In the story, an old woman and a young girl with an intellectual disability work together to plant Norfolk Island with the very pines that the narrator is later sent to destroy. The section’s title alludes to a 1932 work, Mutiny on the Bounty. The third, “Mutiny,” is told by a man who has been stationed in Norfolk Island in the South Pacific near the Australian coast, and instructed to cut down a large swathe of forest to enable the construction of a military base airstrip.
The novel begins with two short narratives, “The South Pacific” and “Coral Sea.” These establish the setting and mood of the succeeding episodes, while hinting to the looming specter of World War II. Now known as Michener’s first novel, its status as such was in contention within the Pulitzer Prize board, which expanded its official definition of the genre in order to award Michener the Pulitzer for Best Novel in 1948. The book’s primary subject is World War II in particular, how real humans grappled emotionally and existentially with the intense and alienating moral atrocity of international war. Its plot is split into nineteen stories, each of which takes place as a direct consequence of the previous story, sharing the themes and characters of the others. Tales of the South Pacific is a 1947 novel by American author James Michener.
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