CBR16 Bingo: Détente – This book is all about all the different peoples and cultures that came to settle the Hawaiian Islands, and ends at the point that they really begin to comfortably and fairly coexist.
Hawaii is a beautiful place with a complicated history, having over the course of more than one thousand years been settled by many peoples from many places, all of which have wrestled over its lands and wealth and made their indelible mark.
This book is over a thousand pages long in print. I listened to the audiobook, which is more than fifty hours long. But it’s not the sort of book that one listens to continuously, but the kind that you must tackle in bits and pieces to really appreciate Michener’s interwoven narrative. I would binge-listen to maybe ten to fifteen hours over the course of a week, get burnt out, and not listen again until several weeks. In the end, I started this book in April, and finished in October.
I’m providing you with all this minutiae because this is a book that’s full of minutiae, and so it’s apt. On one level Michener tells a sweeping history of hundreds of thousands of people, but he does this by distilling his focus down to a few representative individuals of each wave of settlers, in whose lives we can see the movement of the times in which they lived. The good thing is that Michener generally sketches these protagonists are compelling, complicated people, so you enjoy being along for the ride, even if you don’t always like it. Yet at the same time, history is complicated, and Michener acknowledges this and doesn’t shy away from leaving the big questions unanswered.
Of course, in a book this big, it is hard to avoid clunky sections, and we certainly have that here, especially in the early parts of every time we get introduced to a new major character. I found myself rolling my eyes at the way Michener represented characters’ sexual lives sometimes. And I must admit that the little ‘twist’ at the end had me groaning- innovative in 1959 maybe, but it feels rather out of line with the lovely sweeping story that came before.