O'BRIEN WRITES AGAIN OF SOUTH SEAS

"Les annees out passe et m'ont fait home. Deja jai Coeur et monde, et me voice enfin divan I'll reeve. Mais jen'y trouve plus que tristesse et amour disenchantment."

Pierre loll, who has dreamed all his life of going to Tabiti, wrote this a 1972. Even as carly as then the Mystic ships of the Seven seas. The process of dissolution had already begun, which is today nearing its completion in the disappearance of the Tahitian race.

It is not surprising, then, that we should find Mr. O'Brien, who too had long anticipated a visit to Tahiti, even more disappointed and disillusioned when he visited? Tahiti nearly forty years after Loti. As in his book telling of the marquesas Islands, in this later book there is constantly recurring the note of sadness which is felt by all lovers of the Polynesians when they contemplate the sad remnant of that once spleen did race. Whenever a barbaric people have been wiped out by civilization it has made a sorry, sordid tale; the physical beauty and lovable natures of the Tahitians has made the story of their decline particularly tragic.

But despite this inevitable strain of sadness, Mr. O'Brien's new book is a delightfully readable book overflowing with the joy of living. The author went to Tahitit to play--not to make scientific investigations or profound deducts on the benefits and evils of our civilization. He cannot help noting the terrible havoc which has been wrought through all Ocean, but he does not let this hang too heavily upon him.

Those who have read his first book, "White Shadows In The South Seas" will know what to expect as to treatment and style in "The Mystic Isles". There is the same breezy journalistic style, readable and vivid above all, although some time uneven and crud; the same mixture of description and narrative and exposition all, brightened by Mr. O'Brien's even present exuberance and enthusiasm. It is this quality above all, we thinly which has made the author so suddenly and deservedly famous. He is always such a delightful companion, so alive, so eager and able to enjoy life, that he could delight us as much if he wrote of the dreariest main Street in our ken.

Tahiti differs from the Marquesas, the subject of the first book, in that the island and its people have suffered more from the baneful effects of civilization and have lost more of their barbaric fascination. At Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, instead of the delightful laxity of the Marquesas, vice in all its forms has crept in to take possession of the little city. Along side there is still a childlike simplicity and naively in a manners of the people which contrasts strangely with the importation's from Europe of the "blessings of civilization".

There are far more characters which will be remembered in the "Mystic isles" than the author discovered in the marquesas. Derelicts from all countries, a Russian noble and merchant, "Lying Bill" Pincher, and old sea captain and scores of others from many ports. Mr. O'Brien make friends with them all, setting them down faithfully and realistically. Indeed "Lying Bill" Pincher was so well described that the original has sued the author for libel.

Of all the people in the book the one which stands out most clearly is Loveland, the hostess of the only Hotel in Palette.

"She was very large. She was huge in every sense, weighing much more than three hundred pounds and yet there was a singular grace in her form and her movements. Her limbs we of the girth of breadfruit-trees, and her bosom was as broad and deep as that of the great June of Rome, but her hands were beautiful, like a plump baby's with fascinating creases at the wrists, and long, tapering fingers. Her limbs eyes were hazel, and they were very brilliant when she was merry or excited. Her expansive face had no lines in it, and her mouth was perfection of curves, the teeth white and even. Her hair was red-brown, curling in rich profusion, scented with the hinano-flower, adorning her charmingly posed head in careless grace.

"When she said, 'I glad to see you' there was a glow of amiability, and alluring, light in her countenance that drew one irresistibly to her and her immense, shapely hand enveloped one's own with a pressure and warmth that were overpowering in their convincement of her good heart and illimitable generosity.

"Lovaina was only one fourth Tahitian, all the remainder of her racial inheritance being American: but she was all Tahitian in her traits, her simplicity, her devoting to her traits, her simplicity, her devotion to her friends, her catching folly s it flew, and here pride in a new possession.

Then there are Lovaina's girls. They are young tadies of many parts--waitresses ostensibly but only occasionally--but we supose that they too are things of the past. But they must have been charming when they had their day. Indeed they we so charming that Livonia gave up in despair the attempt to bring them up in the way they should go. "I tell you, I give up truyin ave those girl," confides Lovaina to the author, "I think they like ruin best. I turn my back--they ruin."