Tales of the South Pacific
by James A. Michener
Summary
Nineteen linked stories from the naval war against Japan, told by a staff officer who moves between islands carrying orders, gossip and the reader. The war here is mostly waiting: the great operation the book builds toward sits weeks away for hundreds of pages while men grow bored, fall in love, run rackets and stare at the sea.
Two of the stories became immortal by way of Broadway. In Our Heroine, Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Little Rock, falls for Emile De Becque, a French planter, and runs up hard against her own inherited racism when she learns of his mixed race children. In Fo' Dolla', Bloody Mary, a Tonkinese vendor of grass skirts and shrunken heads, engineers a love affair between Marine lieutenant Joe Cable and her daughter, and the same wall goes up from the other side.
Around them circulate Tony Fry, a wonderfully unmilitary officer scrounging whisky, Luther Billis the Seabee entrepreneur, and the operation itself, which arrives at last and collects its price.
Michener's manner is anecdotal and unhurried, closer to a man telling stories at a bar than to a made novel, and the stories are franker about race, sex and boredom than the musical's reputation suggests. The construction is quietly formal underneath: the stories are linked thematically in pairs from the outside in, the first and last reflective, the second and the eighteenth given to battle, so the loose anecdotes turn out to have been an arch all along.
Around four hundred pages, best read in order but built to be dipped into.
Best for readers who want the Pacific war behind the battle lines, and the raw material of South Pacific before Rodgers and Hammerstein sweetened it.
Historical Context & Significance
Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer in 1948, the first year the prize was named for Fiction rather than the Novel; the category was redefined that year, letting linked stories qualify. The choice startled people anyway. James Michener was a forty year old former textbook editor with no previous book, who had written up his observations from service as a Navy lieutenant commander on Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific opened in April 1949, ran 1,925 performances, and won the 1950 Pulitzer for Drama, keeping the material's argument against racial prejudice at its centre. The royalties gave Michener his independence, and he spent it becoming the most industrious novelist in America, producing the thousand page geological epics, Hawaii and Centennial and their successors, that made his name a genre.
He never won another Pulitzer in fifty years of writing. The first book, the modest one, is the awarded one, and plenty of readers think that got it right.