Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific

Pleasant enough, humorous little account of a British schoolteacher who finds himself in a remote village of the Solomon Islands. The reader has to somewhat suspend belief, that the job of a kind of development officer was just offered to a man who barely knew where the place was, on the strength of an acquaintance with the previous man in charge, the Commander.
Entertaining, mildly amusing, the characters (and, indeed the narrator) all rather implausible comic personalities, but fairly readable, as our clueless teacher strives to think up a money-making scheme for the locals and decides on a chicken farm...

Imagine dropping everything in 1999 and moving to a remote island in the Solomon Islands? Oh and you are tasked with coming up with a project that will supply the people of that island with an income after you leave a year later.
And you are a British school teacher of foreign languages, and well......like it or not you are a fish out of water, and funny as well. If this describes you then you must be Will Randall the author of this book, Solomon Time. A dry British, very funny book about a man determined to help these islanders.

OK, so I guess I was a bit thick, expecting to read some kind of factual account of a guy going to live on a remote South Pacific island, but that was what I wanted. I'm unlikely to get to do it myself, so reading about someone else doing it was going to be the next best thing. Except that the more I read, the more it felt like fiction, with some dramatic/funny incidents feeling as though they had been dreamed up for the sake of entertaining literature. And rather stupidly reading the foreword last with its references to research I realised that was almost certainly the case.

It shouldn't matter - after all I believed less than 25% of Henri Charriere's supposedly factual "Papillon" but it's one of my favourite books. I've reached the show more conclusion that it's OK if it's gritty, but not quite so OK if it's more on the level of daytime telly or slapstick.

That said, there were some gems in amongst the text, the sort of thing I'd file under 'guilty pleasures', poking fun as they did at different nationalities. For example:

"...she was from the minuscule Lord Howe Atoll, Luaniua, which was so remote and so limited in its range of activities that there was nothing for people to do but tattoo each other"

or indeed:

"...people tended to be worryingly accepting of the various religious road shows that paddled around the islands. Every halfwitted, crackpot, dishonest, unscrupulous, hypoctitical and, more often than not, American church was in evidence..."

or my favourite, speaking of the old colonials inhabiting the Yacht Club:

"Fans feebly stirred an atmosphere of outdated exclusivity and wafted the smell of stale tobacco and narrow-mindedness over almost entirely white heads".

It wasn't an unenjoyable reading experience, but if wanted proper travel literature I'd probably look elsewhere. show less

Imagine dropping everything in 1999 and moving to a remote island in the Solomon Islands? Oh and you are tasked with coming up with a project that will supply the people of that island with an income after you leave a year later.
And you are a British school teacher of foreign languages, and well......like it or not you are a fish out of water, and funny as well. If this describes you then you must be Will Randall the author of this book, Solomon Time. A dry British, very funny book about a man determined to help these islanders.

Hapless young bureaucrat finds himself posted to the Solomon Islands where he quickly learns that trying to make things happen on a schedule is futile. Entertaining and humorous travel essay.