THE LEGEND IS BORN

Knight delves deeper into the origin story of his heroic Micronesian mariner in this third historical novel in a series.

Before his Odysseus-like sea journeys began, Ḷainjin was an infant in the arms of his surrogate mother, Helkena, on the storm-swept rocks of Wōtto Atoll in the Rālik island chain (now part of the Marshall Islands). As this story opens, his birth mother, the trader Tarmālu, has just departed the atoll with her sailors, hoping to move their fleet of canoes out of the path of a typhoon. The storm arrives and destroys Helkena’s house, but she and the baby manage to survive by taking shelter in a tree. Tarmālu doesn’t return after the storm, and Helkena is unsure of her fate; the latter does receive two visitors from Tarmālu’s native island of Naṃdik, however—one of whom is Japeba, the grandfather of the baby Ḷainjin. The men want to raise Ḷainjin on Naṃdik, and they want Helkena to come and help them. She agrees, hoping that, while she’s there, she can get her “lines”—the traditional tattoos of mature women—as well as a husband to bring back with her to Wōtto. Helkena is already a mother of sorts, but she’s about to embark on a journey through the complex, environment-dictated customs of Rālik womanhood. Knight’s prose is even and evocative, speckled with Rālik words that effectively help to shape the world of the novel: “The old mariner claimed he felt the island’s presence in a swell called buñtokiōñ, which fell from the north. He spent quite a bit of time trying to point it out to [Helkena], but its presence was too subtle for her to detect.” Knight’s interests are perhaps more anthropological than they are literary, but his fictional world is so immersive that readers won’t mind the relative flatness of the characters. It’s a short novel, barely longer than a novella, but the landscapes it inhabits are epic in scale.

A slim but often effective coming-of-age story set in a Micronesia of long ago.