Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Michael Fitzgerald, Transit Lounge, $29.95.
This is an interesting premise: an examination of individuality and contrast that merges historical fact and contemporary fiction.
Italian painter Girolamo Nerli leaves Sydney by steamer for Samoa in 1892 to paint famous author Robert Louis Stevenson, known to the locals as Tusitala, ‘the teller of tales’. His goal was interesting: to capture something of the Hyde within Stevenson’s Jekyll.
Stevenson chose to die in Samoa. Nerli’s presence sets in train a disturbing sequence of events.
More than a century later, art historian Lewis Wakefield makes the same pilgrimage, in search of the story behind this portrait, leaving behind the medication that controls his bi-polar disorder and allowing him access to his own repressed feelings.
Meanwhile, dancer Teuila channels the spirit of Stevenson’s servant, her ancestor Sosimo, and explores her own duality as a fa’afafine, a Samoan identity that embodies both male and female traits.
There are factors at the core of Fitzgerald’s The Pacific Room, which is a scrutiny of individuality and dualism that combines contemporary fiction with historical fact.
A starting point is Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. From there Fitzgerald deftly creates characters that overlap plentiful private and public identicalness, both acknowledged and not accepted.
Fitzgerald’s debut novel is set against the lush backdrop of Samoa. His liberal use of imagery can get a little opaque sometimes, but this is a “…wonderfully stylish novel, dream-like and mesmeric…”
It’s both a ‘love letter to Samoa and a lush and tender exploration of artistic creation, of secret passions and merging dualities’.
To win one of three copies of this book, tell us the backdrop for The Pacific Room. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by next Monday, 10 September 2018. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column next week.
