SOURCE: Mortimer, Molly. Review of The Happy Isles of Oceania, by Paul Theroux. Contemporary Review 261, no. 1523 (December 1992): 334.

In the following review, Mortimer offers a negative assessment of The Happy Isles of Oceania.

Paul Theroux can make pleasant reading, when he is not being deliberately disagreeable and his book [The Happy Isles of Oceania] makes a good dip in companion to Simon Winchester's equally vast tome on Pacific politics. Theroux has a personal and less coherent paddle round many islands, as he tries to overcome personal trauma, as others like Rupert Brooke have done before him. Like many western travellers, he cannot resist patronising local whites as against the less than noble savage.

Theroux starts in the Trobriand Islands, waving his sociological bible, Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages. This was required (unofficial) reading for every LSE undergraduate before the war. And how we loved it. Paul Theroux does...