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The Shark God Bolai

Book Review by 17 of Charles Montgomery'sLast Heathen: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia (Canadian edition). Published in the USA/UK as The Shark God : Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific. Photos by Charles Montgomery.

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I encountered Charles Montgomery's book The Last Heathen at a queer author's night at the Vancouver Public Library. I was blown away by the power and diversity of the readings from all the authors that night. It made me feel like Gay and Lesbian writing as a genre had matured to the point where, perhaps, it was becoming unnecessary.

Montgomery's reading was the one that most intrigued me and it his newly autographed book that I took with me from the auditorium. This non-fiction work is also the one that will surely resonate with Travelblogs readers with its tales of a faraway place that most of us will never get to experience. Montgomery, however, had a deeply rooted reason to go to such a remote place: his great-grandfather had been there as a missionary and served as bishop. As a child, Montgomery had discovered and been enchanted by his great-grandfather's notebooks, discovered in the attic, filled with wild tales "of a journey made more than a century ago; that back in the days when the world was a wild and treacherous place, when white men in top hats and ties confronted cruel savages on the rocky shores of remote islands, when black magic and powerful spirits still ruled the backwaters of the world, the bishop had a very big adventure somewhere on the far side of the Pacific Oceanóan adventure sanctioned by God Himself."

As an adult, Montgomery rediscovered those journals and embarked on a journey to prove or disprove the magic in them for himself. The passage he read at the reading starts after he has arrived at Langa Langa Lagoon in the Solomon Islands to find a man called Selastine who is said to have special powers and a special relationship with the Shark God Bolai. Although the passage he read is probably too long to include here, I'm going to do it anyway because just as Montgomery's great-grandfather's notebook echanted him and called him to Melanesia this passage enchanted me and made me rush off an buy the book. I think it will do the same for you. It starts with Montgomery and Selastine and some local boys in a canoe on the lagoon at night:

Selastine picked up his speargun, which consisted of a wooden pole, a simple iron spear with a barb at its tip, and a rubber elastic with which to propel it. He pointed his flashlight into the water. There was nothing to see. He looked at me.

"You come now!" he shouted, then leapt into the water, disappearing in a cloud of bubbles and phosphorescent sparks.

"Yu garem glass-blong-diver. Yu swim/ Hem fun!" said one of the boys.

I pulled on my mask and crawled over the gunwhale. The water was warm. I poked my head beneath the surface and gazed down into the abyss, where there was nothing. I pulled myself close to the canoe and imagined bad things.

The calm was broken suddenly by the leap and crash of something big.

"Long-fish. Hunting," said a boy. "You go! You go!"

I imagined myself as seen from below: a soft bundle of exposed flesh. I flattened myself against the canoe, wrapped my legs around the hull. All this talk of indiscriminate revenge killing had filled me with a nauseating sense of vulnerability.

Another explosion of water, this time near the bow of the canoe. It was Selastine. He was like a breaching whale. He gasped and sucked at the air. "Gudfula moon! Gudfula night! Come now. Follow my light," he said. And then he took a long heave and slipped away again, leaving an expanding circle of silver ripples in his place. I saw the flashlight beam across the hull of the canoe, turn towards the deep and then descend until it was engulfed by a silty mist.

One of the boys pushed down my head with his paddle blade. He hammered on my knuckles, making it hard to cling onto the boat. The boys thought I was afraid. Of course I was afraid! I was swimming with the bloody lord of the sharks. But the humiliation made me let go.

I took a breath, pushed off from the canoe and reached into the void with both hands. The effect was mesmerizing. Every movement, each handstroke, was followed by a momentary burst of blue-green light, as though I had released a handful of fireflies. I circled beneath the canoe, which, with its paddles pointing out, resembled a great black dragonfly hanging in the sky. I waved and curled my hands, kicked above me until my body was surrounded by a whorl of stardust, like the sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia. I was laughing when I surfaced, and so were the boys, who knew what I had seen.

And I could stop here. I could let this be enough. But there should be more to this story. I do remember there was more.

I realized Selastine was still underwater. How long had it been? One minute? Five?

"Selastine," I said, and the boys just laughed. "Hem go walkabaot. Hem fising." I peered down and saw nothing. I took a great breath and dove, kicking at the sky, pulling at the deep, peering through the blackness.

There is a panic that comes when you hold your breath for too long. It's about oxygen of course, and the thought of all that water pouring into your lungs. I saw the faintest glimmer of light beneath me, and I struggled against my buoyancy, but the panic turned me around. I kicked for the surface and emerged far off the bow. The boys paddled towards me. I grabbed the gunwhale and took ten deep breaths, then dove again. I exhaled slowly this time. I ignored the sparks that peeled from my finger. I saw the light and kicked hard towards it. It grew into a jaundiced circle of seaweed and sand. Perhaps there were coral rocks. I couldn't tell. A great, obscuring dust storm of silt was sweeping through the lagoon. I kicked farther and saw that the light was coming from Selastine. He was sitting cross-legged on the ocean floor, not moving, just sitting there. Occasionally, a bubble escaped from his mouth and floated like a nervous jellyfish up towards the steel glare of the night sky. Then the panic returned, obscuring my vision, screaming for me to surface, even as I struggled to make sense of the scene, which was somehow right and not right at the same time, and confusing, because I knew I should have been scared yet I was not.

Selastine was not alone. Between the halo of his flashlight and the impenetrable void, in the grey murk between certainty and imagination, I saw something like a great drifting shadow. It was sleek, as long as a car and as black as charcoal. And it was circling the shark boss, slowly, slowly, and if I could have pulled myself down just a little deeper I would have been able to give it a shape, but even as I gaped I was beginning to rise slowly back up towards the surface and the shark boss was becoming a blur, and his pool of light was shrinking and the great shadow was melting into the murk.

I wasn't certain at the time what I saw. And I never spoke to Selastine about it. When he bobbed to the surface a moment after me, he just smiled and said, "Gudfala moon! Gudfala night!" again, and I agreed. We paddled to the shadows and splashed around a bit, while the pipe drum band thumped away beyond the distant mangroves. We returned to the fire and drank hot water mixed with milk powder.

Selastine asked me to stay a week, so we could fish and dive on the reef. I told him I couldn't. I told him I was bound for the Santa Cruz group, to look for Bishop Patteson's ghost on Nukapu. He understood. Then he asked for my diving mask, and I gave it to him.

When I returned to Honiara, I didn't think about the shadow, not even when my friend Morris asked me about Langa Langa. Did I see the shark spirit? Did was have a tourist attraction? he asked. No, I told him. No, I told all my friends, though each time I told the story I felt it could have been more complete. And then, late one evening after the lights had failed and the rascals had fled the city, after the conversation of a dozen men had trailed away around me and there was no sound but the rustling of palms and the whirring of cicadas, as the perspiration seeped down my back and the circle of listeners drew close, I let myself say yes. Yes, I saw a shadow in the deep. Yes, it was big and it was as black as charcoal, and every sweep of its tail fin raised a storm of silt from the lagoon floor. Yes, that shadow had circled ever so slowly around my friend the shark boss, who was sitting cross-legged on a bed of crushed coral. Yes. And the story became whole. And I grew more certain every time I repeated it. Now there is no doubt. Yes, it was a shark. Yes, it was Bolai. Yes, the ancestor had not forgotten the saltwater people of Langa Langa Lagoon. Yes, I was a believer.

Myth, like love, is a decision. What it answers is longing. What it demands is faith. What it opens is possibility.

The book as a whole enchanted me and has clearly enchanted many othersóit was the winner of TheCharles Taylor prize for literary non-fictionóand I expect you too will be enchanted.

Charles Montgomery's book has been published in Canada asThe Last Heathen: Encounters with ghosts and ancestors in Melanesia by Douglas & McIntyre. In Canada, you can purchase the book at your local independent bookstore or via Amazon.ca from a link onCharles' website.

The US and UK editions is titled The Shark God : Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific and is due out from Harper Collins in May 2006–look for it in your local bookstore or purchase from Amazon.com using the link to the left.

Posted by Doug Dosdall on September 15th, 2005 in Articles.