Honolulu Weekly

201 pages, $13.95

Can we get a Pidgin immersion school? Not to replace the Hawaiian immersion movement, which is maybe the best thing to happen to us culturally and educationally in a generation. But we need a Pidgin program, too, a place where Hawaiian Creole English, the endemic tongue of 20th-century Oahu, is celebrated and nurtured. Because even as ka ‘olelo Hawaii rises from its long sleep, and despite the efforts of people like Lee Tonouchi and Frank De Lima, Pidgin seems headed the other way. A victim of a changing economy both material and social, Pidgin is fading as the lingua franca of Hawaii even as we need one more than ever. English is here to stay, and we can only hope the same is true of Hawaiian, but Pidgin–creative, melodic, a little rough around the edges but playful at its heart–is who we really are. Or at least, for a moment, it’s who we were. And in today’s Hawaii, that’s where the attention is.

We are engaged in two separate conversations these days, one about our future–rail, agriculture, development, our schools–and another, much more contentious one about the past. In sorting through questions of history, politics and ethnicity, we’re trying to establish what kind of past we want for ourselves, and for those who come after us. It seems unlikely we’ll get very far in the first exchange without coming to some sort of understanding on the second one, which explains why so much of what’s felt important in recent literature about Hawaii is focused on the places those two dialoges meet.

Ian MacMillan’s most recent novel, the first published since his death last December, is about all of this stuff, or refers to it in a deep way, and one of its most compelling elements is MacMillan’s selection of Pidgin as the language by which to sort through it all.

The Bone Hook works from the premise that even when we all want the same things–love, sex, treasure–we want them for very different reasons. The plot of MacMillan’s third novel about Hawaii centers on a breathless search for buried treasure–a huge store of Hawaiian artifacts and Spanish gold, hidden away behind an ancient ‘ulu tree somewhere in the Koolau. As word begins to spread that this legendary mother lode may be real after all, several distinct–and well-drawn– characters struggle to be first, while others wonder how such a historically-loaded quest can end in anything but disappointment.

While the characters have various and divergent ties to the Islands–and therefore to the contested history the treasure represents–and the two principal characters share deeply local identities, only one major character speaks in Pidgin. Billy, a wayward Kailua man-child of 20 struggling with resentment, fear and the uncertainty of his path. He is MacMillan’s idea of a local Everyman, caught between his rough-and-tumble roots and the promise of a lucrative, if sketchy, future in a fast-moving modern enterprise. MacMillan explores Billy’s dilemma through a tense, at times hilarious tension between the young man’s braddah-braddah speech at home and his attempts at highly formal English at work. The conflict’s eventual resolution in a climactic showdown is one of The Bone Hook’s most absorbing moments.

MacMillan’s use of Pidgin occassionally feels overdone–Billy and his friends, along with other characters, use the tongue in a way that has become much rarer on Oahu than the book suggests. As the novel progresses, however, the author’s choice begins to seem less descriptive and more an act of hope–when these characters lose their way, and when they need to articulate their affection and respect for this place, they turn to Pidgin to express themselves, and if MacMillan’s usage sometimes strikes an off-note to native ears, it may be because he is trying to will the cadence and idiosyncracies of our endemic tongue back to life.

In this way and many others, The Bone Hook is about hope: for wealth, for love, for the wisdom to make the right choices. It is also about loss, and what happens when things lost become found again. With MacMillan’s passing, Hawaii has lost a distinct and fascinating voice–we can only hope that, like his characters, local readers know a good thing when they see it. This is a book, and a writer, worth treasuring.

386 pages, $15

Paul Malmont’s 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, an homage to period-piece pulp fiction, established Malmont as a writer to watch and put him on many end-of-year best book lists. Malmont’s latest effort, the historical drama Jack London in Paradise, advances his reputation as a novelist with a keen ear for vintage dialogue and an able hand at the literary page-turner.

Set mostly in the Hawaii of 1926, Jack London in Paradise finds the legendary writer and adventurer down and out in Honolulu after a total artistic and financial collapse. A desperate Hollywood producer comes to find London and win his approval for one last Jack London payday, but finds a job much bigger than the one he’d bargained for.

Malmont’s eye for the Islands is a bit hackneyed in places and may leave local readers wincing, but that’s par for the course in fiction written by and for those living abroad, and the portrait he paints of London–as well as the journey into Honolulu yesteryears, make this novel shine. �