62 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
War, romance, and black-marketeering in the Pacific, December 11, 2000
This review is from: Tales of the South Pacific (Mass Market Paperback)
To use an old cliche, this book gives the reader a sense of "being there" during the Second World War in the Pacific theater.
This is not a chronicle of the war itself. It is not a military history, although it is full of military anecdotes. It's a series of loosely connected stories of the prolonged island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, related through the personal experiences of a variety of characters. Michener's emphasis is on the individuality, humor, valor, and idiosyncrasies of the men and women who populated the bases and combat units of the Pacific campaign.
As anyone who has seen the musical "South Pacific" (based on a part of this book) knows, it includes the island natives and expatriates who happened to live in the places where the war was taking place. In reading these stories, you may come to understand why many of the armed forces veterans of the Pacific war were drawn to go back to the islands in later years.
If I were limited to one sentence, I'd say that this book is about everyday Americans doing unusual jobs in exotic places. I like it well enough that I've read it multiple times and consider it a favorite. It's a lot easier reading than many of Michener's later epics, and in my opinion it's as good as anything he's ever written and better than most.
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42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Underrated American Masterwork--Provocative, Complex, Profound (and Patriotic), November 1, 2002
This review is from: Tales of the South Pacific (Mass Market Paperback)
The omission of this work from the academic canon is another comment on the discriminatory but hardly discriminating state of literary studies today. Michener is far more than a captivating storyteller, collector of colorful characters, painter of vivid natural imagery, and documentor of the orchestrations of world warfare. Each of the "tales" comprising his carefully-constructed epic narrative is at once thematically and stylistically related to the other smaller narratives and at the same time artistically whole in itself.
If the reader has expectations of a single-minded patriotic paean to the fighting men of the South Pacific, a close reading of the early chapter, "Mutiny," should dispel any such illusions. Here, as throughout the book, Michener uses nature and the ocean as a test, a touchstone, and a foil--exposing the folly not just of warring nations and military campaigns but of arrogant, imperialist civilizations and many of their prideful citizens. Tony Fry, his anti-authoritarian, compassionate "hero," commits a subversive act that links him with the mutineers on board the Bounty and casts the American command in the role of Bligh and Hitler! In the next story, "Cave," Fry emerges as a war-time philosopher whose meditations on courage move him to acts of selfless, Christ-like charity. In "Boar's Tooth" Fry is able to overcome his resistance to a primitive religious ritual involving pain and sacrifice as he contrasts it with the empty and self-serving practices of modern religion.
The American fighting men and women who come to the South Pacific bring no small amount of baggage from a flawed social order back home, and Michener's heroes are not simply the individuals who perform fearlessly in combat: they're just as likely to be the narrow-minded Americans who are transformed by their experiences in the South Pacific into better human beings. "Our Heroine," the story of Nellie Forbush, is a shocking expose of racism, delivering a reeling blow comparable to explosive moments in Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner. When Nellie learns that her fiance's former lover is dead and rejoices not because a rival has been removed but because a black person has been eliminated, she would seem to be beyond the redemption experienced even by O'Connor's most degenerate souls. But in an earlier story about "the Remittance Man" Michener's narrator has constructed a definition of heroism based on courage and an exclusive vision of the sacred status of all human life, allowing us to see how Nellie's eventual change of heart qualifies her for inclusion among the company of true heroes.
The famous Bali Hai chapter ("Fo' Dolla"), far from an escapist love story, is at once romantic tragedy in the tradition of "Madame Butterfly" and tragicomedy in its portrayal of accessory characters who recall the nurse and friar in "Romeo & Juliet." And once again the narrative's definition of the "heroic" allows us to see the tragedy play out not merely as a tale of star-crossed lovers but as a drama of choices and their painful consequences. In each case the act precedes and produces illumination: Joe Cable's venture into Bali Hai and the Dionysian produces self-discovery because ultimately it becomes a "shared discourse" with his dark-skinned, native lover, who turns out to be a "real person" with a history of her own.
Michener is as likely to locate the heroic away from the war as on island battlefields or the Pacific main, because his real subject is human nature and the courage to live in the face of obstacles both natural and human. To their credit, Rodgers and Hammerstein detected (and partially, if unevenly, captured) the strength in Michener's novel: Each of us has a Bali Hai, and our failures to reach it can be traced as much to failures of courage and vision as to the ironclad circumstances of existence.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better the second time around, June 25, 1999
This review is from: Tales of the South Pacific (Mass Market Paperback)
I first read this book when I was young, not long after I saw the movie "South Pacific". I didn't particularly like it because the characters were the same ones as in the movie but they didn't "fit" in the same way. After many, manyy years, I read it just the other night and loved it! It had been long enough since I saw the film that the characters could stand on their own. Mitchener wrote this soon after the war when his memories were still fresh and he displays a great deal of affection for the "typical" sailor caught thousands of miles from home. For many, they would never get home. To this American tale, he adds a lot of tropical spice: Bloody Mary, the Frenchman's Daughter, Emil De Becque himself. Mitchener shows the American fighting man as hero, coward, nice guy, louse, sacrificial, selfish, and mostly a combination of all of these traits. Although I have read many of Mitchener's books, this is still his best: young, filled with Mitchener's memories from his recently-concluded naval service during World War II. Deservedly one of the classics that came from World War II.
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