The Wayfinder Review

Usually, putting “Pulitzer Prize winning author” and “critically acclaimed” in a book’s description is a good way to convince me not to read it.  Such books are usually not in the genres I prefer to read (being mostly literary fiction), they usually involve a lot of internal agonizing and “angst,” and they are often depressing.  In fact, it often seems it’s a requirement for a book to be depressing to win most of the literary prizes – I certainly felt that way when we were required to read a certain number of books of the prize-winning lists for school.  Thus, what many people might consider to be reasons to put the book on their reading list were reasons I hesitated to put Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder on mine, and I hesitated again before picking up the book to read.  I was not entirely wrong.

The Wayfinder is historical fiction more than it is literary fiction, deeply researched and richly evocative of the ancient Polynesian culture.  In descriptions, I detected a certain similarity with Laurus, another historical fiction book from a prize-winning author which I found a surprisingly good read.  That similarity, combined with my stuttering efforts to find more historical texts from Polynesia, convinced me to give The Wayfinder a try, and I’m mostly glad that I did.  The book is an immersive treatment of a time and place with which most readers will be unfamiliar, although it does not handle the mythology and beliefs as well as it does more fact-based anthropological and archeological matters.  There is a certain in-world cynicism to the way these aspects of the culture are treated which combined with the banality of Johnson’s prose to make it difficult to grasp the depth of characters’ beliefs and understand how they influence their view of, and actions within, the world.  His use of language, especially dialectical terms like “gonna” in dialogue, is occasionally jarring, especially given his occasional forays into ancient Polynesian linguistics and the inclusion of poetry as a significant component of the storytelling.

Although it can be considered the opposite of epic in scope and tone, The Wayfinder utilizes a storytelling structure somewhat akin to the flashback methodology featured in Stormlight Archive.  Two main stories compose the text, which eventually converge towards the last third to last quarter of the book, with one being a flashback sequence whose connection to the present action is dribbled out in bits and pieces, as of the characters in the present action gleaning those connections from the stories told to them by their strange visitors.  This, combined with the narrative voice, contrive to provide a sense of oral storytelling to the piece.  The narrative is not strictly presented as if it were being told by a character in the story, despite parts of the text being written in the first person, but there is an emphasis on the role of storytelling and tradition, and the way the narrative voice conveys a sense of storytelling in that fashion intertwines with the in-text emphasis to draw out that theme and significance.

This is the kind of book that lingers in its moments, with long chapters divided into many short sections which present a variety of viewpoints on events and times.  For me, it took until I was halfway through it for the story to really sink its teeth into me and start pulling me along.  In the first half, every time I would start to feel myself being immersed in the text, something would happen that was sufficiently jarring it knocked me back out of it again.  It’s a very reflective piece, the characters struggle for self-awareness more than they struggle for their external objectives, and perhaps the dominant theme of the narrative is one of regret.  Regret is present in the Tongan princes and the corpses they literally carry through parts of the novel, it is present in the isolated islanders who are slowly starving to death, it is present in the king, the queen, and great aunt, the poet, the navigator.  We all have things we regret, but this novel and its characters live in it, wallow in it, dwell ever on halcyon days which may or may not have existed.

At risk of sounding way too artsy, I might describe The Wayfinder as a still mountain lake.  It doesn’t look that deep on the surface, it looks like many other mountain lakes you might find as you hike through the peaks, and when you look at it from an angle, it shows a reflection of what’s around it.  Then, you look closer, and you realize just how much depth it has hidden behind that reflection.  The basic plot of The Wayfinder is a familiar political and family drama not dissimilar from Hamlet and similar tales in their many permutations, but the co-narrative in the book provides a kind of quiet intimacy and vulnerability to the Tongan plotline which would otherwise have more of an intrigue tone.

For all the language is simple, even plain at times, this is a book that requires some effort to read.  Johnson manages to write in such a way that his storytelling almost compels the reader to stop and think about his themes and the contradictions his characters embody.  It’s not for every reader or every mood, and it did not entirely fit into the niche I thought it would or the role I wanted it to play.  Even so, I found it worth the time it took to read.