Product Description

On his way home from a remote Pacific island, Dr Saunders travels with two strangers: the treacherous Captain Nichols, and Fred, a handsome Australian with a shadowy past. Driven to shelter from a storm on the island of Banda, the trio meet good-natured Erik Christessen and his fiancee, the cool and beautiful Louise. A tense, exotic tale of love, jealousy, murder and suicide, which evolved from a passage in Maugham's earlier masterpiece, "The Moon and Sixpence".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #385301 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Back Cover
All this happened a good many years ago.'
This is the disclaiming first sentence of this sea tale par excellence which evolved from a passage in The Moon and Sixpence, written twelve years before.
On his way home from a remote Pacific island, Dr Saunders meets the treacherous Captain Nichols, who is carrying Fred Blake from Australia, where he has committed murder. Sheltering from a storm on the island of Kanda, the trio are befriended by the good-natured Erik Christessen. But once they encounter the cool and beautiful Louise, their story becomes one of love, jealousy, murder and suicide.

About the Author
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965

Customer Reviews

A touch of genius
Just finished reading this. I have always liked Maugham. He treats his readers with respect and intelligence. As he himself admitted, his output was of variable quality. At his best I believe he displays flashes of genius, whatever the disdain visited on him by the high priests of literary academe. This novel shows masterly construction and insight. It combines Maugham's characteristic wonderful touches of atmosphere and local colour with sagacious insights of character. As with many of Maugham's works, it treads a sometimes fine line between tragedy and melodrama, but in this case I feel he takes the palm. All the elements are so well worked out, the novel has the flavour of Euripidean tragedy, with Saunders (= Maugham?) the detached chorus - cynical on the surface, but the cynicism perhaps a defensive mask against the sensitive soul just beneath the surface. Well, Maugham would no doubt laugh at my analysis. Nevertheless, in my opinion one of the best of his novels I have read.

Maugham's usual very high standard.
The cover blurb gives an (understandably) simplistic over-view of the plot. The reason I say this is that Maugham's strength was his love of the complexities of human nature, and that is very much the theme of this novel set in the exotic Far East. Dr Saunders hitches a ride on a boat chartered by a thoroughly amoral rogue called Captain McNichols, and accompanied by a handsome young man called Fred Blake, who is fleeing from a dark scandal back in his native Sydney. On the small island of Kanda they meet an impossibly naive and idealistic Dane called Erik Christessen, who harbours a completely unrealistic love for Louise, a beautiful young woman living with her father in a remote part of the island.

What follows is an all-too-human tragedy when Louise falls for Fred, and Erik is unable to cope with the shattering of his illusion. Watching from the sidelines as all this unfolds is the not-so-loveable rogue Captain McNichols, and Dr Saunders, who, with his extreme pragmatism (apart from when there is a storm at sea and then the casual mask falls and he actually shows some emotion and fear), opium-addiction, and past shrouded in mystery, is perhaps the most intriguing character in the book. In fact Saunders acts almost as a sort of third-person narrator to the tale, and sometimes his calm acceptance and smug belief in his own emotional isolation from the rest of the human race can make him quite insufferable (think of the old Simon and Garfunkel song "I Am A Rock, I am An Island" and you get the idea).

Louise doesn't appear in the story quite as much as I thought she would do, but she isn't a mere plot-device. Maugham was good at writing about strong young women, and Louise is another in that mould. Some male writers would have been quite judgemental about her cool (though never callous) level-headedness, and her ability to see clearly through Erik's ideal of her, i.e in that he was putting the qualities of her beautiful and saintly mother, (whom he had also loved), onto her and expecting her to live up to them. Fred also is far more than the usual standard character of a young man fleeing from a dark deed. His explanation to Dr Saunders about what had really happened in Sydney is a complelling piece of narrative.

So the book has it all: adventure, (the descriptions of life at sea, and their discovery of the islands are superb), love, steamy passion, loads of mystery, plus intriguing characters, all done in masterly prose. And if you want more than that you must be very hard to please!