Customer Reviews

Tales of the South Pacific

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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.

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.

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.

I read this book for the first time in 2006. It is a wonderful book, very valuable in learning about daily life for American soldiers during World War II. You also learn what the South Pacific Islands were like then. I have been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand so I know what is like to have left a life behind in the United States and to live in another country. When you are signed up for a certain period of time, you always have to keep in mind that you are going back to the life you had before, but you are living a totally different kind of life now. People back home will never quite understand what you have experienced and many will not care. Most will only want to know a shallow version of that life. A person keeps most stories to themselves. I feel that Michener understood the life he wrote about in the South Pacific and was able to fictionalize many true stories. The book has insight, compassion and wit for it's protaganists. Just a wonderful book and I'm glad I read it.

Mitchener's World War 2 collection of short stories remains as vibrant and compelling in terms of human interest today--as when it was written. Alternating between the logistics of war with personal suffering and joy, these stories present the reader with a composite of life and death in tropical paradise. Characters popularized in the Broadway musical, South Pacific, appear in several stories in this fascinating patchwork of passion and pathos. As all emotions prove more poignant in a backdrop of war, the inner conflicts of personal desire and frustration touched responsive chords in both post-war and contemporary readers.

Mitchener's themes include frequent references to racial prejudice which was rampant in still-insular America. As well as the devastating effect of prolonged heat and limited space in Westerners. Throughout the book runs the thread of the Allies' gradual reclamation of the Japanese-held islands, culminating in the strike on Kuralei, with its the shocking toll of life. As the ubiquitous narrator pays a respectful visit to the new cemetery, this collection draws to a gentle close, yet Mitchener's unforgettable characters live on in our literary memory. If nothing else this book reveals the tremendous debt we owe to the brave men and women of the armed services. A sensitive
yet historically-accurate masterpiece, for readers of all ages.

Because this is Michener's first published book, because it is different from his subsequent works, and because many people are more familiar with the Rogers and Hammerstein musical than with the book, I will reveal my biases up front. I do not care for epic historicals, and so have never enjoyed Michener's writing before reading Tales of the South Pacific. The musical was Rogers and Hammerstein's second or third collaborative effort, and to me was a poor follow up to Oklahoma.

That said, reading this book gave me the feeling I have when my father and I rummage through his collection of black and white war photos, postcards, and 78 RPM disks from his days as a Chief Petty Officer in the US Navy in and around the South Pacific. Each artifact stimulates a story, many of which are linked to another, and another. Sometimes the stories are about the war theater in Europe or Africa or home in the states. Most often, they are simply about friendships, loss and the discoveries of an eighteen year old doing a man's work in the first few months away from his parents' farm.

Like my father's stories, Michener's Tales of the South Pacific could be set anywhere, but they are about being somewhere other than where one comes from. They are about finding belonging in new surroundings and accepting that great people are rarely 100 percent great. Michener's heroes are the very human people who were decent to one another, believed in the value of their nation's cause and the people around them, demonstrated leadership, but didn't take the trappings of the navy or rank very seriously. His nemeses were not just the Japanese, but American biggots, mean SOBs and phonies. Like Hersey's, Bell for Adano, the stories were practically current events when they were published, and Michener's perspective on sex and the races were shocking material for many Americans who had been fed years of propaganda about their boys (and girls) overseas and who only after 1945 could truly emerge from the depression of 1930s to enter a new, modern and more aggressively democratic age. Tales of the South Pacific foreshadowed the new world to come while honoring the great people who helped to make it possible. At the end of the book, the reader is glad to be among the survivors, standing in the graveyard among heroes, but worried that the supply of greatness might someday be used up.

I admit I had very little idea what this book was about when I bought it, but it seemed like something I should read while on vacation in the South Pacific last fall. It wasn't quite the island paradise novel that I thought it would be - it really is a book about WWII, in which the islands of the South Pacific are characters, but despite not being what I thought I enjoyed it thoroughly and didn't put the book down until I was done. My reading experience was definitely enhanced by the view of the ocean that I had from my overwater hut in Bora Bora where I was when I read the book, but even if you aren't on vacation in some exotic locale, South Pacific is a classically entertaining novel well worth the read.

This was Michener's first book and it's one of his shortest. It is also, for my money, his best (though I must admit I haven't read them all), maybe because it is based on personal experience and not research. Exotic island locations, memorable characters and stories: excellent even without the Rogers and Hammerstein tunes.

Because I had seen the movie South Pacific, which was based on this book, I already knew the main characters and the plot of the story once I reached for this tear-jerking book. But, Michener surprised me with this war-time, romancing drama that depicts realism in a manner of brashness. Michener never lost my attention, but he managed to change my views of Hollywood's renowned attributes of a "perfect" relationship and that happily-ever-after ending. Michener only takes you a little further. Read for yourself...

Its all here - fantastic locations, gripping stories love, death, war, bigots and racists, hope, waiting waiting waiting on desolate coral atols, disease, cowards and heros, an ancient avenue of noble pines cut down for a runway, a mountain moved in a week, wild tribes, brutal nature, life lived and lost. Michener wrote the book before being assigned the job described by the narrator. Read the book and rent the video SOUTH PACIFIC for fantasic songs and romance (I especially like the way they slip the red filter over the lense for each song - glorious 50's color). Like all good books this is about much more than is subject