This extraordinary book consists of a collection of letters written by Asterisk (Robert Fletcher) to a friend in England. In them, Asterisk describes his arrival, in 1912, in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), where he sets up a residence for the next seven years. Asterisk's revelations are frank and brutally honest. He exposes his own failures and frustrations. He even opens himself up to self rebuke for his taking of a native wife, having a son by her, and then abandoning them both, because he wants to return to civilization and fears they would not fit in.

Along the way, Asterisk describes his life as a surveyor. Once he is caught on a volcanic island that is erupting and is trapped between two streams of lava. He barely makes it out to sea to survive. He also tells of his life as a government translator, a plantation manager, and an owner. Trained as a physician, he further takes note of the disease among the natives and Europeans, especially dysentery, malaria, and assorted infections and fevers. All the while, Asterisk sinks further in despair, becoming filled with animosity towards all his fellow men and becoming a sort of unperson.

Only when Asterisk leaves the New Hebrides and his wife and son for Tahiti does he begin to recover. The book ends with his letters from 1920, and he has settled into a Tahitian paradise, full of color, benevolent solitude, and tranquility.

That is the picture. We do know more about Asterisk than these letters alone tell us. James Norman Hall, the American writer who lived for decades in Tahiti, went looking for Asterisk's house some years later. Hall remarked how only a remnant of clothing still existed in the dilapidated husk of a house. For despite the apparent happy ending of Isles of Illusion, Asterisk soon moved on from Tahiti. Eventually, he returned to England toward the end of the 1920s, where he became a school teacher. Before starting his grand adventure in 1912, he had held the same position in England. For all his craving for adventure and the idylls of the South Sea that Robert Louis Stevenson set going in him, he returned whence he came.

Asterisk never married. He died in 1965 at the age of 87, living in his sister's house, apparently alone, captured in his solitude once more. One only wonders if, towards the end, Asterisk looked back on his remarkable life and felt regret for what was lost to him--a native wife, a son, a family, a life in the tropics away from the civilization that both repelled and attracted him. It is a pity Asterisk failed to write more letters in the twilight of his life that would have let us know. When I think of this book, I will always imagine him a withered old man, stuffed away in a chair too big for him, secluded in the semi-darkness of his sister's Edwardian home. And maybe always looking back to the days of the ocean, the mountains, the lagoons, the colors, and, yes, the volcanic dust, the insects, heat, disease, and isolation. Was the sedate life in England really better?

A fascinating chapter, "Gone Native in Isles of Illusion In Search of Asterisk in Epi," about Asterisk was published by Michael Young in History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology. Written in 1992, Young not only discusses Asterisk's book at length, but he also tracked down his family during the 1980s. It is utterly fascinating to read and is available for free as an eBook at the University of California Press' website: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft509nb347&chunk.id=d0... ( )

My wife found this book somewhere -- an estate sale, library bookshop -- and read it. She said it was pretty interesting, so I checked it out. It originally appeared in 1923 in England. It's merely the letters that the author, Robert Fletcher, sent to his friend Bohun Lynch from the South Seas from 1912 to 1920. The book was very popular in the 20's in England, but then fell out of print until the writer Gavin Young was given a copy and convinced a publisher to print it again in 1986. It has since fallen out of print again and is pretty difficult to find.

Fletcher had been so intrigued by the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson of his home in Samoa that he decided he would just move there. So once there, he finds work on one of the islands in the New Hebrides, as it was called then; it is now part of the island group that makes up Vanuatu. He works on a copra plantation (essentially, they are harvesting the coconut oil from the palm trees) as a supervisor, but he also ends up doing a bit of doctoring (although his degree from Oxford was in chemistry) and occasionally acting as a midwife to the natives. His attitude about the islands, their climate, and the natives ranges from distaste to affection, depending on his mood and health, which can get pretty awful -- malaria and dysentery are frequent visitors.

Some of the few readers of this book are upset with what they see as racism, although Fletcher's feelings for the locals range from exasperation to empathy (true, his terminology for them is not for modern ears, but how he interacts with them clearly shows that he is not a racist -- to be fair, English authors of the 20's and 30's were overtly worse). He eventually takes a native woman and has a son with her; a boy that he dearly loves although he decries his half-breed nature.

Along the way there is an eruption of a volcano (on Ambrym in 1913) that he survives, encounters with Presbyterian missionaries, wild business schemes that come to nothing, and a lot of what daily life is like in the tropics. He often shares his philosophy with Bosun, as well as his constantly vacillating ideas about leaving or staying. The book acts as an antidote to any dewy-eyed visions of South Sea paradise. It's not a great book, but it is a fascinating look at what it was like to be an Englishman having "gone native" in Melanesia and Polynesia in the 1910's. ( )