These sea gypsies live an impoverished life, caught between brash tourist development on the one hand and unsympathetic border officials on the other. The particular feeling of their lives -- their illiteracy, their vulnerability to cheats who sell them crudely forged documents, their ambiguous position at the intersection of state boundaries -- does come across.
Yet when you've finished the book and ask yourself exactly what you've learnt, you realize that the book contains far less hard information about the sea gypsies' existence than you'd thought.
One point that the book does silently make is that these areas have more to unite them than to render them distinct. They are united by Islam (the sea gypsies of Thailand are invariably Muslims) and the Malay language even before they are linked by the presence of the migrant fishermen the book focuses on.
Several theories are aired about the origins of the Bajau (Bajo in Indonesia), the migrant people the author is particularly interested in. Were they Neolithic remnants who had taken to their boats in the face of rising water levels at the end of the last Ice Age? Are they related to the Bugis -- also known as sea gypsies? Was their heartland the islands immediately south of Singapore?
But perhaps they are just outcasts, as the book's title describes them, who took to the sea because there was no place for them on land.
It would be possible to find this book valuable if you shared the writer's interests and found yourself in the places he'd been to. As an evocation of the diverse areas he visits, however, it loses by covering too many places with only a tenuous thread to connect them.
Some people might enjoy this book, but most, I suspect, will conclude that life is short, and that there are too many genuinely wonderful books waiting to be read.
There are many classic travel books about life among isolated minorities. Wilfred Thesiger's The Marsh Arabs, about the tribes who inhabit an area in southern Iraq devastated by the Gulf War, and Gavin Maxwell's A Reed Shaken by the Wind on the same people, can stand as representative of the best of them.
It's when you think of classic titles like these that you know that books such as Hope's can't compete.
Publication Notes:
The Outcasts Of The Islands
By Sebastian Hope
285 Pages
Harpercollins
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