Book Review: Among The Islands

Book cover of Among The Islands. Photo / Supplied

Among The Islands by Tim Flannery
Text Publishing $40

Parents wishing to change the attitude of their science-averse teenage boys could do worse than to drop into their Christmas stocking this account of Tim Flannery's adventures as a young zoologist. I quote: "before long I felt a firm breast resting on my shoulder and the warmth of a groin pressing into my side." And again: "A young woman was sluicing her body under the communal shower, the sun catching her curves so that she looked like a classical nymph."

These extracts come from a chapter on his stay with the Kwaio people of Malaita, whose unmarried young women go about completely naked.

In another passage, on Alcester Island, he describes being cared for by a fetching young woman in a grass skirt who comes and mops his body with a moist cloth while he is suffering an attack of malaria.

In fairness to Flannery he also points out the morality of the Kwaio is such that anyone attempting to seduce a naked nymph is likely to find a spear in his ribs and that the young Florence Nightingale in the grass skirt was merely exercising the kindness of strangers. Still, it all sounds rather more attractive than Business Studies 101.

In opening his chronicle of his years during the 1980s and 1990s, Flannery says he had the best job in the world. He was leading a team of researchers in the tropical islands of the South-West Pacific investigating the mammals of the area, previously almost undiscovered.

Apart from the scientific thrill of discovering new species and properly describing those known but unclassified, the expeditions also provided insights into island biodiversity, a topic of peculiar interest to us in New Zealand where, as Flannery points out, a third of land bird and bat species have become extinct since human settlement and another third are threatened with extinction.

The scientific merit of the exercise was unquestionable and Flannery doesn't gloss over the routine, laborious work that went into it but to conduct such tasks in the extraordinary settings he describes must have been as magical as he makes it appear. He does not look through rose-tinted glasses and his accounts of the human troubles besetting places like the Solomons have the perspicacity of a gifted observer.

He is strong, too, at the capsule histories, both human and natural, that differentiate the islands.

Despite the successes of his previous books Flannery's prose can tend to the leaden and clichéd - as always, the word "quipped" is guaranteed to be linked to something that isn't funny - but he does have a talent for the good anecdote.

His description of an excursion into a noisome bat-filled cave where his choice of either having to go through Bat Shit Mountain or Bat Piss Lagoon drops him waist-deep in stinking maggot-ridden filth is a fine piece of knockabout farce with the punchline being that the bats in the cave were a common species of no great note.

One of the key assets of a good scientist, we are told, is a sense of wonder and Flannery demonstrates that in spades. To read his account of such encounters as having a huge horseshoe bat land just in front of him or of finding an undiscovered giant red tree-climbing rat, is to share the excitement that drives him.

I could not say, in all honesty, that establishing the definitive taxonomic classification of the monkey-faced bats of Fiji and the Solomons was high on my list of concerns but Flannery made me interested in it, some indication of why this book is so worth reading.

John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.