Hidden Lattitudes
   Alison Anderson
  1996 G.K.Hall & Co.(Large Type) USA
   ISBN: 0671008889


Robin & Lucy, whose marriage is sinking are sailing around the world. Lost & in need of repairs, they make landfall on a Pacific atoll where someone already is marooned.

In the hugeness of the Pacific ocean, the sky and an unnamed island, a hushed and musing voice speaks to us of forty years of solitude, of watching and waiting. Watching as a white sail hoves to on the horizon and unlike all the others, grows larger and larger until it is there, ready to shoot the pass, enter the lagoon and come into the calm reaches of the island.

Aboard the sailboat Lucy is hot, frightened and overwhelmed. She is dreaming of the life she misses, of her classroom, the feverish exchange of ideas there and the satisfaction of knowing she has reached her students. As Lucy sweats and regrets Robin, her husband of ten years, is fishing in the shade of the jib, passing the time remembering his years as a professor and one of his ex-students. He has moved away from the oppressive heat of the cabin and his wife's mood.

They have staked everything on this trip around the world, gladly jettisoning the stale things of their lives, instinctively grasping for this last chance to be free. While the storms of nature have brought them together, it has been the calmness, the vast quietness and relentless lulls which have tested them.

This couple's biological clocks have been out of synch for most of their marriage and they have barely been intimate and happy for quite a while, both, in fact, having dabbled with infidelity. They are a couple in search of a divorce and what they find is a deserted island, with a safe place for repairs and nothing to distract themselves from each other. And all the time in the world to shed the clamor of their previous life.

And then the island's voice speaks some more and you begin to get a fascinating idea of who this watcher from the trees might be. You listen to the stories, you hear the memories and wonder, could this really be?

Funny how even in Paradise we humans will foul it up with our fear and indulgence. Funny how being lost in the company of your spouse becomes a major terror until you learn how to cope with your fears. And no matter how long you're married, each person's fear is their own. And as this couple panics, struggles, squabbles and comes together again, the watcher remembers and wonders how to help and if this is the boat to escape on.

Hidden Lattitudes is a great winter adventure, I swear I felt the heat, melt the sea and the wind. It's a wonderful and wonderfilled read; breathtaking in places where memories transfigure the ordinary. A magical, redemptive read.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca