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In 1975 I worked in Burma and lived, for the first six months at least, in Rangoon's Inya Lake Hotel which, together with the Strand Hotel, was one of Rangoon's two luxury hotels. However, Burma, being then the most isolated country in South-East Asia, allowed us no access to Western goods, Western food or Western books, and so my employers, TOTAL-Compagnie Française des Pétroles, sent me on a shopping trip to Singapore.
Knowing nothing about Singapore, I had booked myself into a hotel also called the Strand which I assumed to be of a similar standard to Rangoon's. Today's website certainly suggests that it has received a major make-over but back then it was a real dive in what was a very unsanitary Bencoolen Street.
I spent my evenings along Singapore's famous (or then infamous) Bugis Street which was just around the corner ...
... and my days inside the MPH Bookshop (which these days no longer exists except online) where I became acquainted with W. Somerset Maugham's Short Stories, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the large collection of James A. Michener's novels.
James Michener's novel The Drifters became my much-loved and much-read 'Bible' during those footloose and fancy-free years, and I completely fell under its spell. The novel follows six young characters from diverse backgrounds and various countries as their paths meet and they travel together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique: Joe, a disenfranchised twenty-year-old youth who is enrolled at the University of California during the Vietnam War; Britta, an 18-year-old girl from Tromsø, Norway; Monica who lives with her father in the African Republic of Vwarda; Cato, the son of the Reverend Claypool Jackson; Yigal, the son of a dean at a college in Haifa, Israel; and Gretchen, a very intelligent girl from Boston who, at the age of 19, has already completed her bachelors degree, and is working for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign.
The story is told from the perspective of the narrator, George Fairbanks, who is an investment analyst for the fictional company World Mutual Bank in Switzerland. Mr. Fairbanks is connected with nearly every character in some way, and they all seem to open up to him throughout the novel in one way or another.
Strangely, I didn't identify with any of the young people but with Harvey Holt, who is introduced only in the ninth chapter. He works as a technical representative on radars in remote locations. He is an old friend of Mr. Fairbanks, and has been everywhere from Afghanistan to Sumatra to Thailand. He is a fan of classical music and old movies and very old-fashioned. Enough said?
I dread to think that today I should perhaps identify with Britta's father who was a radio operator during the war whose mission it was to alert the Allies to the arrival of German ships in Norway, and who dreams of going to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) once the war is over. As Britta grows up she watches her father endlessly listening to Georges Bizet's The Pearl Fishers during the endless arctic nights while his dream slowly fades into a distant vision never to be realised. I don't even like Georges Bizet's The Pearl Fishers! Carmen yes; The Pearl Fishers no!
Fifty years later I only marvel at Michener's genius in having made me once enjoy a 700-plus page book about a group of unlikeable characters who no longer resonate with me. I guess the permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality, and the permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality. Perhaps Michener's message is that once we cease to dream, it is simply time for us to die.
