THE STORY
ISLANDS of the oceans – with their hedonism and supposed romance – have captured the
imagination of armchair travellers and wide-eyed visitors for more than a century. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island of 1883 remains the ultimate youthful adventure story. James Michener’s first book Tales of the South Pacific (with a spin-off Rodgers and Hammerstein musical) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Theirs was an innocent islands world.
Kenneth Bain has been writing, lecturing and broadcasting about islands and island
people for 50 years. He was born in one – New Zealand. He has worked or spent time in many of them – the South Pacific, South Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the West Indies. In the present day global village of worldwide instant communications and mass tourism, the nature and quality of island life have changed forever. We may be about to hear the dying voices of adulterated island cultures and societies; as the quest for survival assumes a new significance in an all-commercialised world and offshore finance centres proliferate. The spectre of money laundering, drug trafficking, poverty and corruption in public life seem inescapable as island King Canutes attempt to hold back the inexorable tide of progression, if not progress, in the new millennium.
In this book, Kenneth Bain turns, as did Michener, to the Caribbean. He writes about its
islands, not least Puerto Rico, which he first encountered in 1958; and again in the 1980s and the 1990s. His main theme is the British Virgin Islands, its people the kernel of his story. The BVI today is a resounding financial and commercial success, not typical of the contemporary Caribbean. Bain tells us why. He is once again a listener, a catalyst, an interpreter and at times a bewildered victim in a complex society. His approach is: let the people speak. Their thoughts and words are from all walks of life, old and young, leaders and the led. The result is an eclectic portrait of a Caribbean society with a distinct thread of rollicking fun throughout as serious
themes gradually emerge. Not least is the future constitutional status of the BVI and seven other British overseas territories currently under discussion between the British and dependency governments and people.
For the TREASURED ISLANDS of the title are not just the British Virgins and others of
the Caribbean region. Kenneth Bain sees them in the context of the varied island worlds in which he has lived and worked and of his own past writings. The threads of similarity and difference come together in response to the question of islandness: is there such a thing and, if so, what is it today? Illusion or elusion. A Caribbean island-hopping seven-day cruise or yacht charter will not tell you. But it will be a start – not least when you sail past Norman Island in the British Virgins and compare its appearance with Robert Louis Stevenson’s map of his Treasure Island. BVIslanders claim it was his model. Good. If they don’t, somewhere else will do so.
PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE:
There are three ways of tackling a book like this – if you hope to go on living among and remain welcome by those about whom you are writing. The first is to do so under a pseudonym, which may initially help but will in the end fool nobody. The second is to dress the whole thing up as a novel, place it in a fictitious if recognisable setting, give all the characters different names, change events a little so that nothing gratuitously libellous can be pinned on you, like Herman Wouk in his rumbustious Don’t Stop The Carnival…
The third course is the one I have chosen: to pin my flag to the mast and chart a passage through the BVI reefs and – as one BVIslander put it to me – through the minefield of BVI society. The risk element is high; but hopefully, I shall reach a safe anchorage without too much self-inflicted damage: a listener, catalyst and scribe for selected, often at random, BVI and other Treasured Island voices. Every now and then, I have changed course or mood with a ‘doggerel ditty,’ so as not to be too earnest.
Much of it is luck, of course, or coincidence. There will be a lead here, a comment there, a newspaper piece, an unexpected meeting, a perceptive observation overheard or a casual conversation that causes a writer to look further or to remember better or to go off in some unexpected direction. Inevitably there will be omissions; and, in choice, an element of the subjective where you are attempting an eclectic rather than a comprehensive account of the life and times of living people.
The pitfalls are clear and tricky. If you write about close-knit small island societies and think you can satisfy everyone, think again. You will undoubtedly fail an obstacle race you cannot win. You will undoubtedly fail an obstacle race you cannot win.......