::: The Drifters (Michener)
The Drifters is right up there with The Quartzsite Trip as far as coming-of-age novels go. Twenty-five (or so) years ago it made me want to sell everything I had and run off to Torremolinos. It's a dangerous book for a young person.
Rereading it now, Mr. Fairbanks' (the narrator's) perceptions of the young people -- their thoughtfulness, their passion, their music, their attitudes, their openness to new experience, their freedom (sexual and otherwise), their rejection of old morals, old codes, old ways of thought -- seem both dated and innocent. They traipse from Torremolinos to Pamplona to Marrakesh, sleeping with anyone they like, trying this that and the other place, drug, idea, religion...and (apart from one character's death, which is not-so-subtly attributed to personal weakness rather than the environment) nothing bad happens. Nothing!!
This is incredible and would never be the case in a novel today. Someone, or more than one, would get punished for seizing all that freedom. They would get murdered or raped or pregnant or arrested or AIDS. There would be Darkness. This novel has no Darkness. It has a few shadows, but no Darkness. Maybe that's why it seems so innocent, this conviction that -- for some people at least -- "finding yourself" in the bars of Torremolinos or the beaches of Morocco is not only possible, but admirable.
The times, they have a-changed.
Rereading it now, Mr. Fairbanks' (the narrator's) perceptions of the young people -- their thoughtfulness, their passion, their music, their attitudes, their openness to new experience, their freedom (sexual and otherwise), their rejection of old morals, old codes, old ways of thought -- seem both dated and innocent. They traipse from Torremolinos to Pamplona to Marrakesh, sleeping with anyone they like, trying this that and the other place, drug, idea, religion...and (apart from one character's death, which is not-so-subtly attributed to personal weakness rather than the environment) nothing bad happens. Nothing!!
This is incredible and would never be the case in a novel today. Someone, or more than one, would get punished for seizing all that freedom. They would get murdered or raped or pregnant or arrested or AIDS. There would be Darkness. This novel has no Darkness. It has a few shadows, but no Darkness. Maybe that's why it seems so innocent, this conviction that -- for some people at least -- "finding yourself" in the bars of Torremolinos or the beaches of Morocco is not only possible, but admirable.
The times, they have a-changed.