THE WAYFINDER, by Adam Johnson
Some novelists return again and again to the same patch of ground and the same set of moral or emotional concerns, excavating a little deeper each time and finding virtue, nuance and richness in their self-imposed constraints. We might think of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Elizabeth’s Strout’s small-town Maine or Richard Ford’s suburban New Jersey: places that may seem ordinary or even dull, but actually contain multitudes.
The novelist Adam Johnson is not a writer of that doggedly persistent kind. In fact, quite the opposite. What makes his writing distinctive is not its sameness but rather its range and variety. “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, follows a North Korean man struggling to survive amid the cruelty and madness of a modern totalitarian regime. The 2015 collection “Fortune Smiles” includes stories set in East Germany, Seoul, Louisiana and a near-future Silicon Valley. Now, in his hugely ambitious new novel, “The Wayfinder,” Johnson takes the reader to the scattered islands of the South Pacific to tell the story of an ancient Tongan maritime empire and its discontents.
At the center of his tale are two radically different communities. The novel opens on Manumotu, a remote and environmentally degraded island where the inhabitants are struggling to feed themselves after decades of overhunting and overfishing. Although their culture has strong ethical values — emphasizing nonviolence and a willingness to talk through any problem — the people of Manumotu are beset by self-doubt and inertia. They know they need to move elsewhere but lack the self-confidence and know-how to build a suitable craft or navigate to a new home.
The other group is the Tongan royal family and their entourage, based on the island of Tongatapu and led by an ailing king known as the Tu‘itonga, a man who possesses immense military and political power. He compels his subjects and the inhabitants of other islands to pay regular tribute in the form of food and other resources. As a result of this long-running extortion racket, the Tongan royal family is extremely wealthy but also widely hated. The Tongans maintain their status by waging an endless bloody war with their Fisian (or Fijian) neighbors, while cultivating, closer to home, a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness.
In the first chapter of “The Wayfinder,” these two very different ways of thinking and living collide when the people of Manumotu, a place so isolated that most of them have forgotten the word for “stranger,” are astonished by the arrival of two of the Tongan king’s three sons — the Wayfinder of the novel’s title and Finau, his younger brother. After this meeting, and the mutual misunderstandings that it provokes, the novel divides.
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The post An Epic Quest in the South Pacific, Drawn From History and Myth appeared first on New York Times.
