FIJI POLITICS OF ILLUSION: The Military Coups in Fiji. By Deryck Scarr.

Kensington, NSW:
New South Wales University Press (Distributed in North America by International Specialized
Book Services, Inc., Portland Oregon.). 1988. xvii, 161 pp. US$19.95, paper. ISBN
0©86840©131

Some historians seem to be closet political commentators, working at a safe distance from their
subject. Here an academic historian with impeccable credentials on Fiji's colonial past has come
out of the closet, and has given us an informed, involved but erratic instant book the 1987 Fijian
coup.

Scarr does not duck his topic's difficulties, taking the impasse between ethnic Fijians and Indo-
Fijians as fundamental, rather than looking to outside intervention or Alliance Party
unwillingness to surrender power. In so doing he must make judgements about each side, but
does so not by examining the internal perspectives of both the two alien and mutually-opposed
cultural world views involved, which would have been a brave and important undertaking, but on
the basis of his own unstated political perspective.

The style and substance of the book is racy, with some parts almost unreadable or
incomprehensible, unless one happens to already know the topic being described. It is made up
of documented events flavoured with biased tales which may provide the flavour of life in post-
coup Fiji, but which make an unconvincing foundation for the book's argument. Over-
generalizations, distortions and omissions are particularly evident in the first few chapters,
containing what passes for background analysis, after which some excellent details of political
skirmishing is covered, without, however, using them to inform the book’s conclusions.

ADRIAN TANNER Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada