Pineapple Epic

H AWAI I (937 pp.)--James A. Michener --Random House ($6.95).

In an age of giantism, novels are growing larger; a 300-pager is hardly more than a pamphlet, and a typical Book-of-the-Month selection, if dropped on the toe, does about as much damage as a bowling ball. Readers' eyes flicker dimly, and the backs of elderly librarians creak like dry bamboo. Author James A. (Tales of the South Pacific) Michener's latest is no mere three-generation monsterpiece; it spans 52 generations, counting only generations of humans. But Michener's fictionalized biography of the 50th state starts long before there are people.

In the beginning, there heaves only the sea and the lava and the prose ("The island had sunk ... ice nevermore formed upon its crest''). The author's natural history may at times be suspect--one ornithologist claims to have pecked three errors from three lines describing how life first came to the archipelago. But as a melodramatist, Michener is superb. His characters do not run deep, but they move fast--through an incredible gauntlet of rapes, murders, tidal waves, human sacrifices, Chinese food, whale-thrashings, leprosy, volcanic eruptions and pineapple blights.

Civilizing Diseases. The author's plan is grandly simple: in four huge subnovels that tower like the legbones of a dinosaur, he describes the coming of the islands' four main strains--first the Polynesians, then the Americans, the Chinese and the Japanese. A final section, corresponding to the dinosaur's backbone, is intended to show how the disparate nationalities took on a sense of Hawaiian unity. As the book ends, a few vertebrae still seem to be missing.

By far the most likable of Michener's people are the Polynesians. As fearless navigators, they outsailed the Phoenicians and Vikings, and as lovers, from all accounts, they outstripped any other race the world has known. Wrote startled Captain Cook after he discovered Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) in 1778: "No women I ever met were less reserved. Indeed, it appeared to me that they visited us with no other view than to make a surrender of their persons." But the happy, handsome Hawaiians surrendered more than their women. When Americans began to arrive around 1820, the islands held some 142,000 natives. Fifty years later, less than half that number were alive; the rest had died of syphilis, measles and other civilizing diseases.

New England Barony. Michener gives the American missionaries their lumps; he thinks they were inclined to be arrogant, bigoted and blind to the virtues of the gentle dreamers they were trying to convert to Congregationalism. But he concedes that they educated the Hawaiians. brought them medical help, taught them to protect themselves against hell-raising whalers. The old gibe that the missionaries "came to do good and ended by doing well" is both true and untrue, according to Michener: they treated the natives honestly, but they also helped build trading empires. For the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, Hawaii was a feudal barony run by a handful of wealthy New England families.

The barony's dissolution began when the New Englanders imported Chinese and Japanese to work as field hands. Neither group stayed in the fields. The industrious Chinese moved into real estate, the Japanese into politics. After World War II, the pineapple workers won their fight for a union, and the Democratic Party, with a membership of Orientals and newcomer Caucasians, won a strong position in island government.

Michener's gigantic work loses pace in its final section, as the descendants of the New Englanders and their upstart adversaries seem to forget both animosities and identities, and the author drums busily for tourism and statehood (the novel was finished before statehood came last spring). Honolulu Resident Michener strives hard for a lyric quality as the two-party system triumphs and the barons and their onetime vassals sit happily together on the same interlocking directorates. But after all the blood and gusto, such gentle music is hardly audible.

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