Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson is subtitled Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island and the sub-title was the big draw for me. I have a particular soft spot for books about desert islands or those whose themes include living and surviving without civilisation.
A book composed of the sections dealing with daily life on an isolated island, on the author's responses to landscape, his underwater experiences and views on civilisation would have earned five stars. The actual book is a bit of a hybrid: part travelogue, part memoir, part fishing manual and, like the curate's egg, enjoyable in parts.
Unfortunately, the sub-title turned out to be somewhat misleading, or perhaps I took it too literally.There is a lot about life on a remote island, but there is also a section devoted to Manila (by all accounts a foul place) and Western reporting of events in the Philippines (by all accounts largely inaccurate), as well as long reminiscences about the author's childhood (largely boring for him and only mildly less so for this reader) as well as ruminations on the author's estrangement from his now dead father. This theme is clearly a painful ache for the author, but frankly struck me as being too personal to publish. Not because it unveils dark secrets or washes familiy linen in public, but because there's nothing specifically to interest someone who knows neither of the people concerned. So those bits bored me. A lot.
The other parts though were very good. There are marvellously unpretentious descriptions of the author living alone, first in a forest a mile from the nearest village, then on an uninhabited island in a bamboo hut with a palm leaf thatch. I love to imagine doing something similar and want as much detail as possible on this. I know I wouldn't last a minute with the fruit bats, biting centipedes that crawl over him in the night, the intestinal parasites (too much information there), no running water (in fact, no water at all) and all those things that go bump in the night.
Hamilton-Paterson though, is clearly made for solitude and his descriptions are quiet and lyrical. I particularly liked the old lady who was his nearest neighbour in the forest, who refused to move down to the village to be with her family because the artificial light there hurt her eyes. Instead, she collected phosphorescent moss and funghi in a jar to give off a faint luminous glow. After her death her abandoned hut glows in the dark because the rain has got in and the spores from the funghi are growing.
Once he moves to the island of Tiwarik, his obvious passion for the sea comes to the fore. Large parts of his time (and the book) are given over to fishing with a primitive spear gun and diving with a tube of air running off a compressor which on one occasion gives him hallucinations (and presumably could easily have killed him) when carbon monoxide fumes from the engine get mixed in. This is fascinating stuff and well handled. Hamilton-Paterson doesn't make himself out to have returned to the state of Rousseau's noble savage, and he is self-critical enough to question his own motives in trying to 'improve' the life of the nearby village by installing a better water supply and to question the ethics of his love of hunting and killing fish.
The most interesting passages for me (leaving aside the Robinson Crusoe moments) came towards the end when Hamilton-Paterson reflects on what his life could have been like if he had not given in to his wanderlust, on what his life is now (and in particular his freedom) and how he feels when he goes back to visit England.
"Later that night I am woken by water falling on my ribs. Outside is a steady downpour which the roofing of last year's fronds cannot entirely shed. .... I roll on the floor in search of a dry patch. In that half-awake state when one's eyes open onto black I wonder how many of my ex-classmates - now all in their forties - have to roll on the floor at night to avoid a leaking roof. What evidence of abject failure that would have seemed in those days had I known what the future held for me. I would have been at a complete loss to understand what kind of calamity could have overtaken me to bring about the forfeiture of my birthright to become a respectable and affluent middle-class Englishman."
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