I began reading Over the Water after completing a binge-watch of the third series of The White Lotus. A luxurious island resort, and the pampered guests are enjoying the Thai sun when gunshots ring out – and as the viewer watches from the safety of the sofa, a murder victim falls into a palm-fringed pool. Lawrence Durrell defines islomaniacs as those who “find islands somehow irresistible” – and this glossy series both panders to this yearning and administers a corrective to it. Islands are receptacles of dreams and obsessions – yet we should be careful what we wish for.
The White Lotus is referenced in an extraordinary essay in this collection. In I Picture an Island, Cecile Pin describes the horror of that opening scene, noting that “we as spectators are compelled to see all that follows in the series – the birds, the water, the monkeys and the plants – in a different, deathly light”.
Pin herself has reason to be aware of the horrors woven into such places: as the narrative unfolds, we discover that her mother was one of the Vietnamese boat people and had survived the voyage in which her parents and siblings drowned; and that scores of female Vietnamese were entrapped and forced to endure sexual assault on Thai islands that today play host to masses of western tourists. “I thought about how islands, microcosms of their times, evolve,” writes Pin. “I thought about how they hold within themselves both the makings of hell and paradise, and how to make sense of those contradictions.”
Many of the essays in this excellent collection are similarly concerned with contradiction – sometimes to moving effect. In You Will Never Touch a Duck-billed Platypus, Noreen Masud wanders the streets of Hobart, Tasmania, in search of a creature that, the locals assure her, she will never see. She does see them – in abundance. “Because once in a while you put out your hand wryly ... and the world quite unexpectedly heaps it until it’s overflowing, with more than you could ever have thought or dreamed of.”
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Masud is in a jet-lagged blur: travel has disoriented and dulled her, yet she has lucked out. Here is a reminder to limit our appetites: as Masud reflects, “Once is enough, really. Once changes everything.”
