Title: Tales of the South Pacific
Author: James A. Michener
Number of Pages: 359
Original Published Date: 1946
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Fiction): 1948
Favorite Sentence(s): Each man who lay on Hoga Point bore with him to his grave some promise for a free America. Now they were gone. Who would take their places?
Tales of the South Pacific was actually the first novel that I’d ever read that had won the Pulitzer Prize. When I decided to make it a challenge to read all of the past fiction Pulitzer winners, Tales of the South Pacific was the first entry on https://www.pulitzer.org/ under the “Fiction” category. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that Tales of the South Pacific was the catalyst for the Pulitzer committee to alter the category from novel to fiction since this book is a collection of short stories and not a typical novel. So, although my to-be-read list greatly expanded after learning Pulitzer novel winners dated back to 1918, I decided to finish Tales of the South Pacific first before I moved on to the earlier winners.
Tales of the South Pacific is different than any other book I’d experienced before as it’s a collection of short stories narrated (mostly) by an unnamed Commander in the U. S. Navy. Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII where he got his inspiration for this book. The cast of characters overlap in some stories, but the overall story is mainly vignettes all interconnected by a backdrop of the Pacific islands during WWII. The book paints a contrast between the beauty of the Pacific islands against the horrors of war where a sneak attack from the enemy or a looming battle envelops the island like the noonday sun.
Michener’s writing drops the reader onto an island in the middle of the ocean and takes them on a tour as the characters navigate the local inhabitants and culture, the politics of war, and the selfish and the self-less traits that war reveals. Many of the short stories are centered around the characters desire to find love or stability in a very unstable environment.
Although set during wartime, a majority of the 19 short stories are less about the death and destruction that occurs in war zones and more about the decisions that people make when they’re in an exotic location where the societal rules and expectations of their pre-Pacific life, expectations that once seemed so logical and acceptable, now seemed distant and foreign to their island life. Many of the characters struggle with desiring a life that goes against their pre-war life with some unable to shed off their old beliefs and find a new kind of happiness.
Discovering this book introduced me to a new piece of history I wasn’t familiar with. The beginning of the novel is about the Battle of the Coral Sea which was a battle between Japan and the U.S and Australia during WWII. Michener does a fantastic job of painting a picture of the battle for those of us lucky enough to be able to read about the events and not have to experience them first-hand. Most of my knowledge and information regarding WWII had centered around Germany and their invasions and less about Japan, exception being the attack on Pearl Harbor. Michener’s book provides an excellent historical (although fictional) telling of what it was like for the men and women outside of mainland Europe during WWII.
In the final chapter, Michener has the unnamed narrator visit the cemetery on the island where the fallen men have been laid to rest. There the caretaker asks the narrator what they will do if all the good men are killed. I’ve paraphrased the conversation below:
“Isn’t is pretty true,” I asked, “that good men always show up when they’re needed?”
“I cain’ believe dat. Dey’s only so many good men, and if you uses ‘em up, where you gonna git de others?”
The narrator then wondered: Throughout the Pacific, in Russia, in Africa, and soon on fronts not yet named, good men were dying. Who would take their place? Who would marry the girls they would have married? Or build the buildings they would have built? Were there men at home ready to do Hoag’s (upstanding character in the book) job?
The last act of Tales of the South Pacific is to remember and honor the memory of those good men who died as heroes during the war. It also leaves an open question from the narrator of who would or could take their place if all the good men perished.
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