Fresh Air Fiend (54 page)

For the traveler who thinks he has seen everything, I would suggest a season in Belize, where the bumper stickers say
You Better Belize It!
Most of Belize City is seven feet off the ground, on stilts, because of tidal waves and regular swamping; over the years hurricanes have come close to wiping it out (which is why the capital, Belmopan, is inland). It is a small wooden town of tall, tottering houses, lame-looking shacks, and a few solid villas. There are vultures in the sky and slavering dogs in the streets and hawksbill turtles in the river that runs through town. The population is multiracial. There is no Belize face. There are Indians and mestizos, undiluted Chinese and freckle-faced brown people, purplish blacks who wear woolen bags on their heads, and yellow women and Rastas and barefoot kids with hair like Velcro. You get the impression that everyone sings a great deal, though times have been hard, not to say desperate. The sugar price collapsed four years ago. People started growing marijuana, and planes began arriving with such regularity on the long straight roads that the government put up iron pylons on the roadside every few hundred yards to frustrate landings. Yet it is said that Belize is still the second-largest grower of dope in the Western Hemisphere—after the Guajira in Colombia, which is legendary. Before writing my novel I traveled in Honduras, but now Honduras has been infiltrated by American troops and vindictive Contras, and the landscape of the novel more closely resembles that in Belize.

"I came down here and looked around," Harrison Ford said. "Looked at the houses and looked at the hotels. Jesus, those hotels. They said, 'Where do you want to stay?' And I said, 'Get a cargo plane...'"

Without any apparent effort he had turned into Allie Fox: the beaky cap, the flapping shirt, the pushed-back hair, the I-know-best eyes, and the gently maniacal voice explaining his brilliant plan.

"'... one of those C-130s,' I told them. 'A big mother. Fill it up with a prefab house in lots of sections, all the plumbing, all the wires, maybe a helicopter, too. Drop the whole thing into Belize in one package and bolt it together. That's where I'll live.'"

But he didn't end up doing this. I asked him why.

"Because I had a better idea. I didn't have to live in Belize City, didn't have to live in Belize at all!"

This again was pure Allie. He decided to hire a venerable 126-foot air-conditioned yacht—mahogany and brass and awnings and etched glass—with a gourmet cook and a crew of five. He anchored this magnificent boat offshore and commuted to the set by speedboat, returning to his yacht every evening. His wife, the screenwriter Melissa Matheson (
ET, The Black Stallion
), remained on board, working on a script about General Custer.

Harrison is a brilliant mimic. He is funny, physical, and full of ideas, a kind of embodiment of Allie. He would do chin-ups over the taffrail as he talked.

One night we were talking about anxiety attacks. He surprised Melissa by saying that he'd had a number of them. Had I? he wondered.

Oh, sure, I said. Late one night in the African bush, a man had pushed a gun muzzle into my face and began screaming at me. I described how I had started gibbering.

"That's not an anxiety attack," Harrison said, not looking at me, still chinning himself slowly, his deltoids swelling, his lats spreading. "That's scared shitless."

He then volunteered the information that he often worried about his performance as Allie.

"You shouldn't worry," I said. "You're doing everything right. You're Allie Fox. Listen, that's from the horse's mouth."

He frowned at me. He said, "Don't tell me not to worry. I worry all the time. Does Allie Fox worry? Right. That's why I worry."

He had another home-grown Allie Fox characteristic: he wouldn't say much. He would chin himself, or wrap himself around a chair and do isometrics, and then he would pipe up only to correct you.

I had been saying something about Peter Weir's being a good listener.

"He listens," Harrison said. "He hears. But that is all."

Weir was so highly respected on the set that he could give an order without raising his voice and it was instantly acted upon. I never saw him lose his temper or get the least bit flustered. You might say, Why should he? But the air was stiflingly humid, the temperature in the high eighties. The sand flies were tortuous, the roads terrible, the machines on the set temperamental. Because children were involved in the filming, the working hours had to be limited. Some of the actors hardly spoke English.

Several years before, Paul Schrader had told me, "The hardest films to make are those with scenes on ships, or ones set in the tropics, or ones with a lot of kids. This one has all three obstacles."

Weir was imperturbable. He said there was a good analogy for directing
The Mosquito Coast
: "It's like being captain of a ship. Not a small vessel, but a ship of the line, with an enormous crew. I don't do it alone. John [Seale, the cameraman] is my first mate. Jerry and Saul are the owners. My second mate is..."

This was another way of describing Allie, too: as a sea captain. In fact, I had given Allie a number of nautical expressions, to suggest this very aspect of his character.

Any writer must be humbled when something he had dimly imagined and put down in a few sentences is brought to life. It is like magic, a conjuring trick, the words creating something solid. Surely the thrill of moviemaking has something to do with these apparitions? I could write "Father built a tall ice house and filled it with a wilderness of iron pipes," and then I saw the crew doing that very thing. It seemed rash, expensive, such an effort, but it worked! "He cleared thirty acres and put up a settlement"—and they went at it, cleared virgin jungle and did the same thing. "One day Fat Boy blew up," I wrote. The special effects crew said, "We're going to blow off the sides first, and then get those structures a hundred and eighty feet off the ground. We can do so many things here with explosives it will be a national event." I loved their eagerness.

I wrote the book alone in a room, but to make the movie they had to do exactly what Father did—go into the jungle and colonize it and make ice. I am not understating my role. I had dreamed it all. But they had to tangibalize it, as Father Divine used to say. You have to agree with the Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. It is not always an easy transition, but that is cinematic transubstantiation, the making of movies out of novels.

K
OWLOON TONG
did not percolate from my past the way most of my fiction has seemed to, but struck me suddenly one day in Hong Kong. I saw the story whole. I made notes, like a painter urgently sketching, and then back home I sat down and wrote it, confident that I was fulfilling an artistic as well as political intention. I feel awkward using the word "artistic," though. All I mean is that I was guided by my imagination and being myself.

I had been in Hong Kong for an extended period, working on another project, spending my afternoons walking the back streets. That day, in a cold spring drizzle, I was in Kowloon, walking north from Mong Kok up Lai Chi Kok Road—just prowling. Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything. A Union Jack flapping on a tall pole at Sham Shui Po Police Station caught my eye. Soon a red van sped by, on its side the British crest and the gold letters
Royal Mail.
A large truckload of doomed squealing pigs was driven into the abattoir on Fat Tseung Street. Nearby, on the western side of Kowloon, an enormous land-reclamation project was under way; the bridge to the new airport was being finished. Moody Mong Kok was scheduled for demolition. All the newspapers were full of stories about the coming Hand-over to the Chinese, and in the bookstores were such dire titles as
The Fall of Hong Kong, The Last Colony,
and
The Last Days of Hong Kong.

And people were talking, thinking out loud in the most un-Chinese way. In this interim period, while the British government was being ineffectual and the People's Republic was quietly maneuvering and it was business as usual in Hong Kong, its citizens were behaving somewhat out of character. Great events bring people together and make them talkative, the way a storm forecast starts people chattering, comparing what they know, which is usually very little. Their sense of being ignorant and vulnerable makes for intimacy.

I was not interviewing people: asking formal questions and taking notes would create self-consciousness and equivocation, on both my part and theirs. The way to the truth was the humbler route of anonymity, faceless me striking up a conversation with a stranger. I did it all the time in Hong Kong, and nearly always the person said:
It's all right for rich people here, they can go anywhere, but I have to stay, and I am worried, I am afraid for my family, I don't know what will happen, the Chinese will not be like the British.

Shop clerks, taxi drivers, people at the herbalist's, women at the fresh-squeezed-juice stand, newspaper vendors, schoolchildren, the pimps in the karaoke lounges, the mama-sans in the girlie bars, the shoeshine boys, the camera dealers. They didn't know who I was.

I think it will be bad when the Chinese take over,
they said.
The Chinese are not clever. With the Chinese it is just money, money, money.
Which was exactly what a woman from Beijing had said to me about these Hong Kong critics, adding,
They are refugees. They live in the present, they are politically naive, and very few of them are interested in democracy.

It had been that way in Hong Kong for the past year, and if anything, people had become more garrulous as the wind had begun to rise. The Hong Kongers were worried; they giggled with nervousness. I had the feeling that on July 1, 1997, the day of the Hand-over, their voices would be stilled.

Looking ahead, I realized that what I'd seen would be gone. Not just the Union Jacks, the mail vans, and the old buildings—indeed, whole districts—but also this revealing talk, the apprehension, and all the maneuvering. In the Hong Kong Club the businessmen seemed hearty: many had grown rich on joint ventures with China. I wanted to capture those feelings, that landscape, before all was lost forever. The "Albion Cottage" of my novel exists on the Peak under another name—a friend of mine lives in it. After I finished
Kowloon Tong
I went back to Hong Kong and saw this friend and said, "By the way, I put your house in my novel." She laughed sadly and told me that she had just been asked to vacate it. It was on valuable land; it would be torn down soon after the Hand-over.

R
OBINSON CRUSOE
, an adventure story of the ultimate castaway, is so established in most people's minds that even those who have not read it know some details of the novel: Shipwreck. Desert island. Goatskin jacket and funny hat. Hairy umbrella. Talking parrot. Shocking footprint. Man Friday. Cannibals. Rescue. The book is all so familiar as an apparently simple, wonderful tale of survival that it is easily read as a great yarn.

Crusoe is too human and accident-prone to be truly heroic—this may be another reason for his enduring appeal. But the setting is also a compelling feature of his story, for the island as a microcosm of the world has been used imaginatively in works as diverse as Shakespeare's
The Tempest
and Golding's
Lord ofthe Flies.
Crusoe is more stubborn than brave, and his first-person narrative, the more believable for being defiantly unliterary, can be appreciated as the account of a man's twenty-eight-year ordeal of loneliness, hunger, and physical threat, the tale of a man who ingeniously succeeds against the odds. Because it is all so assured and so filled with plausible episodes and peculiar wisdom, it helps to be reminded that it was written by a man of nearly sixty, who resembled his fictional creation in his need to scheme in order to survive. Defoe was a master of improvisation, and he had to be, for his life was a chronicle of ups and downs—which is a fair description of this novel.

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was, in the words of one critic, "a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned." He was jailed for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses included bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used for perfume) for ready cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman, and sometime secret agent, whose novel—the first in the language—was a huge hit, running into many editions and being quickly pirated and imitated.

One of the reasons for the success of this piece of fiction was that it was taken for fact. It is utterly, vulgarly modern in that sense. In the preface, Defoe, wearing the mask of editor, wrote, "The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it." Defoe (who took the view that fiction could be a low and subversive trick that encouraged mendacity) had hit upon an idea that persists to this day: if a book is said to be true, it is somehow more important and authentic. "A true story, based on actual events," runs the assertion in the made-for-TV movie. "It really happened!" the person says, urging you to read such and such a book. That was also what Defoe wanted people to say in 1719 when
Robinson Crusoe
was first published. And they did say it, and believed it.

The story is sensational—even today a story about such a castaway would be front-page news. But with time and rereading the adventure deepens in meaning, and the longer you live, the more impressive an achievement
Robinson Crusoe
becomes, turning from an amazing tale to a subtle study in innovation, a metaphor for human survival, and ultimately one of our own mythical tales, almost biblical in its morality: Robinson is as vivid and unambiguous a character as Job or Jonah, two people he specifically mentions.

Surely it is significant that the very first English novel is a desert-island story, of one man in the middle of nowhere, with almost nothing, who survives to create a whole world. In this sense, the novel is like an allegory of the history of humankind. The narrative emerges from chaos, with no society or props to speak of. A whole metaphor of creation is described in the book, which is as surprising in its action as in its intelligence. Its contradictions are the contradictions in the lives of many people; it embodies many of our discontents and dilemmas. No women figure in its drama; there is no passion, and though there is affection, there is hardly any love. But in its understated way the novel discusses just about everything else: materialism, isolation, arrogance, travel, friendship, imperialism, rebellious children, the relativity of wealth, the conundrum of power, the ironies of solitude, learning by doing; it is also about faith, atonement, and the passage of time. It is as practical as a pair of shoes. No sooner is the ordeal over than Crusoe is back, founding a colony and counting his money; and in the same way, the Crusoe idea continued, producing sequels and parodies, giving words to the language—"Crusoe" is a byword for castaway, as "Friday" is a synonym for helper.