Coconut Chaos: Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea

by Diana Souhami

Book Overview

A personal voyage to obscure Pitcairn Island, with profound modern echoes of the Bounty mutineers who settled there, this story moves from a simple, random event to its complex connections. Its... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0753823675
• ISBN13: 9780753823675
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Phoenix House
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

Better than Chatwin

Bottom line: I couldn't put it down! One one level this is a superbly researched book on Pitcairn Island's modern legacy of violence and incest dating from the days of Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. On another level it is a hilarious travel memoir that admits to being highly fictionalized. How refreshing. The book received so much well-deserved praise in the British press for being a rolicking travel read that I have little to contrbute besides introducing new readers to Souhami's work. If you loved IN PATAGONIA or WHAT AM I DOING HERE by Bruce Chatwin, buy this book! I think Souhami is now better than Chatwin ever was at giving us a portrait of the author as deep thinker and sensitive traveler who falls headlong into the landscape (both past and present) that she planned to investigate and demystify. I've long regarded Diana Souhami as one of the wittiest, most incisive, most stylish literary biographers writing in English. Beginning a few books ago, with SELKIRK'S ISLAND, the elusive Souhami began tantalizing readers with snippets of "memoir" interleaved with the biography, drawing parallels between the biographer's wayward subjects and her own life. COCONUT CHAOS picks up the thread with the self-confessed unreliable narrator "Diana Souhami" still deeply involved with her research into 18th century maritime history. Meanwhile she has become even more deeply mired in a personal obsession with chaos theory, which threatens the relationship she appears to be in. COCONUT CHAOS takes the fact/fiction, dual-narrative pattern (some reviewers call it a double helix narrative structure) and really runs with it. Like Captain Bligh and Flecther Christian two centuries before her, Souhami recklessly abandons her fragile mother, her safe harbor (and her blameless girlfriend) in England for a book (if not exactly a life) at sea. She returns Lonely Planet-style to the South Pacific where a sex crime scandal is about to break out on isolated Pitcairn island, population 49. This is the island that Fletcher Christian's band of mutineers had colonized (using kidnapped women as breedstock) after taking over Bligh's merchant vessel, the Bounty, in that famous mutiny that Hollywood couldn't get enough of. Their descendants still live on Pitcairn today. They are extremely wary of strangers. In order to get permission to land on Pitcairn, Souhami creates several false impressions even as she judges the 18th century mutineers to be rabid liars whose falsities led to devastating consequences. Then, on a quai in Auckland where Souhami waits to board the ship that will take her to the island, one of the great characters in modern travel writing makes her unlikely entrance, fourteen trunks in all. This is the exasperating and overtly blonde, emotionally "out there," adventure-loving, fiftysomething former repertory actress turned jet set Londoner called Lady Myre. An original and first-rate comic character on the order of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell. If she isn't the