By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
Pacific
Simon Winchester (HarperCollins)
*****
In his stellar five-decade career as a journalist and author, Simon Winchester hasn’t even toyed with the idea of writing a memoir. “You can really only write one memoir, and I don’t want to write one yet,” laughs the peripatetic 71-year-old author of bestselling works such as The Surgeon of Crowthorne, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, Atlantic and The Man Who Loved China.
But the tracery of a life lived in service to a curiosity that knows few limits can be found in each of his well-crafted books. None more so than his latest offering Pacific, a “biography” of the Pacific Ocean, which in some senses is his most passionate book yet. Indeed, it’s only since he finished it, says Winchester, “that I’ve become aware that the book is very, very critical of the way the West has treated the Pacific. It wasn’t intended to be, but it is rather angry in the first few chapters”.
As he declares early on in the book, “the Pacific is the ocean where much of the dirty business of the world has been conducted”. None so dirty as the misuse of this, the world’s largest body of water, and its island residents by the US as an atomic testing ground during the early years of the Cold War.
Even now as he speaks of the Marshall Islands and “this whole nuclear business” his ire is palpable. “Western impact on the Pacific Ocean has not been benign. We’ve colonised, we’ve enslaved, brought illness and greed and disdained their culture. I’m hoping they’ll reassert their cultural dominance and begin to push back against what we’ve done to them.”
The book is as much a plea for greater respect for Pacific island cultures and an expression of hope in their ancient maritime skills as it is an account of the vast Pacific itself, its effect on global weather and its role in human history. For the historical tide has long turned and Winchester sums up the key moments in potent and novel ways in this compelling narrative.
Contrary to the old Kipling line about East and West and “never the twain shall meet”, says Winchester, “West and East are now meeting across the Pacific, and depending on whether they clash or co-operate, or whether the better elements of one culture are absorbed by the other, is how the future will be played out.”
Talking to Winchester is a lot like reading one of his books, you just relax for the ride. He’ll first ensnare you with an informed account of some little-known but key global event or phenomenon, then take you on a detour into even more unexpected waters.
Mention the Pacific as the driver of the world’s climate “which is going so haywire” and he’ll tell you not only about the El Niño southern oscillation but “this extraordinary single-celled creature called the prochlorococcus, which is like a sort of scrubber that’s taking all the nasty carbon dioxide from the ocean and turning it back into oxygen”.
In a life ruled by “serendipitous encounters” as much as by his driving curiosity, Winchester credits fabled travel writer Jan Morris as “someone who completely changed my life” by convincing him to abandon his profession as a geologist and become a newspaper reporter.
Anther chance encounter came when, lying in the bath reading a book on lexicography, he spied an obscure footnote that led him to write The Surgeon Of Crowthorne, which sold several million copies. “Who’d ever think that a book about a 19th-century lexicographer would sell? But that book changed my life in all sorts of ways, and I bless the publisher.”
He is working on a book about precision. And after that?
“I don’t think I’ve got the knowledge to try it, but a big new book on Africa would be a very tempting thing to write”.
He describes himself a “nosy old bugger”.
“I love poking my nose into other things, you never know what you’ll come across.”
Follow Bron Sibree on Twitter @BronSibree
Book details
- Pacific: The Ocean of the Future by Simon Winchester
EAN: 9780008162399
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