THE WAYFINDER

The Polynesian islands in the South Pacific are transformed by this historical epic into a region at once otherworldly and recognizable.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son, 2012) has established a reputation for spinning complex, colorful, and plausibly rococo yarns from civilizations remote from and mysterious to outsiders. Here, his audacious, unruly imagination roams with confidence through the island kingdom of Tonga as it undergoes societal uncertainty and the potential of war with other islands. At or near the center of this whirlwind is Kōrero, bold and insatiably curious daughter of a fisherman and a tattoo artist, whose discovery of a fishhook-shaped pendant in an ancestral graveyard signals the beginning of a grand, perilous, and transfiguring adventure that puts her, her family, and her friends on a sea voyage whose outcome could mean either salvation or oblivion for their people. The perilous odyssey is led by a figure known only as the Wayfinder, whose near-intuitive grasp of navigation by both the shifting waters and the celestial patterns of the night sky arouses in Kōrero her own aspirations of being a “way finder.” Telling stories, however, is her own means of navigating through the twists and turns of her life’s journey, and Johnson’s multilayered narrative has the baggy, wildly divergent feel of oral storytelling, in which the intrigues of royal power politics, often facilitated through violence, are woven with tales of familial conflict, verse by royal poets, and even the occasional monologue from Kōkī, the most articulate and, it seems, resilient of the islands’ many parrots. Such enchanted touches are deftly threaded into the rangy storyline by Johnson’s richly lyrical prose, which is also capable of handling the social dynamics of the Tongans along with the background stories of royalty and their rivals. At times, the saga can get so discursive that it risks leaving the reader on some reef or capsized by an unexpected surge from another time. Yet somehow, you yield to the novelist’s evocation of a world that, like the pendant recovered at the novel’s start, feels “both ancient and startlingly new.”

A book stuffed with revelations while keeping many secrets.