Cannibal Country

By John Elson

TITLE: THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA

AUTHOR: PAUL THEROUX

PUBLISHER: G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS; 528 PAGES; $24.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: Another excellent adventure by the great grump of travel writing.

It was a journey that began, at least symbolically, on a gloomy Sunday in Christchurch, New Zealand. Cooped up in a hotel room so dreary that he drank the contents of the mini-bar, Paul Theroux was continents away from his London home, newly separated from his wife, afraid that he might have cancer (not so, it turned out) and depressed by the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf. "Get me out of here," he said to himself and headed for the wilderness -- because, he wrote, "as long as there is wilderness there is hope."

The result is Theroux's ninth and possibly best travel book, an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip that took him to 51 Pacific islands, from New Guinea to Easter Island to Hawaii. His goal was to retrace, in part, the bold voyages of early Polynesian seafarers who gave this vast area a common culture, now corrupt and moribund. Theroux took the big hops by plane or ship. But his preferred mode of travel was a collapsible, 16-ft.-long French-made kayak, which he paddled -- carefully -- through dangerous waters infested by crocodiles, sharks and stinging Portuguese man-of-wars.

Theroux was bothered less by the terrifying fauna than by many of the people he encountered. The ethnic put-downs of The Happy Isles might be considered racist were it not for the fact that the author is clearly an equal- opportunity disdainer. New Zealanders are shabby and provincial, he complains. Aussies are rude, foulmouthed and drink too much. Tongans are lazy, quarrelsome and mean to their children. Samoans are greedy, hostile and obese, perhaps because their junk-food diet consists mostly of "Cheez Balls" and corned beef saturated with hippo fat. (Did their liking for the latter, Theroux wonders, derive from their ancestors' enjoyment of "long pig" -- that is, human flesh?) And almost everywhere he found God-swanking missionaries, usually Mormons or Methodists, who seemed mesmerized by the thought of preaching the gospel to islanders who were once notorious for practicing cannibalism. "Missionaries and cannibals," Theroux muses, "make perfect couples."

Food was terrible everywhere in the Pacific, Theroux discovered, although he was bemused by such oddities as omelets made from enormous eggs laid by the megapode birds of Savo in the Solomon Islands. (His verdict: "The yolkiest eggs I had ever seen.") To be sociable, the author occasionally took swigs of kava, the mouth- and mind-numbing intoxicant of the islands, which is made by chewing the root of a plant known as Piper methysticum and then mixing the blob with water. The best kava, connoisseurs assure him, comes from root masticated by pretty teenage girls.

Theroux's title, of course, is heavily ironic. Instead of happiness, he mostly finds apathy, ugliness and poverty -- not to mention once pristine waters fouled by industrial and human waste. The nearest thing to the imagined paradise of Hollywood sarong epics is the Big Island of Hawaii, where last July he watched an eclipse of the sun. The experience, Theroux writes, was akin to "the onset of blindness." When the sun returns, he kisses the woman next to him. "Being happy was like being home," he exults, and every reader will know why.