visit Easter Island and to study its mysterious history. But as Elsa becomes bewitched by the island and engrossed in her work, she fails to notice that her beloved sister Alice is becoming caught up in desires of her own, that will threaten not only their work, but also their lives. 

Sixty years later, Dr Greer Faraday, recently widowed, makes her own journey to the island. Born into a different time and country, Greer nevertheless shares Else's passion for this strange and haunting place. Troubled by unhappy secrets, Greer takes solace in her work, making an island of herself. But as the two women's stories begin to entwine and passions are played out, both Greer and Else must struggle against what society expects of them, and what fate has planned...

This title was a lucky find.  It has archaeology, biology, anthropology ………….. themes that interest me very much.  It is also a book that keeps you turning the page, and a rather clever ending I did not see coming.

I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

One of my fellow Splinters has been banging on about this book!  I hadn't taken the bait as the title didn't grab me; somehow the Bunyanesque handle put me off.  800 pages of someone on a pilgrimage?  I didn't warm to the idea.  So get the idea out of the head, quite simply this novel is a gripping thriller.  It's scary, an inventive spy/terrorist narrative with plausible plot-lines.

Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter.  He has been an investigative reporter, a political correspondent and columnist.  He is writing on his own territory.   If, like me, you like to intersperse seriously good, top notch, intelligent writing with a well-written and compelling page-turner then Pilgrim fits the bill.  Think Jack Reacher, but so much better on all fronts!

Amazon says:

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

WHAT I THOUGHT

‘Two psychos enter, and one psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles of bodies and a lethal biochemical agent or two.’ Kirkus Reviews

This is certainly a page-turner, a race against time between two sharp minds, determined to prevail.  In a nutshell, a former intelligence agent who wrote a book on forensic pathology becomes involved in a case where someone uses his book to commit untraceable murders. Because of the agent’s earlier career, he also gets involved in another case involving a threat involving an ex-Afghan fighter who uses the network he established fighting the Soviets to reverse engineer a virus which threatens humanity.  The fighter is turned as an eleven-year old boy when he witnesses the public beheading of his father in a Saudi Arabian square.

In trying to get inside the mind of the Saracen, Pilgrim has to use his intuition and intelligence from the highly sophisticated technology which is available to the intelligence agencies, i.e. the FBI.  From all the data that is gleaned from signals, mobile phone calls etc that are being picked up by the FBI ultimately there is one trace that the human intelligence machine determines is likely to be ‘the one’.  They run with that link.  Then there is the coincidence of the relationship between the meeting of the policewoman Leyla Cumali in connection with the murder of the American woman in the run-down apartment.  She happens to be the sister of Saracen.  These threads spun just so make for clever plotting.   

What I admire about this thriller is that Terry Hayes switches between providing detailed character studies of the two protagonists with a narrative of roller-coaster action which shifts across continents leading to the denouement where there is the inevitable encounter between Pilgrim and the Saracen in Turkey.

Terry Hayes is an author, screenwriter and film producer who started work as a journalist in New York.  He surely wrote I am Pilgrim with an eye to a film. 

Here is a review by the New York Times which is not a plot-spoiler.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/books/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes.html

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

What Amazon says:

Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa.

But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military?

Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

So.… what did I think:

Without any facts at my fingertips, but only hearsay from occasional broadcasts about Bletchley Park and the Enigma code I have always had a rather glamorous notion of the place, a hothouse of a select group of brilliant people who put their minds to the cracking of the code and who had  eureka moment.  So the story of a rambling house populated by thousands of men and women, recruited in sometimes  most chancey and haphazard ways in order to set about the long slog of the interception and decoding bit by bit of the German code, was a revelation. McKay manages to convey from the outset that there was an atmosphere of informality and disorganisation at the house that was overcome by the British talent getting on with things.

I loved the way Sinclair McKay tells a story of human beings, sometimes so aristocratic, and others so ordinary who were united in loyalty to their mission.  A loyalty so solid that it persisted into this century.  The staff at Bletchley Park were secretive even between themselves.  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of their story is that they kept it secret for so long: most veterans did not even tell their families what they had been up to, and only confessed when the cat was officially let out of the bag 30 years later.

So Bletchley was staffed by a motley collection of people, cryptographers, mathematicians, Egyptologists, linguists, astrologers. Sometimes it was down to who you knew in upper circles, who for example a relative played golf with.  The inmates had been recruited from all walks of life. Debutantes and working-class girls mixed with mathematicians, servicemen and university lecturers in an environment where the normal class divisions and deference for rank no longer seemed to apply. They entertained themselves by putting on their own shows and music recitals, playing tennis and swimming in the manor house lake. They smuggled barrels of cider into their rooms, worried about how to make their rations last, and fell in love among the clattering machinery.

I loved the anecdotal bits, like the fact that code-breaking machines that were cobbled together with everyday objects such as sticking plasters and pieces of string – one of these machines was actually called the “Heath Robinson”. And yet of enduring significance apart from the immediate benefit of shortening war I learnt that the forerunner of the computer was created here. 

The setting up of Bletchley Park was rather amateur at the outset, described endearingly by the author.  Those it brought together were united in a common and vital task.  I think it must have been very exciting to be involved in such a crucial and unique part of the war effort.  Cushioned from many of the vicissitudes of living in wartime Britain, working in that rarified atmosphere seems very glamorous to me, being a committed crossworder and puzzler.  I have a Codeword app on my iPad which I love.  It was real cloak and dagger stuff that resulted in the establishment of a very professional organisation derived from the best of human endeavour, ingenuity and commitment. 

Having read this book I now feel I must visit the place to see it for myself.  Does anyone want to join me?

The Garden of Evening Mists

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

On 25 July 2012, the book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and on 11 September it was shortlisted.^[7]

During a major pruning of random documents in various folders on this machine I have come across occasional book reviews that I have written for book group meetings.  This is one such.  It seems a shame to consign it to the Recycle Bin without keeping a record of it somewhere:

What I thought

In one word, atmospheric.  It was beautifully written, I found it a bit slow to come to the point and I found the switching between time periods a bit hard work.  This is now a popular and effective way of telling stories but the juxtaposition of chapters was rather random and not always logical in my view.  I found the most engaging passages those that dealt with the interval of civilian internment of the two sisters, the incident concerning Tatsuji, the Kamikaze pilot’s mission which was carried out by his superior officer (and lover) and the story around the tattoo which Yun Ling consents to have and its later significance.  I found Aritomo a rather difficult to grapple with, he was so enigmatic and it becomes apparent that he carries baggage.  This is the first book I have read that deals with a patch of history about which I knew nothing: The Japanese occupation of Malaya.

The following synopsis contains spoilers:

Synopsis

Newly retired Supreme Court Judge Yun Ling Teoh returns to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya, where she spent a few months several years earlier. Oncoming aphasia is forcing her to deal with unsettled business from her youth while she is still able to remember. She starts writing her memoires, and agrees to meet with Japanese preofessor Yoshikawa Tatsuji. Tatsuji is interested in the life and works of artist Nakamura Aritomo, who used to be the gardener of the Japanese Emperor, but moved to this area to build his own garden.

During the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Yun Ling was in a Japanese civilian internment camp with her sister, Yun Hong. Yun Hong did not make it out alive, and after the war was over, Yun Ling decided to fulfil a promise made to her sister: to build a Japanese garden in their home in Kuala Lumpur. She travelled to the highlands to visit family friend Magnus Pretorius, an ex-patriate South African tea farmer who knew Aritomo. Aritomo refused to work for Yun Ling, but agreed to take her on as an apprentice, so she could later build her own garden. In spite of her resentment against the Japanese, she agreed to work for Aritomo, and later became his lover.

During the conversations with Tatsuji, it comes out that Aritomo was involved in a covert Japanese program during the war, to hide looted treasures from occupied territories. The rumours of this so-called "Golden Lily" program were widespread, and Magnus was killed trying to save his family from the Communist guerrilla, who came looking for the gold. Aritomo never talked about the treasure to Yun Ling, but gradually it becomes clear that he might have left a clue to its location. Before he disappeared into the jungle, he made a horimono tattoo on her back. It now appears this tattoo might contain a map to the location of the treasure. Yun Ling decides that, before she dies, she must make sure that no-one will be able to get their hand on her body, and the map. In the meantime, she sets out to restore Aritomo's dilapidated garden.

Themes

Taking place over three different periods of time, the novel deals with a number of historical issues. The Japanese occupation of Malaya is the backdrop for the earlier story, while the central narrative of Yun Ling and Aritomo's relationship plays out against the backdrop of the post-war Malayan Emergency. Finally, as Yun Ling narrates the story, we are in the age of independent Malaysia. The various characters represent different attitudes towards colonialism; Yun Ling – a Straits Chinese – downplays the importance of nationality: "Old countries are dying...and new ones being born. It doesn't matter where one's ancestors came from." (ch. 5) Magnus, meanwhile, carries memories from South Africa under British rule. His sister died in a concentration camp, where he suspects she was murdered by the British. (ch. 4) Tatsuji carries post-colonial guilt for the actions of his nation during the war, and tries to apologise to Yun Ling, but she replies that "your apology is meaningless." 

A central theme in the novel is the role of memory in human existence, and the relationship between memory and forgetting.  Memory is also strongly tied to guilt, particularly survivor guilt, Yun Ling wonders "why did she survive and her sister perish?"

Critical reviews of The Garden of Evening Mists were mostly favourable.

Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan is a multi-award-winning American novelist and short story writer.  She won the Pulitzer in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad.  Manhattan Beach is her fifth novel.  

Amazon says: 
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

'We're going to see the sea,' Anna whispered.

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.

Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/29/manhattan-beach-jennifer-egan-review

What I thought:
Much of the action is set in the New York dockyard during World War II.  The narrative is a female voice.  Well constructed, the novel moves between the characters and timescales.  Some of the most vivid writing centres around Anna's attempts and ultimate success at becoming a sub aqua diver.  I did feel, as did a fellow reader when we discussed it, that the ending was rushed.  As the Guardian reviewer notes, the author decided to withhold crucial scenes until late in the book and I found this unsatisfactory.   It seemed to be late in the day to have those revelations.  It was this that gave the impression of an abrupt ending. 

  

TWO MERMAIDS: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock and Elijah's Mermaid

A couple of days after fulfilling my obligations to book group etiquette and ploughing through my duo of thrillers I am able to refind good writing.....

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

I stumbled upon this title whilst searching on the internet for information about The Essex Serpent. I think probably it was mentioned in the context of being another novel about a mythical creature, set in a similar time-frame as the 'Serpent' and written with a real feel for the language and mores of the time.  It is authentic to the ear.  Once I had pulled up an image of the cover I was smitten ............ in shades of grey and yellow it features a scallop shell, one of the most beautiful forms in nature to my mind, and the shell which features most prominently in my shell collection.  The shapes, colours are so various.  There are some 300 species of scallop extant, and to read more about this fascinating shell and the way it features in our lives nutritionally and culturally (think architecture, furniture, décor, jewellery, utensils, religion) check out Wiki.

But to return to the book, here is what Amazon has to say:

‘A brilliantly plotted story of mermaids, madams and intrigue in 1780s London and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it become the Essex Serpent of 2018’ - The Pool'Imogen Hermes Gowar is a soon-to-be literary star’ - Sunday Times

THIS VOYAGE IS SPECIAL. IT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.

One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah’s ship for what appears to be a mermaid.

As gossip spreads through the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels, everyone wants to see Mr Hancock’s marvel. Its arrival spins him out of his ordinary existence and through the doors of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on… and a courtesan of great accomplishment. This meeting will steer both their lives onto a dangerous new course, on which they will learn that priceless things come at the greatest cost.

Where will their ambitions lead? And will they be able to escape the destructive power mermaids are said to possess?

In this spell-binding story of curiosity and obsession, Imogen Hermes Gowar has created an unforgettable jewel of a novel, filled to the brim with intelligence, heart and wit.

And for an extract of the book you can find the opening chapter here:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/find-your-next-read/extracts/2016/jun/the-mermaid-and-mrs-hancock-by-imogen-hermes-gowar/

And this is what I thought:

By way of introduction, well over twenty years ago, a friend and fellow conchologist with a special interest in curiosities of natural history asked me if I would arrange to go to the Booth Museum in Brighton and take photographs of the 'mermaid' they were holding in their collections.  He, David Heppell, was compiling a book of unnatural curiosities of natural history.  Often these would be Chimerae, imaginary monsters compounded of incongruous parts.  The Brighton mermaid was no exception being the melding of an ape head and torso complete with its forelimbs and the tail of a fish.  Extremely ugly but some of these artefacts were so well made they were convincing.  The first mermaid in Gowar's book is clearly of this type.  

In many ways a companion volume to The Essex Serpent of Victorian East Anglia, this debut novel steps back further, to Georgian London, and features as one of its principal characters, a 'mermaid'.  Gowar's  human cast is cleverly set in its various hierarchical milieu, with appropriate vocabulary, turns of phrase,  speech fashions and behaviour according to social class, and their respective susceptibilities and superstitions.

Gowar has written with wit and panache and in particular delivers a masterly interlude when the 'Madam',Bet Chappell, hires the wizened little mermaid to draw customers to her upscale brothel, the grotesque curio only emphasising the beauty of the women who frolic round it, draped in pearls, their privities dyed bright seaweed green, in a masque of the sea that turns into a carefully orchestrated orgy.   Without doubt this is an erotic piece of writing but with so much taste.......  Another vivid and moving passage occurs towards the end of the book when Bet Chappell faces retribution for connivance in pandering to the public appetite for sins of the flesh.

So I thoroughly enjoyed this book on many levels.  I found the notion of mermaids and the public fascination with the possibility of their existence, which flows through the narrative, to be captivating and, in a sense takes me full circle since the day I first gazed upon that ugly monstrosity in a glass case in Brighton Museum. 

LATER

…… Some time after reading this book my attention was drawn to another 'Mermaid' novel by Katharine.  Only too eager to indulge my fascination with mermaids I settled to read:

Elijah's Mermaid by Essie Fox

Check out this blogspot for a beautiful site about this book with some captivating illustrations:

http://elijahsmermaidreviews.blogspot.com/

This short blurb appears on Amazon:

Saved from the Thames one foggy London night, Pearl grows up at the House of Mermaids - a brothel that becomes the closest thing to home. But despite being cosseted and spoiled by the Madame, come her 14th year, Pearl is to be sold to the highest bidder. 

Orphaned twins Lily and Elijah are on a rare trip to London when they meet the ethereal Pearl. And the repercussions of this chance encounter will bind all their fates together, in a dark and dangerous way.

Bewitching, gothic and sensual, this is a tale of love and betrayal in a world where nothing is quite as it seems.

There is a longer synopsis/review on the web page of the author, Monique Mulligan

https://moniquemulligan.com/2013/03/02/review-elijahs-mermaid-by-essie-fox/

This review inevitably contains plot spoilers so should be read with that proviso. 

And what did I think:

Well...……… if you like seriously gothic, Victorian London, under-belly aspects of a demi-monde life in a story of love and betrayal , obsession and guilt, you may well find this an engaging read.  Women and children are exploited as victims of poverty, a male culture and the world of the Madame and her brothel.  There are family bonds that tie and relationships to be revealed as the story unfolds.  

What I do like is the several sections at the end of the book where Fox mentions real historical characters who have influenced those in her novel, real places which have influenced her settings, including the Grotto at Margate which I know well, and other themes relating to photography, health.  She also provides a glossary of Victorian slang which occurs in her prose.  I like it when authors bother to give that information to their readers.  This contrasts with an absence of such ancillary information in Imogen Hermes Gowar's book.  I thought she ought to have given a nod to the 'mermaid' which must have in part inspired The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock.  She has worked as a curator in the museum world, surely she must have come across an example of the 'monkey-fish' monstrosities that were contrived and passed off as genuine mermaids.  I am always impressed by authors who give the reader some background as to the origins of their works of fiction or non-fiction.

I found this novel sat quite nicely in the context of other recently-read titles such as the Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, also The Essex Serpent.  It also picks up on themes in A Year of Marvellous Ways.  Sometimes it is fun to read a gaggle of books whose plots and themes echo each other in some ways.  

Then again I am always a sucker for the stuff of mermaids...…..