Product Description

Echoing the experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson - who spent several years in the South Pacific - here is the story of a contemporary writer who lived in and came to love the Solomon Islands. Most unexpectedly, Will Randall, once a happy schoolteacher, found himself dispatched to a small village on a not very large island, far out in the vastness of the South Pacific. His mission (although he had hardly chosen to accept it): - to fulfil the dying wishes of the 'Commander' and help the local people set up a money-making community project. The Solomon Islands, islands lost in time - Solomon Time; these little gems of land scattered across the ocean, must be the last sanctuary on our shrivelled planet not yet overshadowed by the Golden Arches or encapsulated in a Coca-Cola bubble. Everyone has dreamed at some time of living on a desert island. Here is the unvarnished truth. Sharks, turtles, a band of unruly chickens, a cast of extraordinary characters, and a bird called the Spangled Drongo, accompany Will Randall through some of the most fascinating and certainly funniest scenes to be found in travel writing since Gerald Durrell.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97340 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'Immensely likeable.' OBSERVER 'offers plenty of pleasures.' SUNDAY TIMES

Will Randall, an inept 30-ish schoolteacher whose lack of life ambition has reached worrying proportions, chucked it all to revive the fortunes of a village in the Solomon Islands. He found himself appointed a one-man Raleigh project by an accident of bad courtship, a dodgy war veteran's will and general spinelessness, and this is the story of how it went. After an overly involved prelude we understand that Will doesn't really want to go to the Solomons. It's just he cannot think of a good reason not to. With tongue set firmly in cheek, his efforts to understand and then help the Solomon Islanders are the point of the book. On the way we get a breezy and thoroughly unscientific lesson in cultural anthropology that is as much about Will's coming-of-middle-age as it is about understanding the strange and Pidgin habits of the Solomons. Apart from trying too hard to do Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson in a fumbling middle-England accent, Randall doesn't do badly. There is incident aplenty, reams of onomatopoeically accented dialogue, and a seemingly endless supply of cultural stereotypes to exploit, ensuring a fair mix of delight, exploration and incredulity. (Kirkus UK)

An English schoolteacher describes his year in the Solomon Islands on a development project. After ten years of teaching French and German to unmotivated students in the West Country, Randall was handed an adventure. A man known as "the Commander" had died; the executors of his estate were looking for someone to travel to his former coconut and cocoa plantation on the Solomon Islands. It had fallen into disrepair, and Randall was hired to come up with a project that would provide income for the villagers to use on community improvements. When he arrives on Mendali, a fishing village reachable only by canoe, he is immediately exposed to "Solomon time . . . a fluid that cannot be contained, that has no master, that sloshes backward and forward and even from side to side . . . schedules and timetables become irrelevancies." What follows is that welcome rarity, a travelogue that does not mock or belittle the locals. Randall is painfully aware that his "mission" is paternalistic and that the Commander was a remnant of the Colonial past. No matter: he sets about learning how to speak Pijin ("Goodfella mornen long yu. Yu oraet?" means "Good morning. Are you well?"), how to paddle a canoe (with disastrous results), and how to fit into his new home. For the development project, Randall and the villagers decide to raise chickens. Several amusing episodes later, the residents open a fast-food stand in the local market and eventually an outlet in town ("Chicken Willy's-Nambawan Nice One"). The resulting funds allow repairs to the church and the installation of a new rainwater tank, among other things. Along the way, the talented Randall writes compellingly of the landscape and the culture, throwing in excerpts from Robinson Crusoe and Robert Louis Stevenson's In the South Seas. A wonderful story and a rare treat for the armchair traveler. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Echoing the experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson - who spent several years in the South Pacific - here is the story of a contemporary writer who lived in and came to love the Solomon Islands. Most unexpectedly, Will Randall, once a happy schoolteacher, found himself dispatched to a small village on a not very large island, far out in the vastness of the South Pacific. His mission (although he had hardly chosen to accept it): - to fulfil the dying wishes of the 'Commander' and help the local people set up a money-making community project. The Solomon Islands, islands lost in time - Solomon Time; these little gems of land scattered across the ocean, must be the last sanctuary on our shrivelled planet not yet overshadowed by the Golden Arches or encapsulated in a Coca-Cola bubble. Everyone has dreamed at some time of living on a desert island. Here is the unvarnished truth. Sharks, turtles, a band of unruly chickens, a cast of extraordinary characters, and a bird called the Spangled Drongo, accompany Will Randall through some of the most fascinating and certainly funniest scenes to be found in travel writing since Gerald Durrell.

About the Author
Will Randall is a schoolteacher and writer who is currently working in India on his second book.

Customer Reviews

Chicken feed and coconuts!
Posh English teacher, Will Randall finds himself handing in his resignation to continue the legacy left by a friends eccentric commander friend, where his mission is to help set up a profitable business for the local people in the idyllic distant Solomon islands.
Will reluctantly accepts the challenge with no idea of the extent of the changes that he is about to encounter living the slow paced life on the South Sea Islands.

With a relatively unknown tropical back drop, Will relates his story through his reserved English eyes, as he struggles with rinsing the rat race from his skin and replacing it with coconut oil and chicken feed...

The Solomon Islands are a beautiful subject and Will's obscure task is an unusual tale. It left me pining to learn to sail, get myself a boat and explore the desert islands, maybe following the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson's, Robinson Crusoe, and more recently, Will Randall, but it is one of the few areas barely touched by tourists, so it would be a shame to spoil it.

An uplifting, light read.

Lovely
Solomon Time is a truly brilliant story. The real life adventures of Will Randall, and his quest on the Solomon Islands is fantastic. Its a book that makes you feel warm, there's nothing too complex or that special, but that's the point. Its not a novel, its just apiece of writing, but is truly gripping, i could not put it down. It also has many points of laughter and comedy within it.

WARMING & RELAXING

"It was quite acceptable to do nothing..."
Will Randall, though a high school teacher for ten years, is really just a kid--thirty-two years old, but still young in his attitudes and in his views of what life, and his own life, in particular, are all about. Unsophisticated and incurious, he has been content to let life happen to him. When his friend Charles suggests that he give up his job and go to the Solomon Islands for a year, he demurs, but Charles is an executor of the will of a man known as the Commander, who has left money for the benefit of the islanders, if someone will go there to develop a reliable industry that will provide the villagers with income they can use for community improvements. Eventually, Randall finds himself agreeing to go, not making a decision so much as just going with the flow.

Randall experiences a delayed coming of age on New Georgia Island, a process he documents in this good-humored tale, filled with delightful characters and observations about life in a community in which there is little change. Ingenuous and unambitious, he enjoys the lullaby rhythms of life in the tropics, but he eventually determines that raising chickens would both provide income and expand the limited diet of the villagers. Describing how he sets up this business, he also comments on village mores, including the cannibalism which existed until the early 20th century. He briefs the reader on the World War II history of the nearby island of Guadalcanal, retells the story of JFK and PT-109, which went down in the Solomon Islands, and describes his own personal disasters, mocking himself at one point, after he falls overboard in shark infested waters and watches as his motorized canoe continues on its way.

Far more interested in telling a story than in contemplating his inner growth or making weighty observations about what he has learned, Randall pokes fun at himself and at the one or two "villains" he encounters with the chicken-business, and he concentrates on telling amusing episodes rather than developing any deep or universally meaningful conclusions. His decision to return to England comes suddenly, with no fanfare and even less explanation, and he offers few clues about what he has learned or why he has chosen this particular time to leave.

Though the author is very entertaining, he sometimes mixes metaphors and similes into a colorful but almost incoherent jumble. At one point, he describes Honiara, the capital, as "the unsightly boil in the navel of the islands." In the next sentence, he says Honiara is "reminiscent of the cardboard set of a low-budget spaghetti Western," and describes it also as "slouching like a hungover vagrant against the foothills of Tandachehe Ridge." Despite such confusions in imagery, however, he succeeds in writing an enjoyable, good-natured, and often charming story which will amuse readers of all ages. Mary Whipple