Simon Winchester’s ‘Pacific’
By
Over the decades, the British-born Simon Winchester has emerged as one of those increasingly rare geographic generalists, migrating from region to region, sharing with his readers an almost tactile sense of the earth, its history and its peoples. His narratives exist within that depressingly vast space between the hairsplitting nuances and abstractions of academia and the vulgar simplicities of cable news pundits. A highbrow out to educate middlebrows, Winchester writes books like someone telling a good yarn around the fireplace, whether about volcanoes, Indian slums or the 19th-century American West. He is an outdoorsman who knows about such things as geology and ocean sailing, which invigorates his prose in the same way as that of another journalistic travel writer, William Langewiesche, who flies planes and also sails. And he certainly has the knack for comparison. When Winchester writes that Hawaii, deep down, “in its perceived cultural essence,” still evokes what “was felt by Gauguin during his time in the Marquesas,” it is reminiscent of the British travel writer Jan Morris describing in 1960 how the smells and landscape of the Lido in Venice ignite thoughts of Carthage and Marrakesh.
His new and structurally ambitious book is “Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers.” In the audio version, Winchester, who has also written a volume on the Atlantic, provides his own narration, speaking with a beautifully enunciated theatrical edge — akin to a BBC announcer’s — that makes the succession of images in the print version especially easy to visualize and to hear. He tells about grand military, technological and environmental trends playing out on a cartographic feature that represents the “unsleeping Eye of the earth,” as the poet Robinson Jeffers called the Pacific Ocean: the whole of history, in other words, seen through the lens of a common geography, 45 percent of the world’s surface water.
But how to organize such an overwhelming story within a reasonable length? Winchester was inspired by a book of essays published by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in 1927, dealing with what Winchester calls the “seminal moments in the tide of human experience.” Consequently, “Pacific” is organized around 10 essayistic chapters about such seemingly disparate subjects as thermonuclear bombs, surfboarding, the transistor radio revolution, coral reefs, cyclones and naval competition. Moreover, Winchester is concerned only with developments that have occurred since the near-halfway point of the last century, when, in his quirky mind, radiocarbon dating stopped being accurate — because nuclear-bomb-created isotopes in the air henceforth distorted measurements.
The effect of these 10 chapters does not quite make the amorphous Pacific cohere as a historical or literary unit, something that may well be impossible. But Winchester does, nevertheless, delineate both the tragedy and dynamism of contemporary world history, with all of its ghastly horrors. He excels at putting geopolitical trends, themselves quite broad, into an even wider metaphorical context for the general reader and listener: by, for example, tying such slow-motion events as the collapse of the British Empire to the unseemly demise of the R.M.S. Queen Elizabeth in the Hong Kong harbor in 1972, and the departure of the American Navy and Air Force from the Philippines to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Everywhere, the author is taking a step back and saying, in effect, let’s look at the really big picture.
Winchester digests expert data in order to take the listener beyond it. Here is his description of an underwater plutonium bomb exploding at Bikini Atoll in 1946: “With a gigantic whoosh, it suddenly created at first a mile-wide glass-bubble sphere of water and steam and condensate and crushed coral and mud that thundered out of the mirror-calm blue of the lagoon.” But even in the midst of the empty Pacific, he reminds us, there are human casualties to this series of bomb tests: 236 local islanders “had received doses of radiation every bit as great as those suffered by the Japanese in Hiroshima.” Yet “no alarm had sounded. Instead, the bomb managers’ first reaction was to think of employing the Rongelapese as case studies, as human guinea pigs.”
Meanwhile, in the late 1940s, the Japanese were emerging from their own devastation. Barely half of Tokyo’s inhabitants “had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: All the buses were destroyed.” This is how Winchester improbably sets up the transistor radio revolution and the emergence of postwar Japan as a technological dynamo. (The name “Sony” was chosen by the entrepreneur Akio Morita because of an Al Jolson song with the title “Sonny Boy.” After all, it was American consumers whom Morita first had to please.)
Winchester arrives in Tokyo Bay in 2014 not by plane but by boat from Russia’s Far East, and immediately notices the relative paucity of container ships in the harbor. For, as he explains, the cynosure of the Asian economy had in the intervening decades moved from Japan to China, a place on which the American military is now obsessively fixated.
Winchester’s description of conflict in the South China Sea is more efficient, balanced and lucid than those in many publications by Washington research institutions. China’s aim is to take over the blue-water extensions of its continental landmass through steps “individually small enough to make retaliation difficult.” It is typical Chinese strategy: “infuriating and clever, and right out of Sun Tzu’s handbook.” And no matter the evolution of American policy, China will keep doing what it has been doing in the South China Sea until it can’t: that is, until its troubled economy or unstable internal politics inhibits its naval expansion. That’s why the future of the Western Pacific battle space may be written inside China itself, a subject not covered in this already sprawling book.
A larger question Winchester confronts is that of the future of the environment. “A coral reef is the marine equivalent of a rain forest,” he writes, registering all the dangers that human activity places on the ecosystem, and the Pacific has “twice as many species of coral as the Atlantic does.” As for climate change itself, it really means atmospheric turbulence. On the eve of supercyclone Tracy, in 1974, the Australian city of Darwin “was a tough little frontier town, a hard-drinking, broken-jaw kind of place — Australia in the raw, ready for most kinds of trouble.” But it wasn’t ready for a storm that “crushed building after building like a giant’s hand.” Eighty percent of the city’s houses were totally destroyed.
By interweaving history, fascinating trivia and acute observation, Winchester demonstrates how travel writing has a future. But it will be less as a one-dimensional gonzo narrative than as a vehicle providing readable explanations for every kind of complex subject, from science to geopolitics.
PACIFIC
Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers
By Simon Winchester
Read by the author
14¼ hours. HarperAudio.
Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. His books include “Monsoon” and “Asia’s Cauldron.”
A version of this article appears in print on
Nov. 22, 2015, Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Ocean of Wonders. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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