Books: Poet’s Pot

THE ISLANDS OF UNWISDOM (328 pp.)—Robert Graves—Doubleday ($3.50).

“In this strange and bloody epoch of the sea,” pipe Publishers Doubleday, forgetting in their rapture that “epic” is the proper pennant to hoist on such occasions, “Robert Graves turns his incomparable talents to the remarkable Ysabel Barreto —beautiful and dangerous—who used treachery, intrigue, and love to become the first woman admiral in the Spanish navy and then embarked on a perilous voyage, filled with incredible and startling adventures, to the Solomon Islands in search of gold.”

This is pretty much what Robert Graves’s new novel is all about—except that peppy Ysabel doesn’t join the admiralty until the last quarter of the book, while the gold rush occurs in the first three-quarters and is led by Ysabel’s husband, who is a general.

Robert Graves writes poems to please himself and other poets; he writes novels only to feed himself and other Graveses (his wife; six children). But because he is one of the most talented and erudite men alive, he is incapable of writing anything that is not of some stature and interest. The Islands of Unwisdom cannot be compared to his best novels (I, Claudius, Claudius the God, Sergeant Lamb’s America), but it yields a rich vegetation of outlandish history, and its narrative is skillfully knocked together by a carpenter who knows his nails and timber.

Graves’s tale (based on historical fact) tells how vapid General Mendaña y Castro set sail from Callao, Peru with four ships to take possession of the dimly known Solomons and to convert the heathen —mostly into cash. But the heart of the book, like that of any pirate story, is Graves’s evocation of the murderous plotting and quarreling that enlivened the long and miserable voyage: its sailors, soldiers, settlers and missionaries fall on one another (and on the hapless islanders) with a ferocity inspired equally by high zeal and abysmal greed.

These feuds and intrigues enable Graves to pepper his Islands with a host of hearty swashbucklers and infamous trollops, both professional and amateur. But sometimes they become so involved that even Graves is obliged to pause and scratch his head. Not for long. When this happens, he merely makes his narrator say: “Here my cart begins to stick … so clogged . . . that I shall have a troublesome task to drive the wheels … by heaving and hauling at the spokes.” At this, of course, the friendly reader unconsciously puts his own shoulder to Author Graves’s mired wheel—and before you can say “White Goddess” the lusty, likable potboiler is bowling down the road again.