John Dollar a Novel

My favourite of Wiggin's books. Re-reading'John Dollar', soon after the Xmas tsunami's devastation only intensifies this fictional resonance. Not that in Central Australia there is the likelihood of a natural disaster of this swift kind be it sub-aquatic earthquake or a Katrina. But S. E asia is our neighborhood, with Burma at its outer reaches. The story opens 60 years on from its central narrative, so we know that heroine, Charlotte has survived the horrors of this Asian ordeal that cost her her sanity. Wiggins adeptly paints a small patch of Rangoon's vestigal Raj on a boat party to an idyllic island to celebrate the closure of the first World War. And it all turns terribly wrong. Her language is magnificently pitched to the fate of her girl castaways and the tale unfolds with appropriate momentum as they rescue badly injured John Dollar, regress to cannabalism, even feeding on his disabled legs, before encountering the disorientated Charlotte. Crusoe and the crew in Golding's,'Flies', of course, are invoked. But I found Wiggin's poise closer to Michel Tournier's, 'Friday'. 'John Dollar' is a brilliant addition to this genre of maritime disaster and survival, and with global heating a fact of life, we may not need the fictions to empathise.

This is an amazing story from beginning to end. I read it in a few hours with only short breaks. A teacher named Charlotte goes to Burma to teach English children at a school for expatriates during the Colonial Age after World War I. She falls in love with a sailor named John Dollar and while sailing on a ship is stranded on an island after a tsunami destroys their boat. John and her students are stranded also. The writing is absorbing and compelling. I was drawn in from beginning to end. The ending came as a complete surprise. Highly recommended.

Maybe *John Dollar* won't strike you at the very beginning. Or perhaps the middle parts will bore you. You'll put it aside for a few days or weeks.But keep going. It is absolutely worth it to reach the last third of this demented, beautiful, torturous novel. The intimate rituals of little English Christian girls discovering their natural paganism and their bizarre approaches to survival in an unfriendly environment create searing, crystal-clear mental images that I have not been able to shake since reading this book several years ago. Highly recommended, although you may not like having this stuff appear in your nightmares now and then.

Marianne Wiggins has outdone herself. John Dollar is an amazing work. Though called "a female version of Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'", John Dollar is much more riveting because it makes an emotional connection with the reader. Where Lord of the Flies was a dry, political, and symbolic novel, John Dollar has real characters, emotions, and fabulous writing to back it up. There is a certain dichotomy-- one half is a satire of English colonialism, the other a horrifying portrait of eight girls stranded on an island. Wiggins, though, weaves the two elements together nicely. The ending, like Lord of the Flies, is a sudden twist, but it serves to highlight both the horror and the grace of the book. John Dollar is an amazing work of fiction and a treat to read. If there are any high schools students out there who, like me, are looking for books to use in a literary comparison, try using John Dollar and Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. I'd be surprised if you found John Dollar to be the least enjoyable and least profound of the three.

disturbing yet hauntingly beautiful in parts this novel has the ability to draw you into the deepest and darkest depths of your mind and soul yet also to send you soaring above the seas that Marianne Wiggins paints so powerfully. This book will not let you put it down - chapter spills over into chapter and climax overturns climax. How can one describe the genre of this novel? I am not sure - it is a love story yet that is not its intention; to say that it is the story of the sea and of shipwreck is oversimplifying the issue. Certainly it is a commentary on human endeavour, explo!itation, conquest and adventure of the spirit - isn't that enough? Read it yourself and decide - and after you have read it I am positive that you will want to read it again to complete the loop