to Dante and more obscure figures like Ibn Arabi or Mendes Pinto and ending surprisingly with the famous Australian painter Sydney Nolan, and our own Colin McCahon. Edmond’s prose, while astonishingly learned, is always lucid, readable and stylish. This is a magnificently broad sweeping account rather than a theory-maddened text, though plenty of theorising gets done en route. At times, I was reminded of the beginning of a Borges short story. As in, for example, this lovely sentence: ”It was said in Peru that the Inca Tupac Yupanqui had in 1480, with 20,000 men and a great fleet of balsa ships, sailed into the Pacific and found there black people, gold, brass and horses.” Note the prefix “It was said” – so Edmond offers the honesty of an account which legend may have embellished or exaggerated rather than guaranteed history. There is of course plenty of dyed in the wool world history but Edmond draws on myth, fable, hearsay, speculation and oddball New Age types like Blavatsky and James Churchward in giving us the full picture of Pacific speculation and exploration. One of the delights of reading this book is the encounter with a new idea. Eratosthenes, who lived in the third century BC, and who first accurately estimated the size of the earth is also, according to Edmond, given credit for the derived invention of the antipodes. The down under Other. The authoritative solemnity of Ptolemy’s world map, which was eventually proved wrong by Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage to India, reminds Edmond of the Surrealist map of the world. Naturally, Edmond, in his scholarly caution, does not accept any of the alleged sites for Atlantis, the most famous of all fabled lands (or continents) but makes the shrewd point that Plato was a philosopher who reasoned by analogy; and that the “truth or falsity of that tale is always subordinate to the point he is making”– which is a morality tale about corruption. There is an array of Greek/ Phoenician thinkers and navigators unknown to me (though no doubt known to scholars) such as Euhemerus, Eudoxus, Hippalus, Sataspes and Hanno. Bring it on, Martin! Later, Edmond gives full credit to numerous French explorers such as Nicholas Baudin who retrieved a boggling 200,000 specimens from Australia including over 2000 new animal species thus doubling those of the known world. Why aren’t such people better known? Has our history been too Anglophilic? Though Edmond never says so, that is an implication one might make. So we pass through the Land of Parrots (probably 90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM April 2010
the coastline of Brazil) and or Locach later Bocach (and many other names) which was possibly Cambodia or Thailand as Edmond slowly charts his way to present thinkers. Stephen Oppenheimer is one such who engages Edmond’s attention at some length. Oppenheimer makes us reconsider the origins of the Flood in various ways and advances the hypothesis that there may have been a city-based civilisation in South East Asia lost to ocean flood. Thus one might say Atlantis pops up in the Pacific. The fabled sunken continents of Lemuria and Mu are, as it were, replaced by the drowned conti-
The scope of Edmond’s survey is dazzling – from the epic of Gilgamesh to Ptolemy to Dante and more obscure figures like Ibn Arabi or Mendes Pinto and ending surprisingly with the famous Australian painter Sydney Nolan, and our own Colin McCahon
nents of Kerguelen and Zealandia. Which ever way you look at it, Edmond restores to us a wide polynational view of a world that is amazing, and that, as Jim Shepherd, of The New York Times, quoted on the dust jacket says, “demonstrates that the natural world is as splendiferous as any fable”. This is a book that invites more than one re-reading.
Lola
By Elizabeth Smither Penguin, $30 Elizabeth Smither is one of our most admired poets. And rightly or wrongly, I have previously viewed her as mainly a poet
and somewhat secondarily as a short story writer and novelist. This is in fact the first of her novels that I have read and if the others are as good as this one, this is an omission that I should speedily remedy. Thus said my initial statement is not altogether inaccurate, for the poet comes through in this novel very strongly. Lola begins with much panache and confidence by introducing to the reader many characters whose fuller charcterisation is only slowly leached, as it were, through the leisurely unfolding of the text. Though Lola is a person who cannot be said to have one foot in the grave, she has married into the firm of Dearborn and Zander, funeral directors. Undertaking, one might say, is a prominent part of her psyche. Ironically, or appropriately, she spends a lot of time nursing Alice Zander who is the unfortunate victim of a freak accident. Her eventual death is rendered with all the gentle sensitive poetic prose that Smither can effortlessly conjure up like an enchantment. Lola is like an Iris Murdock novel crossed with Marcel Proust plus an undertow of Jane Austen. In the first segment it is uncertain which country we are in for there are almost no geographic markers to guide us. My guess is Australia. Later, it is clear we are in an art deco Napier, not the rough port but a cultured provincial town that enjoys lashings of classical music provided by the Sylvester Quartet with which Lola, somewhat improbably, becomes involved as a sort of companion mascot, for she is not a musician. It is a tribute to Smither’s transmogrifying prose that she can make Australasia seem such a culture-saturated locale. Like Murdoch, the characters do not do much rolling around on beds; romance begins so subtly you almost miss its initial frisson and indeed you can’t really be sure it has actually started until Lola receives a kiss, a rather chaste osculation I suspect, on page 129. Here’s a typical passage that shows off Smither’s acute ability to analyse character as well as her rather coy reserve in describing any approach to intimacy; “Sam was very fond of Alice in the way that a sensuous ebullient man can find a reserved unflirtatious woman restful. Flirting had never been in Alice’s repertoire. She suspected she lacked it even as a girl; there was no sidling up to her stern father, no batting of eyelashes or performing little dance steps.” One could say that Smither’s characters do small dances around each other. A minuet, one might say, rather than a tango.