Riallaro, the Archipelago of Exiles

by John MacMillan Brown

Written by a scottish born New Zealand university professor John Macmillan Brown under a pseudonym. A political and social satire similar to Gulliver's Travels. The protagonist looking for a spiritually pure form of humanity which he believes can only be found in a primitive and isolated culture, travels on his ship the Daydream to the fog bound archipelago of Riallaro where he discovers various islands run on extreme social or political views.

Such as communist islands or places populated only by journalists or legislators. Or places where lineages of ancestors can be bought and sold or fame is controlled by the state.

A biting social satire this work has a sequel Limanora: Isle of Progress.

436 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

John MacMillan-Brown was a Scottish-New Zealand academic, administrator and promoter of education for women. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Godfrey Sweven.

Reviews

[Mike]

I put this on my e-reader a while back, and had forgotten the details, so I vaguely thought it was a utopian novel like Erewhon . That certainly seemed to be where it was going at the beginning: a group of gold prospectors in Fiordland (New Zealand's most remote region) stumble upon a man who speaks English with a northern accent, haltingly at first, as if he hasn't been using the language for some time. He appears to have got where they are using some sort of winged contraption. But this is just a frame story for a book that is much more like Gulliver's Travels.

The unnamed man, having inherited a steam yacht, and disillusioned with western civilization and its discontents, sets out in search of a theorized idyllic land populated by noble savages, which he hopes to find in a mysterious area of the Pacific surrounded by mists. However, what he finds there is a group of islands where the inhabitants maintain their biases by exiling anyone who doesn't fit in with their way of thinking to one of the other islands. It's an elaborate, though fairly obvious, satire on western, or at least British, civilization, told in verbose and mannered language that contrasts with the rough gold prospectors of the frame story, who are theoretically conveying it to us. Sample:

Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the root of all evil... They despised it and hated it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles, they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the nation.

Which says the exact same thing at least three times, in case you miss the point. It was this style that caused me to stop reading, having obtained about as much entertainment as I was likely to get out of the book. Oh, and the antisemitic bit that suddenly crops up. At least, I think I'm hearing the dog whistle in this passage: "tall and lank, long-nosed and large-mouthed, red-haired and small-skulled—as fine a crowd of Judases, it was said, as could have been picked out of living creatures."

Interesting historically, though.

[Zack · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst book. Literally nobody needs to read this.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the vein of Gulliver's Travels the protagonist journeys to a fog bound archipelago and discovers various islands each run on different philosophies.
There are four or so major islands, run by what i would describe as liars, communists, warmongers and sensualists. Then each of these islands takes anyone they deem mad and sends them to another island filled with people who share their madness or extremist views.
So you have islands populated by nothing but anarchists, another by journalists, others by religious extremists of one kind or another, one filled with book critics another by people who value pedigree above all else, another by people who will always argue the opposite of what you say, others who will always agree with whoever seems the most popular, another with those who think they can talk to the dead etc.
That last one is one of my favorites, the community has divided into two groups the traditionalists who build creepy castles to attract ghosts and the modernists who say you don't need all that stuff and ghosts are perfectly happy turning up in a modern kitchen and communicating by knocking on the underside of tables, provided you only ask questions everyone knows the answers too. Its funny stuff.
Not as well characterized as Gulliver's Travels but lots of ideas and it also has a certain internal logic, theres a fairly reasonable explanation why this place exists and how such weird communities manage to survive. So nothing as sci-fi-ish as laputa or liliput.
Overall i just really enjoyed it.
Also theres a second-part or sequel which i'm definitely going to read at some point its called Limanora, the island of progress.