A compelling Science Fiction tale originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1992 as Children of the Rainbow, that transports the protagonist back in time urging readers to examine their beliefs about the present and what the future holds for mankind.
The setting is 2072, interwoven with 1835 Britain's Norfolk Island penal colony and 1972 Greenpeace III's renunciation of French nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
The author braids his tale depicting one of the characters in Peru as an Inca mystic representing rules, and dogma and the protagonist, a scientist named Fletcher Christian IV, currently professor of Life Sciences, a famous descendant from Mutiny on the Bounty who escaped to Pitcairn Island. Fletcher is the antithesis of old-style religion and rejects the concept of professional or ordained intermediaries placed between an individual and the holy environment. As a learned man, Fletcher IV disputes the validity of original sin and heredity as being foundations of the human matrix. The third major character, Dalton, is a convicted convict.
One of the themes running through the story is the impact dishonesty, barbarism, domination and despair create in several generations of mankind. For instance, at the beginning of the story Dalton naively states that the inedible food at the prison requires a spoon. A guard strikes him with a rifle butt splitting the skin of his face and knocking him on the ground for voicing what everyone knew to be true. The crime that brought Dalton to Norfolk Island was breaking and sacking tea chests in a warehouse for which Dalton being a simple man, deprived of education, failed to comprehend the import of seven years' transportation.
Fletcher Christian rebelled against Captain Bligh's abusive, controlling leadership. British naval officers were trained and legally obligated to follow Bligh's orders which caused the mutiny on the Bounty and the subsequent settlement of Pitcairn by the crew members. Fletcher's descendant, Christian Fletcher IV, in the book became law-abiding, principled, valuable members of society. Dalton, the convict, inadvertently time-travelled from Norfolk Island to Pitcairn and like the Bounty mutineers is freed from literal and abstract chains, becomes pleased with his new life and fathers a child. Choice and freedom galvanize self-empowering motivators.
Throughout the book, the author draws the reader's attention to the spaces between men and women. For example, the prison commandant, Major Anderson, represents linear, intellectual, left-brained thinking that leads him to condone and authorize the brutal treatment of the prisoners. His wife and daughter rely on creativity and intuition, right-brained conceptualizing for their conclusions resulting in their acceptance of Fletcher Christian IV's tale of conveyance to the prison from the future. Anderson's style of cognition blinds and prejudices against the truth of Fletcher's arrival on the island.
A central feature that brings numerous themes in the story together is the rupture in time caused by two instances of nuclear tests spaced one year apart as observed by Green Peace III. Given the political unrest, nuclear proliferation, and wars in the Middle East, the concepts in the book are topical today for countless generations. Albert Einstein pessimistically remarked, “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking.” Each reader after absorbing the novel needs to decide for themselves which road mankind travelled in the past and where the journey ends.
If the macro elements of the story lack appeal for some readers, the novel's plot and development apply at the micro level to individuals—everyone in their lifetime has metaphoric nuclear incidents that alter their life's directions. Science friction is not a genre which frequently attracts me, but like Shadow of Ashland, a previous book by Terence M. Green which I read in one sitting, Sailing Time's Ocean, glued me to its pages.
