Book Review: One Big Damn Puzzler

At last! After a host of books I've struggled and waded and cursed and bled through, here's a book club read I can honestly say I enjoyed. Not that I was expecting to. I almost gave it a miss, and then while I was on Amazon searching out this cover pic for the club website, I read some of the reviews. Some uniformly positive reviews. So I bought it, and they were right. One of the best reads I've had in a long time. Many, many laugh-out-loud moments. A few tears. But most of all some fresh, engaging, original prose with a heap of messages; some hidden, some overt.

The book opens with one of the main characters - a Pacific islander called Managua - having his life's work of translating Hamlet into pidgin English interrupted by the arrival on the island of an American lawyer, William Hardt. He hasn't got much further than: "Is be, or is be not? Is be one big damn puzzler," so the interruption is particularly irksome. He straps on his artificial leg and hobbles off to greet the stranger, whom the entire island are soon referring to as gwanga. This simple act explains why William is there: to gain compensation for the islanders for the landmines that American forces have left scattered around the North of the island, and which have been responsible for a large number of limbs being lost.

But during his stay, William learns that the islanders are not defined by their injuries. He learns about their culture, their beliefs, their morals and their society. So different from anything he's encountered before, and yet not so very different. Told with rare warmth and humour this is a book that will suck you in and take you, like William, to a world you will never forget.