Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific

Who hasn't fantasized about dismantling his or her hassled, wired-up life for a simpler existence? Yet who among us has the will and opportunity to do it? The answer, of course, is very few.

Will Randall, a young English schoolmaster, had such a chance -- and took it. He uprooted his conventional First World life and let himself be blown to one of the farthest and most beautiful corners of the earth, the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. In the entertaining tradition of Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, this is the story of Solomon Time.

From the first, it's an improbable journey. In a chance encounter on a rugby field, Randall meets a doddering old man known as "the Commander," who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later, the Commander dies and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his beloved, long-missed island -- where his plantation has fallen into ruin -- and devise a way for the natives to support themselves. If successful, they might avoid poverty, build a new school, and even fend off the greedy developers circling their peaceful waters.

It's a mission of noblesse oblige, yet possibly a fool's errand, too. Randall agrees to go.

Spread across the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands are not so much the Pacific archipelago that time forgot as the one that forgets time. Randall's new home is Mendali, a fishing village so remote it can be reached only by motorized canoe. But the people of the village, some with cheeks engraved with a rising sun, are welcoming, for they remember the Commander kindly, and still practice a pagan Anglicanism in a church he built for them in 1956. They sleep in houses made of leaves and live on fish of every sort, mud crabs, yams, ngali nuts, even the honeycomb of termites.

Randall decides that the villagers could raise chickens, and they greet the idea with enthusiasm. But finding live chicken eggs in their watery world proves wildly difficult, and Randall must chase after the eggs over shark-infested seas and through jungles where strange characters reside, including a one-eyed dwarf and a tattooed lady.

One couldn't imagine a better man than Will Randall to help the people of Mendali meet the twenty-first century on their own terms. But will he succeed?

Solomon Time is a moving and witty account of one man's accidental adventure in paradise and is certain to enchant explorers and armchair travelers alike.

As a typical capitalist American, I of course would have set up the same, but I also want to ask the author: Are these good people better off as they were, or after taking up the reins of commerce?

This new author has real talent.


a volunteer in the Solomon Islands   January 3, 2004
David Stanley (Canada)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book tells the rather self-deprecatory tale of an English school teacher who becomes a volunteer in the Solomon Islands. A chance meeting with an ex-colonial identified as "the commander" sends Will Randall to Rendova Island in the Western Solomons with the vague intention of helping the local villagers create some sort of income-generating project. Randall's first weeks are spent acclimatizing to the slow pace of Solomons life, until a divemaster in nearby Munda suggests he help the villagers set up a chicken farm to supply meat to the local guest houses. Despite the ethnic conflicts raging in the capital Honiara, Will Randall manages with difficulty to locate the correct breeding hens, and Chicken Willy is soon dispensing fried fast food to one and all at Munda Market. Solomon Time is a case study of the naive Westerner in a tropical location who arrives to do good and stays to go native. It's appropriate reading for anyone considering doing something similar.