The best books are good in different ways. But weak books all share the same characteristic. They have difficulty raising sufficient interest for the reader to know how he or she has been let down.
Joseph Conrad published an early novel called An Outcast of the Islands in 1896. Though the islands in Sebastian Hope's The Outcasts of the Islands are the same ones Conrad refers to in his title -- the tropical islands of Southeast Asia -- the resemblance unfortunately ends there.
Hope's aim in this book is to understand the lives of the region's semi-nomadic boat people, or sea gypsies. He travels with one such family for the first third of the book, then visits other similar groupings.
The sea gypsies seem unassuming and good-natured people, as does the author. What the book lacks, however, is bite. After wading through this amalgam of travel journal entries and casual research, you long for a touch of the acidic aggression of a Paul Theroux. A couple of pages of his The Happy Isles of Oceania -- any two will do -- can be guaranteed to give more pleasure than this entire compilation.
The book is organized around three locations. In the first, the author makes friends with one of the itinerants, Sarani, and his family who fish the waters between Sabah on the northern coast of Borneo and Mindanao in the Philippines -- an area called the Sulu Archipelago. Many of their tragedies are preventable -- Sarani's young son, for instance, steps on a fish with poisonous spikes and dies of his wound. No modern medical treatment is available. The shadiest characters are the fish-bombers, with their beer bottles filled with white crystals and fuses they light with cigarettes.
After returning home to the UK, the author spends a winter in the provincial city of Bristol, living within sight of the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge.
But he can't stay away from the roving life so returns to Asia in search of more sea gypsies, this time in the waters off Thailand's Phuket and the southern coast of Burma. He gets caught up in the filming of The Beach, and for once raises a measure of enthusiasm in the reader when he decries the despoliation of the Phi Phi islands.
A third section sees the author in Indonesia (east Sumatra and southeast Sulawesi) and the region around Zamboanga in the southern Philippines. More sea gypsy settlements are discovered, visited and briefly described.
It remains the case that the book is marred by cliches and second-hand sentimentality. How often have you read of a Westerner who is initially treated with suspicion by remote Third World locals, only to be gradually embraced into their lives, with scenes of barely suppressed emotion when he leaves?
The author's version of this oft-told tale is that he embraced the old fisherman on whose boat he'd lived in silence and turned to walk away, past the dried fish, unable to look back. He'd next see him again three years later, and watch the joy in his eyes as he showed him the photos.
The book's very first paragraph ought to be sufficient warning. Hope begins with a pompous would-be aphorism -- "I know of no place in the world more conducive to introspection than a cheap hotel room in Asia." He ends it with a maudlin stab at nostalgia -- "In the hotel's dormitory, one night during a power cut, I saw Bartholomew's map of South East Asia for the first time. I was 18." That said, there are some modest virtues to be recorded.
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