THE NAVIGATOR
by MORRIS WEST 407 pages. Morrow. $8.95.
Many people dream of escaping the world and fleeing to some unspoiled tropical isle. Most of them settle for a couple of weeks in the Hamptons or a package tour to Puerto Rico. Not Gunnar Thorkild, the half-Polynesian, half-European hero of Morris West's latest novel. The grandson of a great Polynesian navigator as well as an instructor at the University of Hawaii, Thorkild publishes a paper claiming that even in this day of earth satellites and up-to-date hydrographic charts, there exists in the vastness of the Pacific an island known only to Polynesia's traditional navigators. He is promptly denied tenure for this temerity.
Thereupon, with a pickup crew that somewhat resembles a World War II movie platoon—a Chinese, a Japanese, a couple of woebegone Wasps, a Jew, a bitter widow, a good-looking woman doctor and a majestic black man—the professor sails west searching for the mysterious island that will convince his colleagues that he actually deserves a full professorship.
Thorkild instead wrecks his boat and maroons himself and his crew, setting up the same situation that William Golding once exploited so skillfully. Indeed, The Navigator might more accurately be called The Lord of the Fleas.
The castaways elect Thorkild chief and play at being survivors, pairing off in various combinations and permutations, cultivating taro and learning how to make stone axes.
How people endure in extremis, whether on Andean mountaintops or in concentration camps, is a popular theme in an overpopulated age preoccupied with lifeboat survival theory. But West's characters clump about mouthing lines like, "We have all stepped back in time," or pondering jejune perceptions. Sample:
"Relative values change." The book itself seems to be a compendium of South Sea cliches containing, in addition to the mandatory paean to the Polynesian way of life, a tidal wave, a tropical storm and a run-in with a poisonous stonefish—a great relief to readers who had been expecting a shark. One thing Thorkild proves, though: there is no tenure in paradise.
THE WIDOW'S CHILDREN by PAULA FOX 224 pages. Dutton. $8.95.
Coin flip: tails. Very well, this neurasthenic little novel is a wicked parody. It mocks the genre of relentless felicity and refined sensibility, the kind of writing in which nothing happens but much is felt. "Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs," the reader learns of Clara, a young working woman of the kind once called "spinster." Or "Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen." And (Clara, in perfect health, leaving a hotel) "Clara's ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would ever get through the revolving doors ahead of her."