Customer Reviews

The Navigator

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4 star:		(3)
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Morris West is one of my all-time favorite authors, and here he stretches himself outside of the Catholic framework in which he proved himself a master.

"The Navigator" follows Gunnar Thorkild, a scholar not yet appreciated, an adventurer not yet tested. He gets his chance to prove himself, and to travel in his ancestors' footsteps, when he rounds up a ragtag team to accompany him on a search for a lost island. When the team become castaways, they are forced to deal with moral and societal laws. They face danger, fear, love, and hate. On an adult scale, they deal with the issues of "Lord of the Flies." And Thorkild is Robinson Crusoe, struggling with his own soul amidst it all.

Morris West is a virtuouso of words. Here, he shows all his strengths and weaknesses. He reveals moral dilemmas and well-drawn characters, then occasionally burdens them with maudlin soap-opera type scenes. His dialogue is dead-on most of the time, then turns melodramatic and Wagnerian.

I still love it. West may reflect old-school sentiments, but he does so with zest.

I will dearly miss the man--the writer, the moralist, the entertainer.

This is a good read. The book is based in the Pacific. Our adventure starts in Hawaii, a University Prof. is turned down for tenure, though he has brilliant publications of the Pacific Ocean, it Navigation and trade routes. He list in an appendix a mystical island of the navigaotrs from legend. And writes it as if it is a fact. An island no one has ever seen.

He and a mismatched group of people sail in search of this island. And when the find it...the novel really begins. I do not want to spoil anything...but the book is a very fast read.

The Navigator is a far cry from Morris West's other books dealing with the Church, but not so far in that it still deals with the common moral questions such as governance, marriage, divorce, law, criminality and how we relate to each other as men and women. Faced with unbelievable odds against them, Thorkild's band of would-by mariners are faced with all of these decisions on a remote Pacific island known only to an historcal band of "navigators" from Thorkild's past. This is a great read and in West's style it will make you think. The old commercial that proclaimed "Try it, you'll like it!" sure hits the mark with The Navigator by Morris West.

As I finished this read, I kept having to resist the urge to see what page I was on as I already knew there were just over 300 pages. The book was running out of pages and there was lots of plot yet to be revealed. . . or so I thought. I was a bit disappointed by the abrupt ending and hopefully this isn't much of a spoiler for folks, but I was immediately logging on to Amazon to find more out about Morris West and to discover if he may have actually written a sequel to The Navigator. Its furtive ground for a sequel and I was disappointed to see there wasn't one, so I am coming to grips with the fact that the author is deceased and I will probably never get a sequel unless I write it myself. Hmmmm. . . there is an idea! Long live the Chief! Long Live Gunnar Thorkild!!!

The story of this "modern Crusoe" is nice, and will keep you interested in the story and how they solve the problems with their bare hands in a lost island, in this book you will find two or three things that are really interesting and you will learn how the people change when they are in danger or they have to do something that they don't want, is not a thriller, but is a good reading.