By Charles Montgomery
In the South Pacific, he discovers an international of sorcery and shark worship, the place Christian and pagan rituals coexist and a standard day is marked by way of confrontations with America-worshiping cult leaders and militants alike. A defiantly unique mix of historical past and memoir, anthropology and shuttle writing, The Shark God is finally a story of private and political transformation.
“The Shark God, a commute tale as darkish and twisted as one may perhaps ever desire to pay attention . . . reaches an excellent climax with a few apocalyptically page-turning scenes.”—Guardian
“A attention-grabbing account of the drama of Melanesian life.”—Times Literary complement
“With beautiful writing, Montgomery lovingly captures the wonder and the horrors, the mysteries and the shams of the folk and locations he visits.”—Publishers Weekly
“A very genuine and noteworthy expertise. . . . The patience [Montgomery] displayed on his travels used to be admirable, the adventures he survived have been large, and the standard of his prose turns out matched in simple terms via the knowledge of his observations.”—Simon Winchester, Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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Extra info for The Shark God: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific
Kelsen flagged it down. We climbed within the field and rumbled east on a mud highway, up throughout the arms into the mountains. Tanna used to be so thick with lifestyles, it used to be a cartoon of paradise: the black volcanic soil exploded with banana, taro, manioc, flowering poinsettia, orange groves, and tree ferns. Melon-sized papaya hung from house-high stems. Banyan timber forged shadows the dimensions of baseball diamonds, their canopies balanced atop 1000's of roots that twisted down from the branches like strands of macramé. As we handed out and in of the shadows, Kelsen defined to me that it wasn’t simply the toilet Frummers who have been going to hell. 36 The Shark God It used to be the general public on Tanna, together with some of the Christians. “These humans disobey the Bible each day,” he grumbled. “They holiday the principles that Moses wrote down in Leviticus. They devour unclean foodstuff: pigs, flying foxes, sharks, crabs. They smoke. They drink kava. All forbidden! Worst of all, they visit church on Sunday, after we recognize that Saturday is the genuine Sabbath. they are going to be punished in time. ” Kelsen knew those ideas simply because his relatives had switched over to Seventh-day Adventism in 1922. they'd by no means fallen for the loo Frum message or the other fake educating, he guaranteed me proudly. The wooded area at the east facet of Tanna used to be caked in grey dirt, and the bushes started to resemble stone carvings. We rounded a bend and entered the devastation. It used to be as if the jungle were buried and sealed lower than a layer of scoured earth. Bucketsized boulders have been strewn around the ash simple like spilled marbles. The volcano rose at once in entrance folks like an exceptional Saharan dune, an ideal, pristine, and never rather threatening heap of sand. This used to be Yasur, the volcano whose fireworks had guided Captain James cook dinner into Port Resolution—named for his send— in 1774. Yasur used to be sacred in these days. every time cook dinner tried to climb it, his Tannese courses led him in circles again to the ocean. Our driving force didn’t gradual for the view. He sped over a spur of the volcano towards a spot within the wooded area at the a ways part of the obvious. We have been midway there whilst the afternoon used to be shattered by way of a deafening explosion. the motive force swerved for a second, then persevered, while a salvo of rocks exploded from the height like pebbles thrown up by way of a few gigantic hand. I dove to the floor. Kelsen laughed. The mountain belched a black mushroom cloud of smoke, then fell quiet. We entered the wooded area back and a rutted tune to a clearing and a suite of thatch huts on stilts. This used to be Kelsen’s Tanna: A Conflagration of trust 37 grand lodge. It was once crude and gorgeous. there have been flowering bushes and dozens of potted crops. Chickens clucked. kids dashed backward and forward. someplace within the woodland, a pan flute performed “Amazing Grace. ” It jogged my memory of the postapocalyptic idyll depicted within the pamphlets that Jehovah’s Witnesses hand out on road corners. not anything undesirable ever occurs right here, i assumed. yet then a terrific sucking noise ripped throughout the valley—like a tsunami rolling throughout a pebble beach—then one other appalling roar, after which a short-term vibration, now not of the earth yet of the air, which brought on the huts to tremble and pressed my blouse opposed to my pores and skin.