Reading – Part Three – The Michener Conundrum

By Anton Lang ~

I started to write about one of the big pleasures in my life, reading novels, back in May, and after two parts of what was going to be a series, I let it slip, but I have come back to it now to add this new part to that Series.

This is something that surprised me so much really, and the back story is why it was so surprising.

As a child, you’re not really much into reading, let alone novels. We had to do them for English Literature at High School, but other than that, it was something we had to do as boring old school ‘homework’, and it’s a very rare thing for children to actually start reading ….. for pleasure, and as a ten year old boy, and then into the teenage years at High School, well, I was one of those who only read novels only because they were that dreaded homework.

Our family moved to Queensland in late 1960 when I was just nine. As a family thing our Mother would take us to the movies to watch children’s movies, at the usual Matinees they had for families, no mean thing with five young children, and we would often sit, rapt, watching the ‘big screen’. (And Mum, looking back now, that was a very clever thing you did right there.)

Anyway, this one time, she took us along to see a Musical, and this one was the newly released South Pacific. I was now ten years old, and the eldest, so Mum told me about the background. She told me that it was an adaptation of James A Michener’s first novel, Tales Of The South Pacific, which he wrote in 1947, detailing his travels with the U.S. Navy near the end of the Second World War. She mentioned that he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this novel, and hey, Pulitzer Prize, what does that mean to a ten year old boy. So, as a young boy, I was pretty excited really, with Mum taking me to a genuine war movie.

Man, what a disappointment. All there was was singing and ‘stuff’. My two immediate younger sisters just loved the movie, as did Mum (naturally) but me, well that was it for me. No more Musicals on my horizon, if I had any say in it, and I made a pretty big mental note to myself. If ever (huh) I did begin to read fiction in the distant future, then if this was an example of Michener, then he would be one author I would avoid at all costs.

As an older teenager, aged around 16, I did get into reading, slowly at first, and occasionally, and I had a list of authors I would read, only occasionally branching off in another author’s direction. In 1986, I got right into reading, and I would read avidly, now surprised just how much pleasure it did give me. In book shops I was in, I would scan the shelves looking for something I thought I might like, and it was a rare thing for me to NOT find something that I liked as I read it. Those shelves were always packed with novels by James A Michener, and, harking back to that time as a young boy, I avoided those novels of his like the plague, even though a few of them had been made into very popular movies in fact.

In 1996, my good lady wife had a very serious health problem (with her Epilepsy) and I nearly ‘lost’ her. After six Months of fruitless and continuous tests, we were advised to travel the 500 miles to a Specialist Hospital in Sydney for an assessment to see if she could have what was then a relatively new operation, which has now become commonplace. She was there for almost five weeks, and luckily, I could ‘live in’ at one of the apartments they had for family members, and I spent each and every day at her bedside. For almost all of that time, she was ‘out to it’, wired up to a bank of machines to do the constant testing. All I could do was sit there by her side, and to pass the time, I read the three long novels I had brought with me for that express purpose. As it was, I finished reading them by the end of the third week. A day later they had to take her away for another round of tests for a couple of hours, so I had some ‘down time’ to myself and having nothing left to read, I walked the couple of miles into suburb close to the hospital, and found a book shop. I asked at the counter if I could spend an hour or so just looking for something, and they didn’t mind. I suppose I was still somewhat distracted, and I idly picked up a novel written by ….. James A Michener. It actually looked interesting, and the blurb on the cover mentioned that it was a ‘runaway best seller’. It was long, at around 1100 plus pages of finer print than nearly every other novel, so I thought, well, why not.

That novel was Chesapeake.

Once back at her bedside, I remembered that as a boy, I was not going to read Michener, and I thought, well, okay, it’ll pass the time, and if I don’t like, I had the other one to read.

I started it, and what a revelation. I actually couldn’t put it down. It was just so good, like nothing I had ever read before. This was Historical Fiction, with fictional characters carefully woven around actual events of the time setting. I read it almost constantly, in fact staying up till two in the morning still reading. It took me three days, and I couldn’t recall having read any novel at all in such a short time, especially one that long with such fine print.

Right then and there, I decided that when we got back home, I would try and get hold of everything I could that Michener wrote. What I found almost right from the start was that Michener did so much research into the actual historical events he wove his fictional characters into, and that research became more in depth with each novel he wrote.

When we did get home, with Barbara’s health situation partially resolved, something that became fully resolved a Month or two later, I started the ‘purchasing program’ for those Michener novels, and here’s where two strokes of real luck came into play.

The first was that while Michener had been in regular publication, the Mandarin Publishers had got hold of the rights to his novels and were publishing all of them, and the book shop I frequented most had a really good stock of them. (The first one I acquired, Chesapeake, was one of those Mandarins, and that’s the one shown at the image.) So, every second week, I purchased one of those Michener novels, until I had around fifteen or sixteen of them. Now, I didn’t read them immediately, but as every third novel I was reading at the time. I had gone through his list of novels that were listed on the inside front pages, and found what order he wrote them in, and I arranged them on my bookshelf from the earliest of them to the latest, and that’s the order I read them in. That was mainly to see how his ‘craft’ developed across the years. What I did find was that he had found a niche, Historical Fiction, with those fictional character in his novels woven around real Historical events, and that they were sweeping novels, some of them, spanning in some cases Centuries.

I must have read around six to eight of them, when, in October of 1997, Michener passed away, and in a wry situation, that was where my second stroke of luck came into play. Not long after he passed, those shelves full of his novels began to dwindle at a fairly rapid rate. I actually purchased another four of the ones I was missing before they disappeared altogether. I wondered at this, and asked the lady behind the counter, who knew me well, as a regular, and the bookshop was usually my first stop at the medium sized shopping mall we did our grocery shopping at on a weekly basis, and I asked her why they had vanished, and she told me that it was probably due to the distribution of royalties, obscure sounding I suppose. Mandarin were the most recent Publishers of his novels, and evidently a stop publication order had been placed on his novels. There was concern around the distribution of further royalties and where they would go, and to save legal problems, they just stopped publishing them. Stocks on the shelves could be depleted, but there were no more novels coming, no matter how many orders there might be, what with everyone now wanting to get hold of one of his novels. So, it was indeed quite fortunate that I had started to get hold of so many of his novels, because had I waited till later in life, the opportunity to read such wonderful fiction would have passed me by completely.

I had most of them, well most of what I wanted anyway, and I found another five of them in a second hand book store I also frequented fairly regularly. Oddly, on one of those occasions I was in that second hand book store, I found an old paperback of Tales Of The South Pacific, very old in fact, from the 50s, arriving in the most recent week from a deceased estate, and this was one of the few of his novels I did not get hold of, again harking back to that earlier time as a young boy. That was one of the last of his novels I did read, and I found that I was also wrong on that front as well. After reading it, I was puzzled that, with such a huge body of really good novels, this one was really average, and I couldn’t figure out why this, his first novel, won that Pulitzer Prize. I also found that the Musical movie was only ‘loosely’ based upon perhaps just three chapters in the novel.

The last few novels he wrote were not as good as the earlier ones either, I found, and while good, were not as good, if you see that point. All up, I suppose I would have read around 20 of his fictional novels, and in the main, they were all very good.

Many years later, I, umm, rationalised on my (now) huge collection of all my novels on one occasion when we moved home. Those novels now took around a dozen packing boxes to fill, so I made the decision to ‘thin out’ my collection divesting of more than 250 novels, and looking back now, in 2022, that was one thing I actually regret doing. There was a hard core of around a hundred of those novels I could just not bring myself to part with, and just three of them were Micheners.

Now living in Rockhampton, in 2015, I looked on the shelf for something to read, and even though I had read it before, I picked out Michener’s Chesapeake to read again. This was pretty much experimental, as having read it before, way back in 1996, almost twenty years earlier, I was thinking that it would not be as good, or that I would know what was coming next. That was not the case, as it was almost like reading it again for the first time. That was in February, and just after I started to read it, we went through the ‘drama’ of Tropical Cyclone Marcia. The power was out for almost seven days, and all we could do was sit outside under the shade of the back porch and listen to the radio, and read. And again, I finished that novel in four or five days.

Then, just back in May, I found I had slipped out of the habit of reading, and thinking how much pleasure it did give me, I picked up Michener’s novel Texas, even longer than Chesapeake, and also in a much finer print. And again now twenty five years since I read it that first time, this was also a revelation again, as I could not remember anything from that first reading, and this time around, I think that I picked up more than I did first time around. It was such a good book to read. What made it current at the time also was that Texas Governor Greg Abbott had only the year before launched his 1836 Project. Michener wove a lot of the early part of this novel around that time, The Mexican American war with General López de Santa Anna, The Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, and the formation of the Texas Republic. And also, over the intervening years since that first reading, a number of things had come into the news that he mentioned in that novel. And now then there was the fact of The Internet, something not available at the time of that first reading, and so, when I did read it in Michener’s novel, I could use a search engine to track down further information as well.

Our granddaughter visited during the time I was reading that, and she commented on some of the novels in my bookshelf, and that persuaded me to get right back into reading again. I have read around six novels in the time since then, and I have seven new ones still to read, and each novel is something new, and is in fact, a source of immense pleasure.

So, now, right back up that title, the Michener Conundrum.

All those years, I assiduously avoided Michener, based on something that was not the truth of the matter. I’m so glad I did finally get around to reading his novels.

Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.

 

Tagged: Authors, Fiction, James A Michener, Reading

Posted in: Australia, Book Review, Personal, Public Opinion