The Happy Isles of Oceana by Paul Theroux

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year. It's an odd sort of comfort, certainly, and it only works if some of them actually do get read and newer books also land on those shelves for seasoning, but people who like to read also like to have lots of choices, for all of the moods that they think they might have someday.

I've been reading Paul Theroux's travel books for probably thirty years - I think I started with The Kingdom by the Sea or The Great Railway Bazaar in the 90s, when I was reading for a living and hadn't yet developed children to steal my time and the Internet barely existed. I've covered a lot of his books here, and every time I read another one of his travel books I have to shamefully note that, even after thirty years, I still haven't touched a single one of his novels. (I intend to, absolutely. One of these days. They're on the shelf...)

The Happy Isles of Oceania is a big book from 1992, covering a series of journeys over what seems to have been at least all of 1991 - starting in late 1990 during the build-up to the first Gulf War - in which Theroux and his collapsible kayak paddled around and through something like fifty different islands across the Pacific.

Theroux's nonfiction books usually touch only lightly on his regular life, but this one is the divorce book - his marriage is breaking up in London in the first chapter, and he notes in the last that he didn't have the usual end-of-travel-book experience with this project, since he didn't return to his old life like he did with prior books because that old life was gone. (Speaking of how he comments on things archly, there is a reference to what might be his second wife in the very last line of this book: "I kissed the woman next to me, happy to be with her. Being happy was like being home.") I've noted before that his books focus on the specific journey - the places he's writing about - and usually not about how he got there, or what he was doing in-between. This time, he might actually have been bumming around the Pacific for a whole year or longer.

It started with a book-publicity tour in New Zealand and Australia. Theroux doesn't anatomize his motives in great detail, but clearly there was a sense of "Yes, let's get as far away as possible. And let's do as much as I can while I'm on the other side of the world. I wonder how many islands I could get to?" So this one is even more episodic than many of Theroux's books - there's no thread of a railway to connect these very separated places, each of them sitting in warm waters far from sight of any other land.

It's broken into four large sections - first Meganesia, covering New Zealand and Australia; then Melanesia, with a bunch of smaller islands to the east: the Trobriands, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and Fiji. The longest section, on Polynesia, covers another big group of small islands: Tonga, the Samoas Western and American, Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and Easter Island. And finally, there's a short section at the end about Hawaii, where Theroux has spent part of the year every year since.

Theroux has always been happiest and most positive about the poorest, most primitive people, and that theme comes out here, as he compares and contrasts a whole lot of different small island societies and sees how they have been affected by colonizers and missionaries and the modern world in general. (I don't want to say he's against all of that - there are small aspects here and there he is not quite as negative about - but it's a reasonable assumption.)

But every travel book is mostly about the traveler, and this one even more so than most of Theroux's work: he was going through a crisis at the time, and paddling around the biggest ocean on Earth was how he wanted to deal with that and find his way forward. He's still reticent, still protective of his privacy and that of his family - he doesn't even mention the name of the wife he's breaking up with, or give any details of their conflicts - but maybe more open emotionally, because this was such a huge transition in his life.

There's a good summing-up of his idea of travel - maybe explaining, sideways, why he does this, near the end of the book, on p.446:

A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "The American" or "The Foreigner" - the palangil, the popaa, as they said here in Rapa Nui. But there was no power in that.

A traveler was conspicuous for being a stranger, and consequently was vulnerable. But, traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. Generally I felt safer in a place like Anakena than I would have in an American city - or an American campsite, for that matter (mass murderers were known to lurk around campsites). I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. That was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

So he went to a lot of gorgeous, exotic, interesting places and wrote well and engagingly about the people and things he saw there. For all of us who will never have a year free to bum around the Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania is the next best thing.