Tropical Romp

OCTOBER ISLAND (246 pp.)--William March--Little, Brown ($3).

At 42, Irma Barnfield has been a missionary's wife too long not to recognize their new South Pacific station, October Island, as a "comedown." But she knows better than to complain. To her husband Sam, so dedicated that he has never consummated his marriage, it is simply another "field that awaits the plow of the Lord."

Around Irma and Sam--and an assortment of turn-of-the-century islanders--Novelist William March fashions a choice tropical romp in the serio-comic vein of Satirists Aubrey Menen and Edgar Mittelholzer.

Piglets for Rahabaat. The natives have all the sins of the senses, but no sense of sin. They worship Rahabaat, a god who lives in the local volcano, with frank fertility rites. When Sam preaches his Vermont fundamentalism at the men, they giggle and slip away into the underbrush. When Irma tries to clothe the women in sacklike dresses of her own design, they cut holes in the tops to bare their breasts. After a brief vogue, even this ventilated version goes out of fashion. When the natives hear of Irma's virginity, they laughingly dub her "The One Too Slippery to Be Caught."

But Irma has been caught by the languid charm of October Island. While Sam files reports of "no progress" to his superiors, she scouts around the island and one day digs up an hermaphroditic sculpture. Shocked, she heaves it into the volcano. Her Christian mission, she decides, is to destroy as many of these pagan relics as possible. The natives find her constant digging odd, but since she tosses everything into Rahabaat's volcano, they find her piety admirable. When, in a moment of hunger, she eats a portion of roast piglet left on the altar of Rahabaat and the god fails to strike her dead, the natives are sufficiently awed to make her the guest of honor at a fecundity festival. "You're a lost woman," comments Sam Barnfield sadly. "And you," she taunts, "are a dirty-minded old man."

Great Breast Mother. Irma's true hour of glory comes as she is ladling condensed milk to a sick native out of an old stone cup she has dug up and failed to destroy. The native vaults out of bed shouting: "She is here! The Great Breast Mother of the World is here!" The cup, it seems, is the one from which Rahabaat drank and drew power; and Irma Barnfield fits the legend of the virgin goddess whose coming will insure October Island a millennium of peace and plenty. In no time, a mass conversion to Christianity takes place, but the natives insist on added sacraments. Irma must periodically spoon out milk from the stone cup.

Lapping up the adulation of her new post as high priestess, Irma is none too happy when Sam takes sick and the mission board orders the couple home for a rest. To invoke her return, the natives toss hundreds of piglets into the volcano and finally even their own infants. Sure enough, back in Vermont Sam dies, and Irma heads for the island again.

Everybody is overjoyed. The natives have lost most of their children, are half-Christian, but have their virgin goddess. Irma has lost her husband, is half-pagan, but has the adoration she loves. As for Author March, he has had the pleasure of some deft ironic thrusts, at the expense of almost everybody but the reader.

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