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A review by archytas
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
3.0
There's a trend this century among non-fiction writers of using naivete as a writing style that is really starting to irritate me. The idea, I assume, is that a casual reader much prefers as a narrative companion someone as ignorant as themselves, a good bloke or lass, setting out to explore the topic from scratch. Often this naivete is a front, the writer actually knows the topic back-to-front, but occasionally, as in Horwitz' book, the faux-naivete covers a real-naivete which is stronger than it should be.
Lest this sound too harsh, this is a very readable book, which manages to transmit a large amount of information in an enjoyable and entertaining way. Horwitz admires Cook, and more, has a real sense of what it might have taken to spend your life as a 'South Seas Explorer', and his attempts to revisit Cook's island visits are used to inform that sense of wonder. This is very far from a bad book.
But Horwitz can't seem to completely decide between travelogue and history book, anecdote-driven comedy, or serious examination of cultural conflict. He might have gotten away with it better if he wasn't looking at a dozen cultures in the space of a single book, but as it is the result is a short summarised version of modern island and Australasian societies and their feelings about Cook. This complexity of these cultures is not only condensed to what-you-can-tell-from-a-to-day-visit, but heavily skewed towards the best anecdotes, giving the peoples described a somewhat cartoonish feel.
I mean, don't get me wrong, anyone whose visited Cooktown will appreciate how hilariously undeniable Horwitz' savage takedown of the town's annual festival is, but as the longest sequence in the book discussing Australia, it might not be entirely representative. Even in the region, while Horwitz visits Hopetown, he offhandedly dismisses the town's no-drinking rule as a relic of it's religious past, displayed a very real ignorance of the tense and complex discussions in Aboriginal communities about wet and dry rules.
And it is in Horwitz' beautifully transmitted confusion about everyone's ambivalence to Cook that the book most fails to reach great, or even very good. It is hardly surprising that a north American visiting the Pacific would fail to understand how loaded a symbol Cook has been, and would be simply surprised by the fact that no-one really wants to talk about him, but it is questionable that in spending more time on his own confusion than exploring the reasons, he is adding much to our understanding. Instead, the book takes on a slightly petulant tone, as if the peoples who have survived the last 200 years of wars, plague, disease, environmental devastation, and cultural destruction, and those whose societies were built through such means, are just too, well, uninterested in Cook to realise what a fascinating bloke he was.
And he as, indeed, a fascinating bloke. In that terrain, the book shines, restoring some of the intrepid explorer gloss, without splashing the gloss over what indigenous peoples experiences were. If modern peoples emerge as cartoons, their ancestors come to life with dignity and agency. I just really wish that complexity had been allowed for these modern societies as well, instead of the "people as viewed by drunk male tourists" we get.
Lest this sound too harsh, this is a very readable book, which manages to transmit a large amount of information in an enjoyable and entertaining way. Horwitz admires Cook, and more, has a real sense of what it might have taken to spend your life as a 'South Seas Explorer', and his attempts to revisit Cook's island visits are used to inform that sense of wonder. This is very far from a bad book.
But Horwitz can't seem to completely decide between travelogue and history book, anecdote-driven comedy, or serious examination of cultural conflict. He might have gotten away with it better if he wasn't looking at a dozen cultures in the space of a single book, but as it is the result is a short summarised version of modern island and Australasian societies and their feelings about Cook. This complexity of these cultures is not only condensed to what-you-can-tell-from-a-to-day-visit, but heavily skewed towards the best anecdotes, giving the peoples described a somewhat cartoonish feel.
I mean, don't get me wrong, anyone whose visited Cooktown will appreciate how hilariously undeniable Horwitz' savage takedown of the town's annual festival is, but as the longest sequence in the book discussing Australia, it might not be entirely representative. Even in the region, while Horwitz visits Hopetown, he offhandedly dismisses the town's no-drinking rule as a relic of it's religious past, displayed a very real ignorance of the tense and complex discussions in Aboriginal communities about wet and dry rules.
And it is in Horwitz' beautifully transmitted confusion about everyone's ambivalence to Cook that the book most fails to reach great, or even very good. It is hardly surprising that a north American visiting the Pacific would fail to understand how loaded a symbol Cook has been, and would be simply surprised by the fact that no-one really wants to talk about him, but it is questionable that in spending more time on his own confusion than exploring the reasons, he is adding much to our understanding. Instead, the book takes on a slightly petulant tone, as if the peoples who have survived the last 200 years of wars, plague, disease, environmental devastation, and cultural destruction, and those whose societies were built through such means, are just too, well, uninterested in Cook to realise what a fascinating bloke he was.
And he as, indeed, a fascinating bloke. In that terrain, the book shines, restoring some of the intrepid explorer gloss, without splashing the gloss over what indigenous peoples experiences were. If modern peoples emerge as cartoons, their ancestors come to life with dignity and agency. I just really wish that complexity had been allowed for these modern societies as well, instead of the "people as viewed by drunk male tourists" we get.