Solomon Time (eBook, ePUB)
An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific
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Life is not going well for Will Randall, a burned out, thirtyish teacher in an English public school. He's tired of his students, they're tired of him, and his girlfriend wants to call it quits. But things are about to change. Will has a fleeting conversation on a cricket field with a doddering, 84 year-old man known as ""the Commander"" who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later the Commander has died and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his lost, long-missed island--where his old plantation has fallen to ...
Life is not going well for Will Randall, a burned out, thirtyish teacher in an English public school. He's tired of his students, they're tired of him, and his girlfriend wants to call it quits. But things are about to change. Will has a fleeting conversation on a cricket field with a doddering, 84 year-old man known as ""the Commander"" who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later the Commander has died and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his lost, long-missed island--where his old plantation has fallen to ruins--and devise a way for the native people to support themselves. This way they might avoid poverty, build a new school, and even fend off the developers. It's a mission of noblesse oblige--yet possibly a fool's errand as well. Will half-willingly agrees to go. Spread lazily across the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands are not so much the Pacific archipelago that time forgot, as the one that forgets time. And as Will quickly discovers, it is a place where timekeeping is governed by the sun and moon, where schedules and deadlines do not translate into the local dialect of ""pijin"" English. Will's new home is Menali, a fishing village so remote it can only be reached by motorized canoe. His house there is constructed of leaves and stilts. The people of the village, some of whose cheeks are engraved with the rising sun, are welcoming, for they remember the Commander, and still practice a pagan Anglicanism in a church he built for them in 1956. They live on fish of every sort, mud crabs, yams, Ngali nuts, even the honeycomb of termites. Here and there in the jungle lurk the mossy skeletons of WWII tanks. Randall decides that the villagers might be able to raise chickens. It's low-tech, low-capital, and environmentally low impact. But--as the attached excerpt shows--finding live chicken eggs for hatching proves wildly difficult. Will chases this goal to the farthest reaches of his watery world, and in so doing encounters a variety of strange, mostly wonderful, characters. His quest serves as the narrative arc of the book, and we come to know Will as an appealing bumbler, forever falling into the bushes or making ghastly mistakes--once even getting himself washed ashore on an uninhabited island, nearly naked, with no provisions. But he's also enormously sensitive to the people of Menali and one couldn't imagine a more thoughtful man for the task. Because his affection for the islanders becomes our own, we want very much for Will to succeed. And he does. Hatchable eggs finally arrive on the island by motorized canoe and the operation begins. Soon the chickens are ready for market; the project becomes a great success--so great in fact that the villagers open a little fried chicken shack on another island. Will's mission is done, and it is time for him to return to the first world. Because his affection for the people of Menali runs deep, he leaves as he arrived--only half-willing to go.
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