The Alternative

by John Saunana

Genres: The World, Fiction

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

John Selwyn Saunana (1945 - 2013) was a Solomon Islands writer.

Reviews

[Leslie (updates on SG) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A readable fable for my Around-the-World reading challenge (Solomon Islands). It was interesting to see how the promising "native" Maduru finds his place in society after his fall from grace, but the ending surprised me. I also wish Saunana provided more description of the culture; including translations of the Arosi dialogue would have helped.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solomon Islands

"Among the things which made his life more pleasant were the friendships he made."

"He was beginning to see that neither his quest for the white man's way of living nor that of his society, as lived by his ancestors and handed down through generations, could provide the "Heaven on Earth" he sought and had expected to inherit by simply going to the white man's school."

"Looking down, his eyes caught his changing reflection in the foam flecked water, and it seemed to be beckoning him to follow it to the distant horizon, beyond the sea and the world and the unknown."

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Global Read 161- The Solomon Islands

I was a little disappointed this was really my only option for The Solomon Islands. It was a short and somewhat shallow book. It was fine.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review is also published on my blog, Around the World in 2000 Books.

This is the confused and confusing story of Maduru Buru, a Solomon Islands schoolboy expelled from his selective boarding school ("the Eton of the Pacific") for organizing a student protest, ends up unemployed, and then drunkenly stumbles into fomenting an independence movement. Maduru's characterization is inconsistent to the point that I got to the last page of the book without being certain whether he was supposed to be a hero, anti-hero, or cautionary tale. On balance I guess we were supposed to be rooting for him, but he's a tough character to root for: misogynistic, arrogant, and vindictive. Of course, these could all be accidents of storytelling, for the author doesn't really seem to have thought much about what Maduru is like as a person. He's a loner and an outcast, but also the best soccer player in the school, and able to lead most of the student body on a walk-out that could have disastrous consequences for their future careers. When he returns to his village from primary school, his neighbors despise him for his arrogance and his exaltation of European values; yet when he heads off to boarding school at the end of the holidays they love him and are sad to see him go.
Mostly I think we are supposed to root for Maduru as a sort of Solomon Islands freedom fighter, but all of his resistance is either accidental or motivated by petty reasons. His school rebellion is sparked by his refusal to apologize to the headmaster's wife; he doesn't want to apologize to her because she's a woman, and it is beneath his dignity to apologize to a woman. It is a failing of European culture, the narrator implies, that women are treated with respect or even reverence (whether European women are so treated is a debate for another time, but Maduru is very clear that equality of the sexes is not something for which to strive). Later, Maduru organizes a student walk-out in his prestigious prep school, an action which is portrayed as an instance of native solidarity against European imperialism. But Maduru is solely motivated by his dislike for one of his teachers; he has little thought of fighting cultural imperialism, he just wants to get the guy fired. Similarly, after he's expelled from school, when he organizes a sit-in in a segregated bar, his anger is mostly motivated by the fact that he was arrested in the bar for drunkenly breaking shit and puking in a trash can. As revolutions go, it's not terribly high-ideal. And at the very end, when he reluctantly agrees to run for public office, his reluctance is not motivated by any sense of honor or unworthiness--it's just that he wants to be able to hang around drinking with his unemployed friends and he's afraid he won't have time to do that once he's involved in politics.
Now, it sounds like this could be a clever social satire, a vicious look at the roots of the Solomon Islands independence movement, and perhaps an argument against home rule. But it's not. If you don't want to read the novel to find out for yourself (and believe me, you don't), you'll just have to take my word for it--that amount of thought has not gone into creating this novel. It's poorly constructed (there's a scene where Maduru meets up with a girl and has sex in the woods in the middle of the night; I kept waiting for it to tie into the story in some way, for the girl to reappear or for there to be some consequences, or at least some other romantic incident so that it was at least thematically relevant, but no, it never comes up again, nor does Maduru date anyone else or, apparently, think of the girl to whom he lost his virginity. It's like the author thought, well, first-time sex is important for a coming-of-age story, so I better stick it in. Or else it's to impress us with Maduru's prowess with women, his attitude toward girls as disposable even as he is getting off with them, and make us like him more...and I'm inclined to think that's it, but it's not something that works with the psychology of an American woman, or at least not this particular one, and it just made me a little bit disgusted with him). It's full of clichés; witness this speech by Maduru's elementary school headmaster to his wife: "Honey, I’ve got a real load on my plate this time…These damned boys are getting on my nerves. Fancy them trying to tell me how to run my school. Me of all people! Honey, I’m going to hit hard this time, and I mean hard. I won’t have my students mucking me around like this…And when it’s all over, I won’t be renewing my contract. The sooner we shake the dust of this place from our feet, the better. And back to good old London as soon as we can.” Again, it reads like satire, but honestly the whole book is like that. All the dialogue is stilted and hackneyed and the narrative isn't any better. And most of all, it's boring.

[K's Bognoter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hvis jeg skulle være høflig overfor salomonesiske John Saunanas roman The Alternative (1980), kunne jeg finde på at sige noget i retning af, at den er et interessant udtryk for sin tid og de rammebetingelser, den er skrevet under. Jeg kunne også bare være ærlig og sige ligeud, at den er røvkedelig og ubehjælpsomt skrevet. At den virker som dét, den er, nemlig det første forsøg på at skrive en roman i et land uden nogen som helst litterær romantradition.

Læs hele anmeldelsen her: http://bognoter.dk/2016/04/02/john-sa...