Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific

by Will Randall

Book Overview

Who hasn't fantasized about dismantling his or her hassled, wired-up life for a simpler existence? Yet who among us has the will and opportunity to do it? The answer, of course, is very few. Will... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074324396X
• ISBN13: 9780743243964
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Beached Down Under

I fell in love with the Solomons during two visits in the mid-1980s. Will Randall has captured the spirit of the islands very well.... the casualness of the process, the friendships of the locals, the dubious expats who drift in and out. You will enjoy his British wit and laugh at his adventures and fellow islanders. A great holiday read, especially if in the tropics.

Brit in the solomons

As an american i found the book to be very intresting not only for the relaxing journey though the south pacific but also for Randall's british ways, Reading solomon time made me think of Will as Hugh Grant. The conversations with the islanders were very good , the desciptions of the island scenery and people was great and i feel like i came away knowing a remote village in a far flung corner of the map, which is always an indication of a good book.

Solomon Time: A modern treasure.

I was highly impressed with this terrifically real, but straightforward recital of events in really unusual circumstances. For example, the author did not editorialize on whether the village people working throughout the night to process their chickens, so they could obtain more material goods, was a good or bad thing. Likewise with the picture of them working in (I presume) a hot, smoky kitchen in Chicken Willys. As a typical capitalist American, I of course would have set up the same, but I also want to ask the author: Are these good people better off as they were, or after taking up the reins of commerce?This new author has real talent.

a volunteer in the Solomon Islands

This book tells the rather self-deprecatory tale of an English school teacher who becomes a volunteer in the Solomon Islands. A chance meeting with an ex-colonial identified as "the commander" sends Will Randall to Rendova Island in the Western Solomons with the vague intention of helping the local villagers create some sort of income-generating project. Randall's first weeks are spent acclimatizing to the slow pace of Solomons life, until a divemaster in nearby Munda suggests he help the villagers set up a chicken farm to supply meat to the local guest houses. Despite the ethnic conflicts raging in the capital Honiara, Will Randall manages with difficulty to locate the correct breeding hens, and Chicken Willy is soon dispensing fried fast food to one and all at Munda Market. Solomon Time is a case study of the naive Westerner in a tropical location who arrives to do good and stays to go native. It's appropriate reading for anyone considering doing something similar.

"It was quite acceptable to do nothing..."

Will Randall, though a high school teacher for ten years, is really just a kid--thirty-two years old, but still young in his attitudes and in his views of what life, and his own life, in particular, are all about. Unsophisticated and incurious, he has been content to let life happen to him. When his friend Charles suggests that he give up his job and go to the Solomon Islands for a year, he demurs, but Charles is an executor of the will of an Englishman known as the Commander, who has left money for the benefit of the islanders, if someone will go there to develop a reliable industry that will provide the villagers with income they can use for community improvements. Eventually, Randall finds himself agreeing to go, not making a decision so much as just going with the flow. Randall experiences a delayed coming of age on New Georgia Island, a process he documents in this good-humored tale, filled with delightful characters and observations about life in a community in which there is little change. Ingenuous and unambitious, he enjoys the lullaby rhythms of life in the tropics, but he eventually determines that raising chickens would both provide income and expand the limited diet of the villagers. Describing how he sets up this business, he also comments on village mores, including the cannibalism which existed until the early 20th century. He briefs the reader on the World War II history of the nearby island of Guadalcanal, retells the story of JFK and PT-109, which went down in the Solomon Islands, and describes his own personal disasters, mocking himself at one point, after he falls overboard in shark infested waters and watches as his motorized canoe continues on its way. Far more interested in telling a story than in contemplating his inner growth or making weighty observations about what he has learned, Randall pokes fun at himself and at the one or two "villains" he encounters with the chicken-business, and he concentrates on telling amusing episodes rather than developing any deep or universally meaningful conclusions. His decision to return to England comes suddenly, with no fanfare and even less explanation, and he offers few clues about what he has learned or why he has chosen this particular time to leave. Though the author is very entertaining, he sometimes mixes metaphors and similes into a colorful but almost incoherent jumble. At one point, he describes Honiara, the capital, as "the unsightly boil in the navel of the islands." In the next sentence, he says Honiara is "reminiscent of the cardboard set of a low-budget spaghetti Western," and describes it also as "slouching like a hungover vagrant against the foothills of Tandachehe Ridge." Despite such confusions in imagery, however, he succeeds in writing an enjoyable, good-natured, and often charming story which will amuse readers of all ages. Mary Whipple