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Playing With Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island
Import 1st Edition
296 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
James Hamilton-Paterson
45 books94 followersJames Hamilton-Paterson is a British poet, novelist, and one of the most private literary figures of his generation. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he began his career as a journalist before emerging as a novelist with a distinctive lyrical style. He gained early recognition for Gerontius, a Whitbread Award-winning novel, and went on to write Ghosts of Manila and America’s Boy, incisive works reflecting his deep engagement with the Philippines. His interests range widely, from history and science to aviation, as seen in Seven-Tenths and Empire of the Clouds. He also received praise for his darkly comic Gerald Samper trilogy. Hamilton-Paterson divides his time between Austria, Italy, and the Philippines and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 1, 2019
Alone on a Philippine island. Descriptions of the people and the landscape by the author in an autobiographical style
A gift of pure water for the community
Spearfishing as a way of life
Playing with water
James Hamilton-Paterson takes us to a time not so distant and a country so far away that few of us will ever experience it
Enjoy!
A gift of pure water for the community
Spearfishing as a way of life
Playing with water
James Hamilton-Paterson takes us to a time not so distant and a country so far away that few of us will ever experience it
Enjoy!
September 4, 2021
Life in the provices of the Philippines.
I live here and this novel is close to real life.
I live here and this novel is close to real life.
June 20, 2011
This book surprised me; I was expecting an interesting read but not a particularly poetic and insightful one. I really enjoyed the author's use of descriptive language about everything he turned his eye toward; his interior landscapes are as vivid as his external ones. None of what I'm saying tells you much about the book's contents, though. It mainly concerns the time he spent on an isolated island in the Phillipines, along with the people and ways of life he encountered there. I suppose one could throw in a reference to Robinson Crusoe here but that would be to miss the richness of the author's account.
This is the first time I've given 5 stars in a while and I'm going to search for more from him.
This is the first time I've given 5 stars in a while and I'm going to search for more from him.
December 10, 2009
One of the best accounts I've read of the Philippine marine life.
April 17, 2022
Second read - I will try to find time to write a review of this extraordinary book.
May 13, 2011
I really loved reading about his interactions with the local Filipinos and I truly enjoyed his observations about the culture. But I didn't care much for his own story and ended up skipping chunks throughout the book that weren't about the Philippines. Still, with a dearth of Philippine culture books out there, I'm grateful to Mr. Hamilton-Paterson for writing this.
April 11, 2026
I expected a novel about survival on a remote island, but although the author indeed lives alone on a small island, he's near a settlement on a larger one, and frequented by islanders. Moreover, a large part of the memoire takes place at the larger island, and there's even a short excursion to Manila. This means this is not a book on survival, but we do get a good share of Phillippine culture, of corruption and the problems and dreams of the very poor. These experiences are interlaced by youth memories, particularly on the author's troubled relationship with his father, and with passages on the landscapes of the mind.
There's also a great deal of spear-fishing and Hamilton-Paterson realizes his ambivalent stance to nature, admiring the still unspoiled coral life of his island, and killing its habitants for food at the same time. His moral stance becomes even more complicated when he deplores the devastation of explosion fishing by the local fishermen, while realizing that these disruptions are still peanuts when compared to the damage of the large fishing fleet of the more developed countries. And how can he condemn the local people, knowing that he can go back to a more comfortable place, while none of them have such a choice? The fishing adventures also provide the most horrifying passage of the book, when the author loses his mind in the deep due to nitrogen narcosis.
But apart from this passage the most striking aspect of this work is Hamilton-Paterson's poetic nature writing, evoking whole landscapes and his emotional reactions to them in beautiful language. There's also a great sense of loss: Hamilton-Paterson realizes all too well the unspoiled beauties he describes won't last. As he writes on p. 250 in Chapter 12:
"'After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,' Hopkins wrote of the cutting down of the poplars at Binsey, firmly in the English literary tradition which associates landscape with loss. But now from a very un-English landscape and with the sensation of hearing great sawings, bulldozings and demolitions borne on the wind from somewhere over the horizon, I pass on that disheartening thought to my bereft counterpart in fifty years' time as he contemplates beds of dead corals beneath a sea as empty of fish as the summer lanes of England will be of butterflies. It will always be too late for each generation to see all the previous generation saw."
And even without these inescapable events, in the end Hamilton-Paterson has to leave his island to go back to civilization, making his remote dwelling another landscape of the mind, which he virtuously shares with the reader, who at least can have a glimpse of the beauties of an unspoiled Philippine island.
There's also a great deal of spear-fishing and Hamilton-Paterson realizes his ambivalent stance to nature, admiring the still unspoiled coral life of his island, and killing its habitants for food at the same time. His moral stance becomes even more complicated when he deplores the devastation of explosion fishing by the local fishermen, while realizing that these disruptions are still peanuts when compared to the damage of the large fishing fleet of the more developed countries. And how can he condemn the local people, knowing that he can go back to a more comfortable place, while none of them have such a choice? The fishing adventures also provide the most horrifying passage of the book, when the author loses his mind in the deep due to nitrogen narcosis.
But apart from this passage the most striking aspect of this work is Hamilton-Paterson's poetic nature writing, evoking whole landscapes and his emotional reactions to them in beautiful language. There's also a great sense of loss: Hamilton-Paterson realizes all too well the unspoiled beauties he describes won't last. As he writes on p. 250 in Chapter 12:
"'After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,' Hopkins wrote of the cutting down of the poplars at Binsey, firmly in the English literary tradition which associates landscape with loss. But now from a very un-English landscape and with the sensation of hearing great sawings, bulldozings and demolitions borne on the wind from somewhere over the horizon, I pass on that disheartening thought to my bereft counterpart in fifty years' time as he contemplates beds of dead corals beneath a sea as empty of fish as the summer lanes of England will be of butterflies. It will always be too late for each generation to see all the previous generation saw."
And even without these inescapable events, in the end Hamilton-Paterson has to leave his island to go back to civilization, making his remote dwelling another landscape of the mind, which he virtuously shares with the reader, who at least can have a glimpse of the beauties of an unspoiled Philippine island.
June 9, 2019
A new find! I'm delighted to have found this author. and eager to move on to his books set in Tuscany. This is beautifully written and compelling to read.
January 21, 2012
As I'm writing a novel for NaNoWriMo I'm trying to put myself in the right frame of mind by reading non-fiction books that relate to some of the themes found in my novel. Island living is one of these themes and one of the books I've chosen to read is Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson.
This book is a memoir centred on the years that Hamilton-Paterson spent living on an island he calls Tiwarik off the coast of the Phillipines. It is an uninhabited island but one that is popular with youngsters from nearby villages as a place to play, camp and fish. Hamilton-Paterson finds a niche for himself in the local community, not least because he turns out to be an expert spear fisherman.
The author has a wonderful eye for detail and describes the underwater world beautifully, there is a particularly breathtaking sequence when he stays underwater almost too long and afterwards realises that the air he had been breathing had been tainted with oil, so his sightings became more and more dreamlike and surreal. He also meditates on the damage caused to the local ecology by the large ships that dynamite the coral reefs. He also is saddened by the fact that the local fishermen often use poisons and small amounts of explosives in their fishing, but realises that for them it is a matter of survival and making a few pennies at the local market. (Interestingly he doesn't seem to differentiate himself from the local spear fishermen, who use the most sustainable form of fishing, without reflecting that he made a choice to live there and kill those fish, while the local people have no choice if they are to stay in the area.)
He also ponders his early life (at first I had found these flashbacks annoying, because I thought that the book was meant to be a travel book, but later I realised how insightful they are).
Sadly since the book was written, the island of Tiwarik has been bought by a Japanese company and turned into a tourist resport.
This book is a memoir centred on the years that Hamilton-Paterson spent living on an island he calls Tiwarik off the coast of the Phillipines. It is an uninhabited island but one that is popular with youngsters from nearby villages as a place to play, camp and fish. Hamilton-Paterson finds a niche for himself in the local community, not least because he turns out to be an expert spear fisherman.
The author has a wonderful eye for detail and describes the underwater world beautifully, there is a particularly breathtaking sequence when he stays underwater almost too long and afterwards realises that the air he had been breathing had been tainted with oil, so his sightings became more and more dreamlike and surreal. He also meditates on the damage caused to the local ecology by the large ships that dynamite the coral reefs. He also is saddened by the fact that the local fishermen often use poisons and small amounts of explosives in their fishing, but realises that for them it is a matter of survival and making a few pennies at the local market. (Interestingly he doesn't seem to differentiate himself from the local spear fishermen, who use the most sustainable form of fishing, without reflecting that he made a choice to live there and kill those fish, while the local people have no choice if they are to stay in the area.)
He also ponders his early life (at first I had found these flashbacks annoying, because I thought that the book was meant to be a travel book, but later I realised how insightful they are).
Sadly since the book was written, the island of Tiwarik has been bought by a Japanese company and turned into a tourist resport.
July 8, 2016
I love James Hamilton-Paterson's descriptions of walking off his little island in the Philippines at night into the warm sea to spear fish in the dark.
His writing is wonderful. It's a pleasure to spend time in his head. That said, the book read slowly for me. A few passages and pages wandered, and I skimmed.
The reader does spend a lot of time in Hamilton-Paterson's head. There are people in the book but no full-fledged characters besides the author. That's because it's a book about solitude. A few years ago I read Tom Neale's An Island to Oneself: The Story of Six Years on a Desert Island. Neale's solitude was nearly as extreme as Robinson Crusoe's, hundreds (or thousands?) of miles from anyone or anywhere. Hamilton-Paterson is also on an island, usually by himself, but his Tiwarik is just off the Filipino mainland. He has his neighbors, some distance from them, and a great deal of distance from his native England.
This is my third Hamilton-Paterson and not my last.
His writing is wonderful. It's a pleasure to spend time in his head. That said, the book read slowly for me. A few passages and pages wandered, and I skimmed.
The reader does spend a lot of time in Hamilton-Paterson's head. There are people in the book but no full-fledged characters besides the author. That's because it's a book about solitude. A few years ago I read Tom Neale's An Island to Oneself: The Story of Six Years on a Desert Island. Neale's solitude was nearly as extreme as Robinson Crusoe's, hundreds (or thousands?) of miles from anyone or anywhere. Hamilton-Paterson is also on an island, usually by himself, but his Tiwarik is just off the Filipino mainland. He has his neighbors, some distance from them, and a great deal of distance from his native England.
This is my third Hamilton-Paterson and not my last.
April 14, 2014
Hamilton-Paterson spends part of every year living on an uninhabited island in the Philippines, spear-fishing for food and communing with the ocean. This is a book about why, and about the surrounding community. I'm not sure I ultimately cared that much about the why, but I will say this book contains some of the most lyrical, exquisite pieces of description I've read in my life. There were sentences and paragraphs I couldn't help but read over and over.
July 21, 2009
I recommend this book for anyone that wants a really beautifully written account of life for a foreigner living in the Philippines.
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July 27, 2011A really beautiful book.
December 5, 2015
Absolutely beautiful. Slow to start, but after the first chapter I settled into it. It's a LOT of description -- almost prose-poetry. I said 'beautiful' already, right? Beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews