In Old Tahiti, Paradise Sought and Truths Found

The experience known nowadays, in the strained language of political correctness, as an “encounter” is the subject of “World Elsewhere,” a first novel by Peter Brooks that lives up to the best aspects of the modern application of the word. Contemporary in its empathy, compassionate in its perspective and capacious in its ideas, this historical novel belongs both to the 18th and to the late-20th centuries. It is a rarity, a novel generated in the library that comes richly to life outside of it, a book that shimmers with sensuality, suspense and much genuine human feeling.

The encounter depicted by Brooks, a literary critic, took place in 1767 between French explorers and the native inhabitants of Tahiti. Based on primary source material, including actual accounts of exploration that the book imitates and supersedes, “World Elsewhere” is narrated by Prince Charles of Nassau-Siegen, a relatively inconsequential participant in the actual voyage, but a highly companionable and finally deeply touching cicerone in its retelling.

An aristocratic but penniless soldier, Charles is a young Parisian gadabout when we first meet him. He has been painted by Vigee-Lebrun and likened to a Boucher cherub. He alternates between two lovers. Though sybaritic and unfocused, Charles recognizes that he is not destined for a career in the boudoir. He longs for a wider knowledge of the world.

At the suggestion of his uncle, Charles joins the Boudeuse on a voyage to the South Pacific. The allure, for Charles, is “to see my own race in the strange mirror of primitive mankind.” “Our voyage should prove a mission of civilization . . .” Charles declares, “a means of spreading enlightenment and humanity across the globe.”

Our initial impression of Charles is that he suffers from a touch of sententiousness and with it a tendency to make overly explicit the themes that inhere in his journey--even these early and naively summarized ones. Some of this underlining is tonal in nature and comes from Charles’ point of view; he is writing in “the quiet evening of my life,” a time when he sees clearly the whole shape of his experience, especially as it was once informed by his “youthful ideals”; but some, doubtless, is due to the point of view of the author, who sees the shape of Charles’ experience with his own clarity, one that comes from an acute understanding of the consequences of these first encounters between “civilized” and “primitive” peoples.

As “World Elsewhere” progresses, its themes became more subtly integrated into its storytelling. While Charles is consistently aware that by discovering a real paradise in Tahiti, he is seeing firsthand the natural goodness hypothesized by his contemporary Jean Jacques Rousseau, it is the visceral way he partakes of and learns from this goodness that profoundly engages the reader.

Charles, who set off to spread enlightenment, instead becomes enlightened himself: He acquires knowledge through his senses; his love for a young girl, Ite; and his comprehension that while all human beings are “set on this earth with the same needs and wants and problems,” the Tahitians “understand the pursuit of happiness in an entirely different way.”

Utopian though the Tahitians are, through battle scars and human sacrifices they show their darker side to Charles, who nonetheless convincingly struggles with the idea of living out his life among them. In the debate surrounding this struggle, the clay of which the Tahitians are made is compared with the Europeans’ clay, which “has developed other desires”: to know, to investigate, to philosophize and to think of the future. Although we are aware of Charles’ fate from the beginning, it is a sign of Brooks’ considerable storytelling gift that we follow Charles eagerly, and with much sharply engaged feeling, as he faces his future and concludes poignantly that “the true paradises are perhaps only those we have already lost.”