Simon Winchester: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

Reviewed by SHONAGH LINDSAY*

Simon Winchester, author of The Surgeon of Crawthorne and The Map That Changed The World, brings the same magnifying-glass approach to detail and an ear for history's strongest voices to this lushly interwoven tale of Krakatoa's massive volcanic eruption on August 27, 1883.

The small Indonesian island lying in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra simmers continually on the horizon of Winchester's narrative as he weaves back and forth through time to explain its eventual explosion.

Although only the fifth largest eruption of its kind - the rest were lost to antiquity - Krakatoa's occurred when the telegraph, undersea cables and news agencies were fast recreating the world as a global village. Winchester suggests it's this conjunction of communications technology with limited geological knowledge, and the widespread influence of religious dogma - a volatile mix exacerbated by Dutch colonialism - which led to fundamentalist Islam emerging in Indonesia and the Dutch empire' eventual demise there.

It's not surprising that Krakatoa has captured the human imagination. Up to 40,000 people were estimated to have died within days of its explosion, most killed by gigantic tsunamis, and for months afterwards ocean-travelling boats crunched through miles of pumice from its outfall, many were studded with skeletons of the dead, some washing ashore as far as Africa, while its final reverberations were detected even in the English channel.

However, Winchester's story is far more effective in explaining the geological underpinnings of Krakatoa and the era's revolutionary discoveries than in linking geological to social upheaval. In the one chapter devoted to it, towards the book's end, he simply doesn't leave space to explore it fully.

Winchester writes that the clearest connection between fundamentalism's upsurge and Krakatoa's explosion is seen in the preachings of a Javan-born mystic, Haji Abdul Karim. Karim preached that the Mahdi, a messianic figure who saves the world, would follow signs such as floods, blood-coloured rain and erupting volcanoes.

"So did the eruption somehow act as a political catalyst? Did it, for reasons rooted deep in this Javanese mysticism drive a wedge between the terrified and dispossessed people and the paternalistic Dutch authorities?" asks Winchester. It's likely that it did, but one senses that it's the geographers, geologists, botanists and zoologists that he's fascinated by, not the zealots and political figures of history.

Penguin, $39.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.