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    Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific
    Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific
    Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific
    Ebook324 pages5 hours

    Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific

    By Will Randall

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Who hasn't fantasized about dismantling his or her hassled, wired-up life for a simpler existence? Yet who among us has the will and opportunity to do it? The answer, of course, is very few.

    Will Randall, a young English schoolmaster, had such a chance -- and took it. He uprooted his conventional First World life and let himself be blown to one of the farthest and most beautiful corners of the earth, the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. In the entertaining tradition of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, this is the story of Solomon Time.

    From the first, it's an improbable journey. In a chance encounter on a rugby field, Randall meets a doddering old man known as "the Commander," who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later, the Commander dies and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his beloved, long-missed island -- where his plantation has fallen into ruin -- and devise a way for the natives to support themselves. If successful, they might avoid poverty, build a new school, and even fend off the greedy developers circling their peaceful waters.

    It's a mission of noblesse oblige, yet possibly a fool's errand, too. Randall agrees to go.

    Spread across the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands are not so much the Pacific archipelago that time forgot as the one that forgets time. Randall's new home is Mendali, a fishing village so remote it can be reached only by motorized canoe. But the people of the village, some with cheeks engraved with a rising sun, are welcoming, for they remember the Commander kindly, and still practice a pagan Anglicanism in a church he built for them in 1956. They sleep in houses made of leaves and live on fish of every sort, mud crabs, yams, ngali nuts, even the honeycomb of termites.

    Randall decides that the villagers could raise chickens, and they greet the idea with enthusiasm. But finding live chicken eggs in their watery world proves wildly difficult, and Randall must chase after the eggs over shark-infested seas and through jungles where strange characters reside, including a one-eyed dwarf and a tattooed lady.

    One couldn't imagine a better man than Will Randall to help the people of Mendali meet the twenty-first century on their own terms. But will he succeed?

    Solomon Time is a moving and witty account of one man's accidental adventure in paradise and is certain to enchant explorers and armchair travelers alike.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateNov 1, 2007
    ISBN9781416593218
    Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific

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    Reviews for Solomon Time

    4/5

    23 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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...
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Solomon Time - Will Randall

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