This was an unexpected treasure! Briefly, the plot concerns Mark, a closeted British gay man who discovers an affinity with Robert Louis Stevenson and the Bounty mutineers. An unexpected windfall gives him the chance to visit the South Seas; he soon falls in love with Samoa's beauty and its slow, sexy pace of life, and what he discovers there inspires him to start life afresh when he returns to England.

This may only be Clements' first novel, but he seems a born writer; he has a gift for striking, picturesque description which is perfectly suited to his subject matter - to pick a phrase at random, the beach at Lalomanu is described as "a gently shelving crescent of pure white powdery sand, fringed by huge palm trees that craned languid necks towards the water, the whole cradling a tranquil, translucent and absurdly blue sea". That word "absurdly" perfectly captures Mark's happy disbelief of the world he's just entered, and the reader would have to be made of stone not to be seduced by Clements' use of language. Mark's sexual awakening is also treated sympathetically and with considerable eroticism.

(I've only one complaint, and it's a minor one, namely that the proof-reader at GMP must have been on holiday when this was produced: simple errors of type-setting and spelling mistakes - "it's" for "its", "theirs" for "there's", an absence of commas at the necessary moment - sometimes provide a niggling distraction from the immediate impact of the prose.)

Overall, the lush descriptions, atmosphere and literary references flesh out the slight framework of the "novel of erotic awakening" to provide something really satisfying.

[Note: This review - my own - first appeared on Amazon.co.uk on 29.6.2004] ( )