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Reflections from the South Pacific
Jul. 17th, 2022 09:17 amI forgot to mention that I've finished reading Tales of the South Pacific. It continued to be a lot less cheerful than the musical, which makes sense, considering. The tale of Nellie and Emile was one of only two stories (along with the Christmas story, which isn't represented in the musical) that I'd count as happy, and both of those still contain their share of the dark threads that run through the rest of the book. I'm not sorry I read it, but I was glad to be done with it.
One of the interesting things about Tales of the South Pacific is that although each chapter is a separate story and mostly each of them has a different central character, there are characters who show up as supporting characters in multiple stories, and over the course of the book there are running plot and character arcs that emerge. And it's fascinating, in retrospect, that because the musical focused on a couple of mostly self-contained stories, with additional colour drawn from a few others, it doesn't include any of the book's most prominent characters. There's a character in the musical named William Harbison, but he doesn't bear any significant resemblance to the book's Bill Harbison (which might be just as well). Emile has a larger family in the book, including an adult daughter who appears in several stories (more than her father does) and is the love interest of the American engineer who is arguably the book's main character if it has one. She's not in the musical at all, and neither is her engineer.
An amusing epilogue was that a few days ago I got an email from an airline pitching holiday packages to exotic Pacific island destinations, and I was reading through it going "Why does the name of this island sound so familiar? ...oh, right."
One of the interesting things about Tales of the South Pacific is that although each chapter is a separate story and mostly each of them has a different central character, there are characters who show up as supporting characters in multiple stories, and over the course of the book there are running plot and character arcs that emerge. And it's fascinating, in retrospect, that because the musical focused on a couple of mostly self-contained stories, with additional colour drawn from a few others, it doesn't include any of the book's most prominent characters. There's a character in the musical named William Harbison, but he doesn't bear any significant resemblance to the book's Bill Harbison (which might be just as well). Emile has a larger family in the book, including an adult daughter who appears in several stories (more than her father does) and is the love interest of the American engineer who is arguably the book's main character if it has one. She's not in the musical at all, and neither is her engineer.
An amusing epilogue was that a few days ago I got an email from an airline pitching holiday packages to exotic Pacific island destinations, and I was reading through it going "Why does the name of this island sound so familiar? ...oh, right."
