Intriguing story of odd people.
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It's hard to decide what category to put this book into. By rights it should go onto the "Impossibly unlikely fiction" section of the library but apparently it's all true.
The story is about a number of settlers on the island of Floreana in the remote Galapagos archipelago during the 1930s. For one reason or another they all seem to want to escape the modern world and get back to nature. One is tempted to suggest that the reason they had to leave civilisation is they were all bonkers and nobody back home would put up with them. They certainly were an odd bunch but this makes for quite fascinating reading. The pick of the characters is maybe the would be philosopher Friedrich Ritter with his insane creed of Nietzschean rules which he relaxes only for himself when he feels like it. Trumping him perhaps is the simply crazy, malicious and dangerous Baroness who sought to lord it over everyone on the island and proclaimed herself Empress.
It's difficult to say much more about the book without giving the story away. Suffice to say there are deaths that are never adequately explained leaving the reader a mystery to muse upon.
It's an easy read and the prose rolls along quite adequately with only the odd hiccough such as the author's liking for the phrase "high falutin'" which can grate a bit. Nevertheless the book never gets boring and the very desire to know what will happen next in this odd story keeps you turning the page.
My edition has some really great photographs of the people involved that really bring the story to life. I'm sure someone will make it into a film some day. I just hope it isn't spoilt by Hollywood as these things often are.
Overall, a kind of real life Lord of the Flies involving adults. An oddity you'll be glad you read.
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Why is this book out of print?
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Astonishing from page 1 - why has no one made a movie (maybe they have, but I haven't uncovered it)? An extraordinary cast of characters, and a strange, mysterious plot that you couldn't make up if you tried. The surprise is how the author manages such a measured delivery, but then the plot is so gripping, it needs no sensationalisation. Thoroughly enjoying this read!
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Investigating an old murder on a pacific island.
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The author, John Treherene, is a Zoologist and a Fellow of Downing College Cambridge. While on the Galapagos Island of Floreana in the 1980's he heard about an extraordinary series of events, culminating in two disappearances and three deaths in suspiscious circumstances, which had taken place on the island fifty years previously. These events had created a furore in the international press at the time, but been forgotten by the world during the second world war, and were now remembered only by a few elderly islanders.
Out of interest Dr Treherne put together as best he could the story of these extraordinary events and published them in this book, together with his own analysis concerning which of the deaths were accidental and which were murder.
If it had been published as a novel, everyone would have dismissed this story as too strange to be credible.
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