South Seas adventure tales represent a vast sub-genre of mid-century popular fiction, even garnering a Pulitzer Prize for James Michener’s 1942 collection of stories Tales of the South Pacific. We watched the movie Tiara Tahiti a couple of years ago but didn’t read the book by Geoffrey Cotterell due to its minimal availability at that time. We like stories set in the South Seas, though, and were interested in details that might have been omitted by the filmmakers, so when we had a chance we grabbed a copy. It was a paperback from Four Square Books with an interesting rendering of co-star Rosenda Monteros on the cover.
The book isn’t wildly different from the film. It’s still about two British officers who clash during the war, randomly meet again on Tahiti, and resume their conflict with a potential hotel project at its core. The characters, however, were radically altered for the film. The central figure Brett, affably played by James Mason, is “grossly fat” in the novel and unpleasant to his Tahitian wife. The wife (a girlfriend in the film), played by Monteros, hates him and is carrying on an affair with a boat captain she hopes will spirit her far from Tahiti. Crucially, in the film she was not fully cognizant of a plot to murder her husband, but in the novel she’s right in the middle of it.
We expected and duly recieved a good read. Cotterell provides no fully sympathetic characters, instead reaching directly into the seven deadly sins to give each grand flaws—foremost among them Brett, who is gluttonous and slothful. Envy drives his wife Belle Annie to seek escape from the island, while lust drives the murder plot. Cotterell may be making a statement about how only certain types of weak or ridiculous foreigners can thrive in a place like Tahiti. If so, that strikes us as a facile assessment.
Northerners who emigrate to tropical islands are often different by constitution. We’ve personally seen it over and over. Our girlfriends would say we are it. Everyone wants to hear the surf when they go to sleep, but unless they’re rich, sacrifices are needed to get there. Usually what’s sacrificed are stable jobs and a future that can be confidently mapped. Only a subset of people are willing to live with such uncertainty. That’s what novels like Tiara Tahiti capture at their best—for expats on the islands, amongst many of whom precarity is already routine, any crazy thing can happen at any time. Cotterell gets that part correct, entertainingly so, even if he may have a low opinion of those who flee the North.
