The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 June 2000
William Somerset Maugham spent a few months traveling in the South Pacific during a leave in World War I. The stories that resulted are a picture of colonial life, and the European experience with Island culture. These six stories occur in Samoa, Tahiti and Hawaii. In them, Maugham expresses a strongly Eurocentric point of view, but with flashes of compassion and forward-thinking egalitarianism. Clearly, to Maugham, the white settlers were outsiders, often unwelcome, usually clueless. These stories are less about island culture itself (Jack London, who visited the islands only a couple years before, wrote more eloquently and acceptingly of island peoples.) than about white men and women and the vast distance between their turn-of-the-century attitudes and those of the Island peoples.
"Mackintosh" is a tale of rage and revenge, tempered with the weird racial and social paradoxes of colonial life on the Samoan island of Savai'i, at least as seen through Maugham's eyes. In "The Fall of Edward Barnard", Maugham brings to life a young Chicago man with great promise and a beautiful, if conventional, fianceé. He is seduced by the languid beauty and freedom of Tahiti in a story of a social rebellion and personal fulfillment the author would explore in more detail in The Razor's Edge. "Red" is a story of the ironic romantic twists that seem to multiply in an exotic place and time like turn of the century Samoa. It is dark and unpleasant, somewhat less developed than the other stories in this collection. On the other hand, "The Pool" is a longer story with beauty, art and tragedy. Maugham is concerned here with the idea that men unaccustomed to the exotic ease of the South Pacific, will thrive or fall there. Here, seduced by a vision of beauty by a clear pool of water, a man falls in love, but loses his sense of culture and direction. Though Maugham writes from a Euro-centric viewpoint, nearly equating racial difference with moral failure, there is an undercurrent of compassion and revulsion for contemporary racial morés. "Honolulu" is perhaps the most Island-oriented of the stories, telling a spooky and ironic tale of mysterious spiritual forces at work on the seas between the Hawaiian islands. It opens with an excellent evocation of World War I Honolulu and its inhabitants, as well as an insightful commentary on the nature of travel. Finally, "Rain" is an excellent and fairly well-known story, in which Maugham takes us to Pago-pago where he ravishes the notion of the holy missionary (a figure prevalent in the history of South Pacific islands). The story (also entitled "Miss Thompson" or "Sadie Thompson") springs from actual events he witnessed, and has been made into no fewer than three movies. It is disturbing, and wonderfully evokes the wet sultry nights in the islands.
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