Lost Island

Readers will need to have some awareness of Nordhoff and Hall's (and just Hall's) other works to get the full meaning of Lost Island. In particular, it helps to have read The Hurricane. For in Lost Island, Hall all but makes it specifically clear that the reason for the obliteration of the island being turned over to the US Navy is that a hurricane of war and the machine age is doing what nature itself could never do--scrape the island into a flat barren aircraft carrier made of sand and coral.

Other parallels also occur. Father Vincent is easily a somewhat updated version of Father Paul from The Hurricane. Both priests make the building of their churches a lifetime project. And they also both indulge in the creation of an almost magical show more garden--in both cases the priests import volcanic soil to the Low Islands where they can then grow fruit trees.

Hall had made clear in earlier works that he detested the automobile and the machine age. He was a romantic who never really accepted the twentieth century, preferring to live with the ideals and imagery of the late nineteenth century. And of course his exile to Tahiti was the one place where he could most closely recreate that anti-modern universe of the earlier century.

More than a couple of times in the book, Hall speculates about what life will be like for Polynesians in the twenty-first century, mentioning 2012 specifically. If only he could have known. Hall died in 1951. And now his Tahiti, and the Polynesia of the early post World War II years, looks appealing to readers as a time unsullied by the new technologies that have shrunk the globe into one cramped, over crowded electronic village. show less

A beautiful, sad, poignant tale told in an older style that I love - one where the main character sits down for a "fireside chat" with two long-time friends and spools out his narrative.

The beauty of the South Pacific shines in this story, not surprisingly, as it is written by one of the novelists responsible for Mutiny on the Bounty, another amazing yarn.

Highly recommend to lovers of classic literature and the gorgeous Polynesian islands and their peoples.

This is a story well before its time. Written in the middle of World War II, it tells the story of America tearing down a beautiful tropical island, moving its people to another island, and pouring concrete all over it to create an air strip and ship yard. As I said this book is ahead of its time (1942).

I have not read it all, but it seems rather bitter account of the corruption of a traditional island culture by an American military base during World War II. The focus is more on the island society than on the war.

157. Lost Island, by James Norman Hall (read 27 July 1944) This book was a part of the dual selection of the Book of the Month Club for June, 1944. It is a short novel and when I read it I was disappointed and said it was as poor a book as Fair Stood the Wind for France, which was the other part of the BOMC June 1944 selection, and which I had finished reading on July 9, 1944.